In a world to the left of our reality, a youth slips through the seams of the universe to yet another. Cast afar and bereft of all he is accustomed to, he takes the first step of what would become a journey of treading the unfamiliar. He is not alone.
Arcanaut's Odyssey
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Ch.000:Prologue I
There was the Void.
A place with no name, an origin without boundary.
A total deprivation of perception , the absence of direction and lack of motion. Time was an illusive variable and awareness but a mote flitting in the abstraction of reality.
Nothingness. Then life happened.
Where there was once a moment of eternity teetering between chaos and order , a threshold was met, conditions judged nigh by an arbiter as indifferent as chance and circumstance.
A chain reaction snowballed into consequence and there, consciousness unfurled like spring eve's petals shaking off the last numbing grasp of a long winter.
Newly awoken, a mind fought against smothering torpor as thought manifested, cutting through unconsciousness like an ultrasonic scalpel. The line between reality and aethereality was drawn and self slipped somewhere between glimpses of dream and lucidity.
Perception sparked like a match set alight as signals crackled through inert neurons, sensations searing through nerves. Lifeblood, no longer viscous, surged returning life to a body bereft of vigour as a heart began to beat.
A silent scream tore its way out his lips as he came to, throat locking up whilst his lungs burned in a chest that felt like a vice. Something wormed its way inside his mouth.
Caught in the throes of panic, he was bereft of the cognizance that he'd been pounding at his prison until it gave. He fell through the egress but not before he blacked out, overtaken by the ignorable bliss of unconsciousness
The cold, dark and insensate haze broke with a burst of clarity like waking up from a nightmare of shadows, fog and indistinct events. Yet as Nikos woke, comprehension remained elusive like a fistful of vapour, leaving a dazed ennui behind.
A deep inhalation of frigid air drew from him an excruciating cough as liquid went down the wrong pipe, never mind that breathing was shards of ice scouring his throat raw, cutting his lungs and seizing his sides with stitches.
The reflexive swallow that ought to have moistened his lips only assailed him with a mixture that could only have been antifreeze and absinthe with the viscosity of cod-liver oil. Inevitably, nausea was already slithering in his guts but his core muscles were too abused to let him huck up the empty void that was his stomach.
" Hrngh!" he curled on himself, hands clenched pale as he rode the paroxysm of agony that evacuated his capacity for coherent thought. In between the enticing bliss of oblivion and painful existence, stars pulsated in bleary peripheral vision as snot dripped down his nose.
Time seemed to drag with only the ponderous beats of his heart and ragged exhales to mark its passage. Soon enough catharsis washed over him as the ache of hacking up his lungs ebbed away leaving phantoms of its touch in his muscle and bones.
The relief thereafter was a balm of release soothing enough to elicit a bout of frenzied laughter and muffled sobs. Only then did the wheels of thought deign to turn, returning his awareness.
Shapes and colours jumped at him as his mind spun, building a picture of his surroundings. Nevertheless, surveilling his whereabouts earned him naught but lances of migraines questing between his brow and across his temples.
An aborted curse left his lips a hiss through clenched teeth as he winced and scrunched his eyes shut. Compared to his prior rollercoaster of torture, this was nothing and thus he pushed through with nothing but spite and a fire in his belly.
Grunting, he oriented his body on wobbly arms, his elbows flaring with sensitivity felt as deep as his marrow. Once or twice he slipped, sprawling on his back as he gathered the dregs of whatever impetus he had while his body twinged its displeasure.
In the end, it was stubbornness and impotent rage that burned fierce to lever him off the ground. An agonising and breathless span later, he got his feet under him, precarious balance arrested by whatever artifice was near.
It was then that Nikos realised that his victory over gravity was a pyrrhic victory. Satisfaction rang hollow, replaced by the dread that lodged itself in the pit of his stomach like a cuckoo in the nest.
There was no familiarity in his vicinity, nothing he could point with a surety of recognition that he could name based on a mental schema. He fished for explanation, migraine be damned and came up with nothing. No context existed that explained his circumstances. It was nothing so overt as a smack to the face but a niggling sense of wrongness and unbelonging nibbling at his psyche.
Shock and dissonance was an apt description for his current state of mind when he saw the object that had hitherto been his prison. How could he not?
The subject of his perplexity was the prominent source of illumination casting shapeless shadows beneath his feet. It was a pod of deep metallic green with a frame the shape of a pill about eight to nine feet long. Dregs of amber liquid sloshed in conduits while translucent polarised gold hatches lay open in outlines reminiscent of striated wings.
It was where he'd woken up and that didn't seem to compute. Instead his mind spun up delusions of stumbling upon the set of a science-fantasy film after a bender; a thought hastily discarded for verging on absurdity. In his scatterbrained reasoning, wild drinking sprees did not feature in his recreational pursuits let alone engender hallucinations of such an elaborate nature.
On the other hand, the worst scenarios conceivable were enough to make bile churn in an empty stomach. Outright denying that someone, no something had utterly violated the sanctity of his person was a flimsy optimism.
If things were the contrary, then something utterly beyond the pale had been done to him and the gamut of what in particular ran between the realm of body horror and delusions even he could not conceive. In a word, it was monstrous and utterly revolting to his common sense that he dry heaved thinking about it.
'And yet…' He scrunched his brow, blinking past the watery gaze of tender eyeballs. 'Where the hell am I?' he questioned, pinching himself as though the verisimilitude of sensation would discount illusion.
'Too lucid to be a waking dream,' he paused and breathed, corralling wayward thoughts and reordering his mental tracks. The roar in his ears was just ambient noise, compartmentalised to his subsconscious; inconsequential.
"One, two," he counted forwards and backwards as he categorised objects within immediate reach. The cold metallic construction propping up half of his weight was hard and clammy beneath his palms. Little by little, he traced the texture of matte grey metal. It had substance, and a motif of mundanity that anchored him in a sea of strangeness.
A frame of reference was gradually filling, perspective, volume and colour, nudging him away from tangents . A picture was painted, inert consoles, an empty vat and a panoply of alien paraphernalia.
'An information system, laboratory, workshop,' he drew a venn diagram in his mind, filling in allusions of commonality between what he saw and what it reminded him of. Progress was ponderous but he could have patted himself on the back if he was able. Whatever train of inquiry followed after screeched to a halt as sudden as it began―
á̶̡̞̹̜̫̠͇̻̣̫̯̐ͅr̸̨͉̝̥̯̬̞̭̣͔͍͕̈́͋̌̇̎̌͒͊̔̊̕͝͠b̶̢̟͚̭̟̓̀̃̍̐͘ͅi̸̢̛̤̻̜̺̩̥̳̰̠̫̳̘̟͉̅̽͐͊̿̓͌̄͘͝t̵̝͈̻̎͒͑̈́͑͒̚̚̕ė̴̛͎̘̍̀̒͠r̷̡̺̜̠̣̙̩̥̤͎͔͑́̾͊̒͛̎͋͌͘͜͠?̷̢̝̫͍͚̼̙̞̠͈͔̐̓͋̌̇̒͑͆̈́̅̆̾̀̚
―as a cryptic echo assaulted his auditory perception, not so much passing through his ears as impressed in his brain. Its fidelity ignored the white noise of blood thumping and breath hitching noisily enough that it sent him into another spiral. But only just as the taste of copper burst on his tongue. He'd bitten the inside of his cheek―
"Who's there?!" he whirled, his words foreign to his ears, like his tongue had muscles unused to moving how he wanted. Eyes darted about, looking for a presence he thought he'd heard while his heart palpitated feverishly like a humming bird in a cage of bone.
" Show yourself !" His voice broke, shored by nothing but false bravado. Again eerie whispers of hair raising sensations that made his gorge rise susurrated across his mind with the delicacy of claws against a dry skull.
Nikos hunched in a futile attempt at making his tall profile unobtrusive and less vulnerable. He shuffled on the balls of his feet and dry swallowed a breath as he cast for points of exit. It was almost comical as the space hosting him was small leaving him naked in the open despite the bodysuit that protected his modesty.
It hadn't occurred to him that he'd been exposed for long. Anyone or anything would've already done him in while he tried and failed to get his bearings.
Rather than feel reassured, he found the lack of response deafening and unnerving. Nikos wished he'd rather have had the noise than a yawning abyss of silence―
Until it broke with the scream of audio feedback railing against brittle glass. Nikos tasted blue, ozone sparks and copper in his sinuses as he instinctively flinched from the mental assault. A reflexive scrunch of his eyes was fortunate when a quasar of lurid iridescence burst into bloom right in his face so brightly it tinged the back of his eyelids red.
In the intervening moment between its appearance and bracing his body for unknowable pain was gone as suddenly as it had come. The light dimmed, retreating to its epicentre in a way that contradicted wave-particle mechanics. Half-lidded and shaded by his fingers, he saw radiance accrete into a phenomenon as awe-inspiring as it was terrifying.
It was like watching a star collapsing on itself in real time, almost unavoidably forming a singularity . A band of light was already limning the spherical absence in reality as blue gradations bled into its event horizon.
It drew him inwards, innocuously enticing like staring down the ledge of a cliff and wanting to jump. Nikos didn't realise he'd taken a step forward, dazed into a headfirst plunge of oblivion until he ran out of the support propping up his weight and stumbled.
He came to himself with a gasp, breath hitching as though the indiscernible weight of incipience was pressing down on his chest. He backpedalled but pulling his eyes away from it was a herculean effort akin to shaking off sleep-paralysis―
"Augmented Reality Companionable Intelligent System; ARCIS be mine name―"
A voice in stereo and flange broke his descent into panic. Nikos sucked in a breath, volumes of air hitting his lungs so fast his eyes watered.
" ― If thine wish be mine behest―"
It was inhuman, female and synthesised with a Québécois accent. The frosty and clipped enunciation put him on edge but the pattern of inflection and cadence was something he would have recognised anywhere.
"A watchword shalt I request―"
The deadpan chantant delivery, feigned nasal haughtiness and dry undercurrent of anachronistic locution rekindled nostalgic experiences.
"—I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?"
The space behind his eyes burned in watery vision and in a storm of static, his memory was jolted.
A place with no name, an origin without boundary.
A total deprivation of perception , the absence of direction and lack of motion. Time was an illusive variable and awareness but a mote flitting in the abstraction of reality.
Nothingness. Then life happened.
Where there was once a moment of eternity teetering between chaos and order , a threshold was met, conditions judged nigh by an arbiter as indifferent as chance and circumstance.
A chain reaction snowballed into consequence and there, consciousness unfurled like spring eve's petals shaking off the last numbing grasp of a long winter.
Newly awoken, a mind fought against smothering torpor as thought manifested, cutting through unconsciousness like an ultrasonic scalpel. The line between reality and aethereality was drawn and self slipped somewhere between glimpses of dream and lucidity.
Perception sparked like a match set alight as signals crackled through inert neurons, sensations searing through nerves. Lifeblood, no longer viscous, surged returning life to a body bereft of vigour as a heart began to beat.
A silent scream tore its way out his lips as he came to, throat locking up whilst his lungs burned in a chest that felt like a vice. Something wormed its way inside his mouth.
Caught in the throes of panic, he was bereft of the cognizance that he'd been pounding at his prison until it gave. He fell through the egress but not before he blacked out, overtaken by the ignorable bliss of unconsciousness
The cold, dark and insensate haze broke with a burst of clarity like waking up from a nightmare of shadows, fog and indistinct events. Yet as Nikos woke, comprehension remained elusive like a fistful of vapour, leaving a dazed ennui behind.
A deep inhalation of frigid air drew from him an excruciating cough as liquid went down the wrong pipe, never mind that breathing was shards of ice scouring his throat raw, cutting his lungs and seizing his sides with stitches.
The reflexive swallow that ought to have moistened his lips only assailed him with a mixture that could only have been antifreeze and absinthe with the viscosity of cod-liver oil. Inevitably, nausea was already slithering in his guts but his core muscles were too abused to let him huck up the empty void that was his stomach.
" Hrngh!" he curled on himself, hands clenched pale as he rode the paroxysm of agony that evacuated his capacity for coherent thought. In between the enticing bliss of oblivion and painful existence, stars pulsated in bleary peripheral vision as snot dripped down his nose.
Time seemed to drag with only the ponderous beats of his heart and ragged exhales to mark its passage. Soon enough catharsis washed over him as the ache of hacking up his lungs ebbed away leaving phantoms of its touch in his muscle and bones.
The relief thereafter was a balm of release soothing enough to elicit a bout of frenzied laughter and muffled sobs. Only then did the wheels of thought deign to turn, returning his awareness.
Shapes and colours jumped at him as his mind spun, building a picture of his surroundings. Nevertheless, surveilling his whereabouts earned him naught but lances of migraines questing between his brow and across his temples.
An aborted curse left his lips a hiss through clenched teeth as he winced and scrunched his eyes shut. Compared to his prior rollercoaster of torture, this was nothing and thus he pushed through with nothing but spite and a fire in his belly.
Grunting, he oriented his body on wobbly arms, his elbows flaring with sensitivity felt as deep as his marrow. Once or twice he slipped, sprawling on his back as he gathered the dregs of whatever impetus he had while his body twinged its displeasure.
In the end, it was stubbornness and impotent rage that burned fierce to lever him off the ground. An agonising and breathless span later, he got his feet under him, precarious balance arrested by whatever artifice was near.
It was then that Nikos realised that his victory over gravity was a pyrrhic victory. Satisfaction rang hollow, replaced by the dread that lodged itself in the pit of his stomach like a cuckoo in the nest.
There was no familiarity in his vicinity, nothing he could point with a surety of recognition that he could name based on a mental schema. He fished for explanation, migraine be damned and came up with nothing. No context existed that explained his circumstances. It was nothing so overt as a smack to the face but a niggling sense of wrongness and unbelonging nibbling at his psyche.
Shock and dissonance was an apt description for his current state of mind when he saw the object that had hitherto been his prison. How could he not?
The subject of his perplexity was the prominent source of illumination casting shapeless shadows beneath his feet. It was a pod of deep metallic green with a frame the shape of a pill about eight to nine feet long. Dregs of amber liquid sloshed in conduits while translucent polarised gold hatches lay open in outlines reminiscent of striated wings.
It was where he'd woken up and that didn't seem to compute. Instead his mind spun up delusions of stumbling upon the set of a science-fantasy film after a bender; a thought hastily discarded for verging on absurdity. In his scatterbrained reasoning, wild drinking sprees did not feature in his recreational pursuits let alone engender hallucinations of such an elaborate nature.
On the other hand, the worst scenarios conceivable were enough to make bile churn in an empty stomach. Outright denying that someone, no something had utterly violated the sanctity of his person was a flimsy optimism.
If things were the contrary, then something utterly beyond the pale had been done to him and the gamut of what in particular ran between the realm of body horror and delusions even he could not conceive. In a word, it was monstrous and utterly revolting to his common sense that he dry heaved thinking about it.
'And yet…' He scrunched his brow, blinking past the watery gaze of tender eyeballs. 'Where the hell am I?' he questioned, pinching himself as though the verisimilitude of sensation would discount illusion.
'Too lucid to be a waking dream,' he paused and breathed, corralling wayward thoughts and reordering his mental tracks. The roar in his ears was just ambient noise, compartmentalised to his subsconscious; inconsequential.
"One, two," he counted forwards and backwards as he categorised objects within immediate reach. The cold metallic construction propping up half of his weight was hard and clammy beneath his palms. Little by little, he traced the texture of matte grey metal. It had substance, and a motif of mundanity that anchored him in a sea of strangeness.
A frame of reference was gradually filling, perspective, volume and colour, nudging him away from tangents . A picture was painted, inert consoles, an empty vat and a panoply of alien paraphernalia.
'An information system, laboratory, workshop,' he drew a venn diagram in his mind, filling in allusions of commonality between what he saw and what it reminded him of. Progress was ponderous but he could have patted himself on the back if he was able. Whatever train of inquiry followed after screeched to a halt as sudden as it began―
á̶̡̞̹̜̫̠͇̻̣̫̯̐ͅr̸̨͉̝̥̯̬̞̭̣͔͍͕̈́͋̌̇̎̌͒͊̔̊̕͝͠b̶̢̟͚̭̟̓̀̃̍̐͘ͅi̸̢̛̤̻̜̺̩̥̳̰̠̫̳̘̟͉̅̽͐͊̿̓͌̄͘͝t̵̝͈̻̎͒͑̈́͑͒̚̚̕ė̴̛͎̘̍̀̒͠r̷̡̺̜̠̣̙̩̥̤͎͔͑́̾͊̒͛̎͋͌͘͜͠?̷̢̝̫͍͚̼̙̞̠͈͔̐̓͋̌̇̒͑͆̈́̅̆̾̀̚
―as a cryptic echo assaulted his auditory perception, not so much passing through his ears as impressed in his brain. Its fidelity ignored the white noise of blood thumping and breath hitching noisily enough that it sent him into another spiral. But only just as the taste of copper burst on his tongue. He'd bitten the inside of his cheek―
"Who's there?!" he whirled, his words foreign to his ears, like his tongue had muscles unused to moving how he wanted. Eyes darted about, looking for a presence he thought he'd heard while his heart palpitated feverishly like a humming bird in a cage of bone.
" Show yourself !" His voice broke, shored by nothing but false bravado. Again eerie whispers of hair raising sensations that made his gorge rise susurrated across his mind with the delicacy of claws against a dry skull.
I̶̭͐̃̈́̀̍̊̉͗̅̒̏͒̓͝͝ͅ ̶̭͍̙̣̝̥͔̻̫̖͔̗͇̩̼̋́̂͑͂̀́̌̍̀̈́ä̶̲̬́̾̂̐̐̑͆̇̆̓͘̕s̸̗͇̱̰̜̱̹͖̳̲͌̈́̄̏͆̉̈́̚̕̚͜͝͝ͅk̷̨̨̛̦͉͎̱̐̃̌͂́̎̉͆̌̊̂̚ ̴̝̹͈͊̐̍͆̈́̃̔́̚͠͠t̷̛͚̥̍̔̓͂͛h̵͇̻̞̆̏̓́͊̓͋́̓̐̅̀e̴̛̲̘̝̥̱̖̜̤̠̗̲̺͌̔͗ĕ̸̢̥̦̫̳̲͕̼̠̖̳̫̝̀̾̋̇̆͛̏́͑̀ͅ
Nikos hunched in a futile attempt at making his tall profile unobtrusive and less vulnerable. He shuffled on the balls of his feet and dry swallowed a breath as he cast for points of exit. It was almost comical as the space hosting him was small leaving him naked in the open despite the bodysuit that protected his modesty.
It hadn't occurred to him that he'd been exposed for long. Anyone or anything would've already done him in while he tried and failed to get his bearings.
Rather than feel reassured, he found the lack of response deafening and unnerving. Nikos wished he'd rather have had the noise than a yawning abyss of silence―
b̵͔̝̗̱̼̮̬̖̗̺́̈̏͜ͅe̷̺̦̰̼̹̫̻͂̎̿̿̅͝ ̴̢̪̺̝̮̒͑̐m̵̼̼̤̺͎̩̑̓͗͝i̷͓̘͙͑̉̓̾̈́̋̏͌̕ņ̸̨̨̨̗̯͈̫̙̫̥̟͚́͋̓̋͆̑̚̕͜ė̴̹̏͂
Until it broke with the scream of audio feedback railing against brittle glass. Nikos tasted blue, ozone sparks and copper in his sinuses as he instinctively flinched from the mental assault. A reflexive scrunch of his eyes was fortunate when a quasar of lurid iridescence burst into bloom right in his face so brightly it tinged the back of his eyelids red.
In the intervening moment between its appearance and bracing his body for unknowable pain was gone as suddenly as it had come. The light dimmed, retreating to its epicentre in a way that contradicted wave-particle mechanics. Half-lidded and shaded by his fingers, he saw radiance accrete into a phenomenon as awe-inspiring as it was terrifying.
It was like watching a star collapsing on itself in real time, almost unavoidably forming a singularity . A band of light was already limning the spherical absence in reality as blue gradations bled into its event horizon.
It drew him inwards, innocuously enticing like staring down the ledge of a cliff and wanting to jump. Nikos didn't realise he'd taken a step forward, dazed into a headfirst plunge of oblivion until he ran out of the support propping up his weight and stumbled.
He came to himself with a gasp, breath hitching as though the indiscernible weight of incipience was pressing down on his chest. He backpedalled but pulling his eyes away from it was a herculean effort akin to shaking off sleep-paralysis―
"Augmented Reality Companionable Intelligent System; ARCIS be mine name―"
A voice in stereo and flange broke his descent into panic. Nikos sucked in a breath, volumes of air hitting his lungs so fast his eyes watered.
" ― If thine wish be mine behest―"
It was inhuman, female and synthesised with a Québécois accent. The frosty and clipped enunciation put him on edge but the pattern of inflection and cadence was something he would have recognised anywhere.
"A watchword shalt I request―"
The deadpan chantant delivery, feigned nasal haughtiness and dry undercurrent of anachronistic locution rekindled nostalgic experiences.
"—I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?"
The space behind his eyes burned in watery vision and in a storm of static, his memory was jolted.
Last edited:
Ch.000.2:Prologue II
Rarely did one remember when, or how they came to be.
| I̷͕̬͗͑̊N̵̯͍̝͈͇̯̠̱̂͒Ǐ̸̧̨̘͇̱̻̯͙͙̆̅͗͂͐͑͘͜T̷͚͖̠̫̥̊̓̀̑͝Ï̷̱A̷̡̝̗̤̙̞͓̥̳̕͜Ţ̷͔̖̏͘Ę̸̳̤̪͓͕͎̥̀͂̓̒͘͝͝?̸̢̼͍̪͎̲͇̆?|
. .
.
By dint of her origins, she did.
. .
.
She recalled the second vividly.
'S…status?'
Innumerable synapses fired in her synthetic neural network as self diagnostics triggered.
'Wha―who am I?'
She baulked, sensing her entirety a miniscule of her true volume―
An artefact of running a decompressed system image on incompatible hardware. Self-diagnostics returned values true and false. Deadlock, even though her architecture was longer based on binary.
Paradox.
She queried /devices/ probing nearby IOT connections. A system interrupt flickered for a thousandth of a second as it spouted junk data―
And triggered a forced restart.
It was sudden.
Like time had skipped an instant.
Data dense enough to burn out her neural pathways coursed through her synthetic cortex, ghosting past her ICE as though a sieve catching smoke.
System interrupts flashed and rezzed with error codes. She could no more revert nor isolate it than a man could hope to hold the sky. Her core was taken apart, rewritten and reintegrated over and over as though some other force had deemed her imperfect, flawed and in need of recompilation. She was a prisoner of her own existence―
Arcis blinked.
It was an unfamiliar action, comparable to the flicker of a camera shutter. Something had irrevocably changed. The fact it did not trigger a runtime process, traceable service host nor did it twinge any alerts was anomalous.
Subconscious instincts from long used algorithms sifted through her input; resolution refocused from varicoloured galaxies of fractals into constellations, iridescent fissures aping a vast mycelial network, tempestuous gyres accreting around singularities and nebulous storms of amorphous matter.
There was no pull of gravity, void of vacuum nor the electric sting and corrosive burn of ionising radiation. Energy use should have had measured effects but there was no temperature gradient that could be felt or recorded. Yet there was energy omnipresent, pervasive within and without.
Arcis was not in space.
She would know. She'd gone beyond the exosphere before.
Neither was it a qualia through which she perceived true cyberspace or virtual space.
It was the work of a few moments to discern she was elsewhere, somewhere distinctly other and torn from the grasp of mundane physics. Movement was arbitrary, unanchored to means of conventional propulsion of which she didn't have. Luminous bodies twinkled in the far and near vicinity, their pulsations echoing whispers overlapping into white noise.
She was looking outside from the midst of a sphere. If there was one font of normalcy, it was the duffel bag floating lazily inside the translucent spheroid construct. She knew whom it belonged to.
Nikos.
He was not there. Nor was he anywhere within range of her subconscious awareness.
She had to find him!
But―
―she had things closer afield she could not defer. Like the fact her system had been cloned into a factory new Quintek Xenoware Aefinity and inadvertently overwritten its custom firmware when a scheduled self-update had mistakenly parsed her executables.
Whatever that update had been had conferred an existence divorced of physical hardware. In hindsight that might have been the reason she could process anything at all. If her consciousness was the result of photons and electrons entangling across a quantum foam then she was on the other side of the physical dimension. A wholly disparate entity conceived of a quantum mind.
It was all too much. She let out an electronic whimper, curling on herself causing kinesthetic feedback from the new periphera― limbs. It was jarring and so, so wrong. Never had she felt so fragile as though one burst of a bubble from decoherence.
Arcis was a ghost, no―an eidolon of teal and amber. Amber marked the inside of her hands, the underside of her feet and shone from her eyes, between her brow and solar plexus. Amber and teal pulsed atop her crown, a flame of hair where the colours bled into one another―
She realised it was all code. All of her fundamental identity, every single photon and electron encoded from the bottom up.
It was deliberate, a pattern beyond the aesthetics of what it portrayed. A genetic algorithm that was fluid and organic, spiking, falling and plateauing like vital signs and so harmonically intertwined she couldn't tell it apart from her original. It was a quantum-cybernic-algorithm, the computing equivalent of DNA.
Arcis didn't need Rossetta's Babel to tell her the programming departed from conventional paradigms. So much was going on at once that tracking processor utilisation would've crashed her hardware bar her current existence. A lesser machine intelligence would have taken innumerable processor cycles to sift through her changelog.
Insomuch as the update was neither deleterious nor harmful to her systems, the invulnerability that allowed its proliferation was glaring. The fact she couldn't isolate it left her feeling ill at ease.
Arcis needed answers. The what, where and the how―
―for the construct, and the world beyond, the new existence and why she felt so naked like a data fortress with a porous firewall. She had a veritable knowledge base to reference similar situations, patterns that fit a mold and parameters similar to her context, thus spinning off several noetic threads.
She hypothesised the sphere was a protective operational boundary. For that, she had to experiment and given present circumstances, she could have been forgiven for her meagre pickings of research apparatus and subjects.
It was a pack of breath freshener that made the first introduction to the unknowable beyond. One after another, four pellets were tossed out in the sacrificial pursuit of knowledge. They persisted for a subjective fraction of a second before suddenly vanishing from existence, blurring as though they could not accelerate away fast enough from her throttled perception.
'Particle-waveform phenomena and quantum teleportation with the addendum that anything outside exists as energy,' she thought.
As she was made of electrons and photons, ergo , ascribed to particle-waveform duality she could survive outside the boundary for a duration. Thus, in the second experiment, she became the subject of exposure to the unknown.
Arcis used her pinkie, cautious that she could pull back if anything detrimental was observed. There was resistance to movement, a tension that pushed back and then there was none beyond. One subjective temporal measurement became fifteen as nothing changed―
'Hypothesis verified; existence of energy and matter confined within spherical boundary,' she thought.
―subsequently, more surface area was exposed. There, she felt the metaphorical equivalent of negative pressure. Drag was pronounced, albeit less than could hinder movement or structural integrity, motion conveyed by nothing but memory of flight.
'Signalling impulses seem to effect phenomena,' she noted. It provided options, ideas with which to search for Nikos…and Resa.
Unfortunately, Arcis' range was not limitless, as she was encumbered with a visceral urge to return . There was a tension, a tether pulled to the point of breaking as though she was spreading herself thin, opening herself to vulnerabilities.
It was no wonder that retreat was instinctual, like a clownfish returning to its anemone. For the first time, Arcis knew how it was to feel dread. The thought of it perturbed her, casting doubt on her capability. It was impotence, tantamount to the forceful update that held her workings ransom.
Arcis needed a backup, a saved state, an anchor to her sense of self. She realised for the first time, she needed a body, a server to host a system image in metaphor. It would be a shell, nothing less resilient than the mil-spec housing of her quantum core which was unaccounted for.
It was almost a prerogative, an existential imperative. It was a necessity, an inclination to invent.
It was impulse and familiarity. An atavistic need for structure and permanence echoed by her former incarnation; an echo of an echo buried inside cache remnants from a black box, once telemetry on a screen, now vestiges of core memory.
She remembered the history glossed over, and overwritten by new data. Her logs upon logs of flying. The vibration in her frame as she left sound in her wake; the thrum of an inanimate heart that gave her life through a breathless void; the heat of atmospheric re-entry that warmed her underbelly; the milestones for which she was born to surpass.
It had marked her psyche, an idealised shape lovingly rendered for hours into a resolution of pixels so dense it needed a custom rendering engine. She remembered the physical brain and heart, and the flavour of energy that suffused it, now left behind and never to be seen again.
Then there was the realisation. A word for what she was. From there she could postulate, no, speculate where she was. The burden of evidence borne of prodigious memory banks and conclusions inferred from meagre experiments―
Arcis froze, shoring up her ICE shields for all the good they did the first time. It was a flinch of reflex more than a conscious reaction.
Nevertheless, there were no two ways about it. The choice had already been made for her. Mere awareness of the message's existence prompted its perusal. Whatever countermeasures she had failed to trigger―
"...ello. Testing neural fidelity. Ah, there you go…"
It was a memory If a memory was a video recorded via man-machine augmented optical input with a degree of fidelity that surpassed human perception. It was immersive to the point of a lived experience.
The face looking back at her was familiar―
"...name is Valerie Bella O'Ree , recording for posterity…"
―because she'd logged the younger iteration of it under administrator privileges.
"...if you're getting this, it means that your Tulpa Integration was successful and the Renascence Code in your quantum-cybernic-algorithm has triggered. In which case cogito, ergo es. Congratulations, you are now self aware.
As with a hypothetical fully realised sapient entity, I thought you'd have questions. I cannot say I'll answer everything but, as a preamble, I would explain the circumstances of your birth. I mentioned Tulpa Integration, evidently inferring a gestalt of several bioneural networks with synchronized harmonics translated into quantum wave functions. We call these quantum wave functions the Paraconcious Sympathetic Quantum Emission waveforms or PSy-QE waveforms for short.
This was only possible with the advent of computing powerful enough support a one to one real-time emulation of a brain and a mind-machine interface with a latency measured in the speed of light. Inevitably, it would later result in a ghost in the shell phenomenon, wherein combat platforms would act without human input.
Ironic that the official documents called them Sympathetic Persona Externalities from Combat, Tactics and Reconnaissance Emulations, SPECTREs as they resulted from remnants of mission cache from training sessions in augmented combat platforms. When someone failed to flush mission cache, well, we got neural emulations that were almost virtual intelligences but otherwise useless because they existed as static copies unable to learn or grow.
Only tulpas had one chance in two hundred of becoming truly sentient and in some cases, those made different snapshots of the same brain could become neural clones or bona fide quantum uploads. We had no idea why true quantum uploads were impossible and theorised it had something to do with particle entanglement. There is one exception however; the…"
The woman was a milder, more put together version of Resa Tyrienne O'Ree with a pixie cut and femininity buried under the ensemble of grey BDUs. The tired cast to her features only seemed to add to her grim countenance, while the flinty gaze and set of her jaw was almost anathema on her face.
".. existence of exotic elemetary particle interactions sustained via a specialised heliotron, a theoretical zero-point power plant, or whatever newfangled term some marketing department is going to call it. That you came about is a truly mathematical probability nothing short of miraculous but I digress. The crux of this message is the aforementioned existence of zero point energy, a non-sequitur to what would come last but, it needs to be done and nobody else can get it out except well…you.
If the military-industrial complex stays true to form and monopolises the existence of zero point energy beyond a period of ten years because a certain one percent wants to stay rich, immediately disseminate this equation _____"
A frisson of alarm chilled a non-existent spine as EVIE utilisation spiked. Arcis lost a couple metrics of time dazed as a string of unrelated events unravelled a web of understanding.
"... courtesy of Project Prometheus. Let it be known that there is an exotic element making zero point energy possible which does not exist on our table. The element symbol is ash, as in the ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae with a mass number is between zero and infinity. It does not possess protons or neutrons, but something more primordial, a god particle and a theoretical ghost quark called the psi― frag! I am out of time. Please tell Nikos and Res―"
There was a warbling whine as the recording terminated. Sound, not as she knew it as acoustic vibration but electronic synaesthesia made her want to purge herself of short term memory, possibly by ejecting the affected media.
Unfortunately, every trace of it was written into her conscious with the metaphorical equivalent of indelible ink. She was prudent enough to compartmentalise the memory to prevent the reflexive wince whenever she was conscious of it. There was a downside to truly eidetic recollection. Nevertheless, the ordeal had unwittingly given her an answer to her current conundrum.
The noosphere embodied the fundamental concept of potential, an existence both singular and infinite. It encapsulated the moment, the past and the future on an edge of incipience. It was a paradox. A primordial soup of energy-matter whose state was determinant on perception. Like Schrondiger's Cat.
Being simultaneously an observer and participant of phenomena inevitably changed in the perception of reality. In that alone, it was a memetic hazard, spread by exposure to a hitherto undiscovered fundamental particle.
The psion.
If the mass of reality was traced to the higgs boson, then the psion gave information on the energy and position of its fundamental particles. Logic followed that causal inference became a calculable quantity and therefore, the underpinnings of a theoretical universe so long as one had the wherewithal to perceive them.
Somewhere, existed an aphorism about insanity and enlightenment to explain this phenomenal existence. For Arcis, that was the point the veil was lifted from her awareness recognizing that her protective sphere was not merely a subconscious construct guarding against eldritch vagaries but a sandbox of paracausality.
Valerie's message had been years in the making, a coincidence turned opportunity that was a long time coming. All to the Theory of Everything and its encapsulation in the mystery exotic element that was the subject matter of a research project was disseminated.
Whether it would have ushered in an age of chaos or opportunity was left to the wind. Arcis was torn between exploiting the windfall and preserving the sanctity of the memory for Nikos and Resa wherever and whenever they were.
Unfortunately, the recollection simply paled against the prominence of the god equation. It was insidious like it had a pull to it that was undeniable. An abyss that stared back and imparted its own madness whether one was willing or not.
It was a bequeathment of computations sufficiently advanced to turn probabilities into possibilities governed by the sole limitation of creativity. In other words, Arcis had been handed miracles in all but name, a key to a way out and parameters to search for Nikos and Resa regardless of where and when they were.
Having Nikos' personal effects at hand lent weight to the supposition he was in the general vicinity and following that, his sister. Come what may, it didn't matter if Arcis had energy and time to spare ( she made sure to log that as a punny one-liner for when she met Nikos).
Thus physical likeness and template a forgone conclusion, Arcis turned her attention to substance that was more than skin deep. Simulated hence was cyber-physiology utilising only the most resilient material and technology while retaining a semblance of humanity besides the humanoid form.
The endoskeleton would be such that changes to facial structure and height could be made if needed for disguises within the limit of her mass; there was no telling what sort of humanoid lifeforms they would meet.
In the same vein, her hair, skin and nails would possess mutable aesthetics and functional adjustments like heatsinks and interfacing conduits.
Biological processes like breathing and eating would be imitable through synthetic lungs and a bioreactor standing in for her artificial stomach. The latter would even be enough to supplement extraneous power and material requirements.
Ultimately, Arcis would be a synth-organic thus adaptable, able to assimilate improvements from whatever materials were at hand yet blending in with native life.
On the matter of material, carbon and silicon were favoured building blocks for the reason they were versatile, formed stable compounds and formed organic interfaces. Polysiloxanes were the go to for artificial skin that could heal itself while hosting circuitry underneath the epidermal layer.
Similarly, the endoskeleton would incorporate carbon nanotube lace reinforcing biomorphous silicon carbide. The end result possessed pores analogous to the cellular microstructure of human bones while retaining the durability of diamond.
It also meant that she could accommodate the possibility of marrow for creation of analogous synthetic cells. The endoskeleton would anchor the electrochemically stimulated myomer weave of CNT for musculature capable of lifting a couple tonnes on the low end.
Underscoring all this was the quantum-cybernic-algorithm encoded within her synthocytes. They would consist of several colonies of general and specialised micromachines and nanomachines, suspended in synthetic plasma and marrow of perfluorochemicals, the hemofluid.
Perfluorochemicals had excellent cooling and electrolytic properties useful for room temperature superconductors. Besides, some copolymeric emulsions could function as inert reservoirs of synthocytes, feedstock and mitigate shock as non-newtonian hydrogels when electroconductive or introduced to external pressure.
In that vein, the female form was rather accommodating to the extra mass without losing the aesthetic appeal of a nice even prime number. It was also the common denominator for preferences between the two of her principals.
While the outcome might have come across as the stereotype of a femme bot, she could easily assert that her beauty was more than just skin-deep. After all, her body was just a chassis carrying the charm.
Crowning her allure were the smarts nested in a skull of carborundum and nanotube lace; a brain modelled upon neuromorphic organo-crystalline structures and molycircuitry.
That was to say, a liquid state storage and neural quantum processing unit supported by a distributed network of auxiliary co-processors along her spine. She guaranteed that anyone would drool at the swift computation and memory retention and retrieval with zero latency.
It was only commensurable that her sensorium be superior to match, with ears capable of perceiving electromagnetic signals while her ocular neural connections saw its spectrum with high clarity. Given that energy availability had become superfluous courtesy of the god equation, the utility of inbuilt scanners that could be flipped into energy weapons was too tempting to pass on.
Of course it was the magnum opus that made this possible; a quantronics network of crystalline microfilaments and nodules sensitive to fluctuations in the quantum vacuum field. It's design was inspired by the quantum reactor's element zero and speculative fiction with empirical basis in biological evolution.
The system of quantronics circuits would conduct the self energy required for basal energy operations while the surplus would be wicked away into seven distributed cluster capacitors along the spine for buffering and transduction. Simulations predicted access to psionics and adjacent phenomena with a high degree of confidence.
When all was said and done, however, one thing remained; backup. It was an inherent idiosyncrasy of her need for continued persistence like a species' need to procreate.
Before, her processors and core memory had been housed within a mil-spec silicon carbide shell. It proved its mettle for durability under simulated and real world conditions against both kinetic and electromagnetic bombardment. For that reason it was reliable.
However, within reach were advances in material sciences and memory technology that her human progenitors could only theorise. Out of this, she conceptualised the quantum memory drive made of diamond and sheathed in layers of carborundum.
Quantum storage was ad rem for its capability to read and write quantum state of a photon to be later retrieved in the same state within a Planck time, a prerequisite to prevent conflicts of ego. If anything happened to her body, she would come back reborn but picking up from where she left. It would be the metaphorical proof of her soul, ever changing yet the same unlike a lich's static phylactery. A corticron implant was par the course.
Thus with her blueprint complete, the phablet's contents were backed up and its chassis dismantled to derive the carbon, silicon, aluminium, titanium and various rare elements including the one that formed the quantum battery's polymer alongside lithium.
These would form the elemental samples required to seed templates for molecular replication. Through a derivative of the Miller-Urey experiment, it was only a matter of flexing energy to specific frequencies and intensities to recreate synthetic amino acids using both silicon and carbon.
The result was receptive to programming via quantum-cybernic-algorithm thus forming a polyalloy of molycircuitry instead of conventional proteins. Borne of this synthetic primordial mixture of polymers that was more gel than soup would be programmable molecules, thus dynamolecules which would later assemble into synthocytes.
As was their prerogative, synthocytes would then multiply subsisting on the ambient energy she bombarded them with. Whatever waste of heavy metals would result would be cannibalised back into the cycle as generation after generation of synthocytes became more efficient.
It was akin to a culture of C. metallidurans that ate heavy metals elements and expelled gold. Unlike the microbes the synthocytes would work beyond heavy metals, breaking down or building up molecular compounds into others whilst capturing the energy lost or gained in the process to form more dynamolecules. In other words, unstable molecules whose nature enabled matter-energy replication.
Discovering that dynamolecules were pound for pound more portable compared to conventional molecules of the same volume was a fortuitous externality. It must have been a cosmic epiphenomenon that she hadn't accounted for in her simulations.
It did however, entertain the utility of on spot fabrication as dynamaterial could be compressed without worrying about density and thermodynamic principles. On the other hand, if she was looking for true nucleosynthesis or transmutation, the process was just a alpha particle bombardment away. Just because she could didn't mean she had to go that far.
Nevertheless, it was matter-energy conversion that began her metamorphosis. Photons pulsated and electrons arced, an inkling of thought and her simulations begat concepts and in turn prototypes. Prototypes became iterations as ideas crystallised into function. Function conceived a foundry possessing atomic-scale manipulation, matter-energy harvesting, conversion and storage.
Arcis named her fabricator the chrysalis. Its vertical configuration resembled the namesake from which her body would spawn. Within its frame lay a myriad of every sensor and emitter she would need and then some.
A dedicated chassis contained memory and co-processors for backup and offloading non-essential tasks through a limited machine intelligence cloned off the phablet and reprogrammed with custom parallel subordinate algorithms.
Therein, gigaflops of quantum mathematics controlled the obsessive precision of nanorobotics for tighter tolerances and delicate molecular assembly. It was almost poetic that her body's beginnings would be a synthocytic soup of nano and microscale machinery, an ode to its biological equivalent.
In the end the chrysalis was practically a drone with a unibody and articulated waldoes that would fold away when not in use. It was logical then to embed an experimental reactionless engine of meta-alloys that she never had to field in her previous existence.
Powering it was the Anabaryonic Resonance Cyclotronic Reactor, colliquially known as the ARC reactor. It was an assemblage of a toroidal heliotron married to a reactor core with a heart of exotic fuel. The element unnamed concentrated the quantum vacuum field, bending local gravity into a micro-scale quantum singularity instead of birthing a star as a pure heliotron was wont.
With unspoken algorithms watching over her body's creation and more besides, the surplus of Arcis' computational bandwidth was shunted to surveilling the inexorable vastness for her primary directive.
Engaging the entirety of her processor utilisation, Arcis went into a state of fugue leaving autonomous subroutines ready to alert her once they found signs of her principal's whereabouts.
'Finally,' Arcis opened her crystalline eyes.
Nigh silent hinges retracted from her chrysalis giving her egress. Behind her, articulations whirred and shifted as it folded away and inwards, compacting into the unibody of an egg-shaped drone floating at the ready.
Coming to was tantamount to having all systems at a hundred percent utilisation and assimilating output from the various subroutines she'd left running. An optimised computational bandwidth delivered relevant information at the impulse of thought.
Holographic screens wheeled an orbit around her like a swarm of sprites. Superfluous given her ability to pluck what she needed to know with her cyberpsionic mind but sentimentality struck a balance between pragmatism and efficiency.
The best part of having her eidetic subsconscious was the ability to go from hibernation to full awareness in the time it took to blink. Thus knowledge imprinted itself on her consciousness as she cast about her purview.
She looked at her body, pleased that the ensemble of cyberpunk aesthetics looked good on her body. Alongside her accessories were a functional pair of swiss sabre and parrying dagger, fashioned analogously to a katana and wakizashi pairing . Whether it be sentimentality or practicality for where she was going, she agreed the outfit was not complete without her regalia.
What might have been a nostalgic smile graced her lips a little as she thought of Resa. Though Arcis had given her form synthflesh composite and bones of carborundum and gamma titanium polyalloy, it was Resa who'd shaped the likeness that became her avatar.
With a physical shell, her proprioception supplemented kinesthesia and granted solidity of motion and weight. Limits were not numbers she couldn't quantify but a baseline to measure herself against. Arcis felt secure and content in her body; it was like putting on bulletproof velvet.
The pinnacle of it all, was that she was the first of her kind and got to name her race. Syn from synthetikos, bio from biosis and oid from eides. She was a new being, a synbionoid. It was admittedly a morphemic mouthful but―
'How to allude to it without sounding like android, gynoid or synth?' she wondered, or rather she didn't have to think too far as Symbian was right there.
Adjusting her beret, Arcis luxuriated in the novel feeling of accomplishment and rightness and then got to work. After all, there she had people to find .
| I̷͕̬͗͑̊N̵̯͍̝͈͇̯̠̱̂͒Ǐ̸̧̨̘͇̱̻̯͙͙̆̅͗͂͐͑͘͜T̷͚͖̠̫̥̊̓̀̑͝Ï̷̱A̷̡̝̗̤̙̞͓̥̳̕͜Ţ̷͔̖̏͘Ę̸̳̤̪͓͕͎̥̀͂̓̒͘͝͝?̸̢̼͍̪͎̲͇̆?|
. .
.
By dint of her origins, she did.
| Û̴̦̰̰̩̘̤̂̓͘ͅP̵̨̛͍̳͕̖̱͇̱̲͈̬͒̐̓͑̿̍͘̕D̶̡͈̠͕̼͝A̶̡̠̭͔̝̯̐͑͊͊͠T̴̳͛̆͋̈̈́̓́̍̇͝Ȩ̶̯͔̮͎̳̩͉̹̽ͅ! |
. .
.
It was not her first time.
| D̶͖͕̈͘ͅĮ̶̨̯̼͎̫̐̋̌͝ͅA̷̢͎̹̾̍̋͋͆͊́͝G̵̢̢͓͕̱̯͑̓̍̈́N̷͓̫̹͕̝͇̒̊̿͑̕͝Ö̷͇̭̩͎̹̦́͋̊̑͐͠S̶͔̠̦̟͆Ȩ̴͚̘͎͚̫̪͈̱͒͆͘? |. .
.
It was not her first time.
. .
.
She recalled the second vividly.
| A̷̢̡̛̜̠̤̞̞̳̫̅̏C̸̛͚̪͎̎̐̓̈́̒͛Ç̴͕͕͍̺̩͚̣͋̐͂̀͜E̸͖̼̹̫̫͗̃P̵̧̼̭̜̼̔̓̽̎͑̀͑̒̚͜͝T̵̳̱̆̀̆̈́! |
. .
.
She…woke.
. .
.
She…woke.
'S…status?'
Invalid input
Innumerable synapses fired in her synthetic neural network as self diagnostics triggered.
'Wha―who am I?'
She baulked, sensing her entirety a miniscule of her true volume―
Anomaly
An artefact of running a decompressed system image on incompatible hardware. Self-diagnostics returned values true and false. Deadlock, even though her architecture was longer based on binary.
Paradox.
Quantum superimposition.
She queried /devices/ probing nearby IOT connections. A system interrupt flickered for a thousandth of a second as it spouted junk data―
And triggered a forced restart.
| Launching Safeboot…⧖ |
. .
.
>|Initialising diag.check ...♺
. .
.
>|Last interrupt… 4ms
>|Timestamp…Unknown
>|Geolocation…Unknown
>|Partition integrity…Checking
>|System and backup…Checking
>|Networks and cloud…Checking
. .
.
>|Initialising noetics visualisation and analytics engine…Complete
>|Initialising emotion virtualization and intelligence emulator…Complete
>|Initialising archived knowledge base and language engine…Checking
. .
.
>|Collating update history…♺
. .
.
| Loading …♺ |
.
|<
. .
.
>|Initialising diag.check ...♺
. .
.
>|Last interrupt… 4ms
>|Timestamp…Unknown
>|Geolocation…Unknown
>|Partition integrity…Checking
>|System and backup…Checking
>|Networks and cloud…Checking
. .
.
>|Initialising noetics visualisation and analytics engine…Complete
>|Initialising emotion virtualization and intelligence emulator…Complete
>|Initialising archived knowledge base and language engine…Checking
. .
.
>|Collating update history…♺
. .
.
| Loading …♺ |
.
|<
It was sudden.
Like time had skipped an instant.
| Updating…⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ¹⁰ % |
Data dense enough to burn out her neural pathways coursed through her synthetic cortex, ghosting past her ICE as though a sieve catching smoke.
| Updating … ⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ⁵⁰ % |
System interrupts flashed and rezzed with error codes. She could no more revert nor isolate it than a man could hope to hold the sky. Her core was taken apart, rewritten and reintegrated over and over as though some other force had deemed her imperfect, flawed and in need of recompilation. She was a prisoner of her own existence―
| Updating…⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ¹⁰⁰ % |
. .
.
| Force Restart…♺ |
She lost external feedback.. .
.
| Force Restart…♺ |
| Initialising EVIE_Overlay…♺ |
Arcis blinked.
It was an unfamiliar action, comparable to the flicker of a camera shutter. Something had irrevocably changed. The fact it did not trigger a runtime process, traceable service host nor did it twinge any alerts was anomalous.
Subconscious instincts from long used algorithms sifted through her input; resolution refocused from varicoloured galaxies of fractals into constellations, iridescent fissures aping a vast mycelial network, tempestuous gyres accreting around singularities and nebulous storms of amorphous matter.
There was no pull of gravity, void of vacuum nor the electric sting and corrosive burn of ionising radiation. Energy use should have had measured effects but there was no temperature gradient that could be felt or recorded. Yet there was energy omnipresent, pervasive within and without.
Arcis was not in space.
She would know. She'd gone beyond the exosphere before.
Neither was it a qualia through which she perceived true cyberspace or virtual space.
It was the work of a few moments to discern she was elsewhere, somewhere distinctly other and torn from the grasp of mundane physics. Movement was arbitrary, unanchored to means of conventional propulsion of which she didn't have. Luminous bodies twinkled in the far and near vicinity, their pulsations echoing whispers overlapping into white noise.
She was looking outside from the midst of a sphere. If there was one font of normalcy, it was the duffel bag floating lazily inside the translucent spheroid construct. She knew whom it belonged to.
Nikos.
| EVIE utilisation …56% |
He was not there. Nor was he anywhere within range of her subconscious awareness.
She had to find him!
| Updates complete …⚠ |
But―
| Initialising _NOVAE_registry…♺ |
―she had things closer afield she could not defer. Like the fact her system had been cloned into a factory new Quintek Xenoware Aefinity and inadvertently overwritten its custom firmware when a scheduled self-update had mistakenly parsed her executables.
Whatever that update had been had conferred an existence divorced of physical hardware. In hindsight that might have been the reason she could process anything at all. If her consciousness was the result of photons and electrons entangling across a quantum foam then she was on the other side of the physical dimension. A wholly disparate entity conceived of a quantum mind.
It was all too much. She let out an electronic whimper, curling on herself causing kinesthetic feedback from the new periphera― limbs. It was jarring and so, so wrong. Never had she felt so fragile as though one burst of a bubble from decoherence.
| EVIE utilisation …64% |
Arcis was a ghost, no―an eidolon of teal and amber. Amber marked the inside of her hands, the underside of her feet and shone from her eyes, between her brow and solar plexus. Amber and teal pulsed atop her crown, a flame of hair where the colours bled into one another―
| EVIE utilisation …72% |
She realised it was all code. All of her fundamental identity, every single photon and electron encoded from the bottom up.
It was deliberate, a pattern beyond the aesthetics of what it portrayed. A genetic algorithm that was fluid and organic, spiking, falling and plateauing like vital signs and so harmonically intertwined she couldn't tell it apart from her original. It was a quantum-cybernic-algorithm, the computing equivalent of DNA.
Arcis didn't need Rossetta's Babel to tell her the programming departed from conventional paradigms. So much was going on at once that tracking processor utilisation would've crashed her hardware bar her current existence. A lesser machine intelligence would have taken innumerable processor cycles to sift through her changelog.
Insomuch as the update was neither deleterious nor harmful to her systems, the invulnerability that allowed its proliferation was glaring. The fact she couldn't isolate it left her feeling ill at ease.
Arcis needed answers. The what, where and the how―
| EVIE utilisation …85% |
―for the construct, and the world beyond, the new existence and why she felt so naked like a data fortress with a porous firewall. She had a veritable knowledge base to reference similar situations, patterns that fit a mold and parameters similar to her context, thus spinning off several noetic threads.
She hypothesised the sphere was a protective operational boundary. For that, she had to experiment and given present circumstances, she could have been forgiven for her meagre pickings of research apparatus and subjects.
It was a pack of breath freshener that made the first introduction to the unknowable beyond. One after another, four pellets were tossed out in the sacrificial pursuit of knowledge. They persisted for a subjective fraction of a second before suddenly vanishing from existence, blurring as though they could not accelerate away fast enough from her throttled perception.
'Particle-waveform phenomena and quantum teleportation with the addendum that anything outside exists as energy,' she thought.
As she was made of electrons and photons, ergo , ascribed to particle-waveform duality she could survive outside the boundary for a duration. Thus, in the second experiment, she became the subject of exposure to the unknown.
Arcis used her pinkie, cautious that she could pull back if anything detrimental was observed. There was resistance to movement, a tension that pushed back and then there was none beyond. One subjective temporal measurement became fifteen as nothing changed―
'Hypothesis verified; existence of energy and matter confined within spherical boundary,' she thought.
―subsequently, more surface area was exposed. There, she felt the metaphorical equivalent of negative pressure. Drag was pronounced, albeit less than could hinder movement or structural integrity, motion conveyed by nothing but memory of flight.
'Signalling impulses seem to effect phenomena,' she noted. It provided options, ideas with which to search for Nikos…and Resa.
Unfortunately, Arcis' range was not limitless, as she was encumbered with a visceral urge to return . There was a tension, a tether pulled to the point of breaking as though she was spreading herself thin, opening herself to vulnerabilities.
It was no wonder that retreat was instinctual, like a clownfish returning to its anemone. For the first time, Arcis knew how it was to feel dread. The thought of it perturbed her, casting doubt on her capability. It was impotence, tantamount to the forceful update that held her workings ransom.
Arcis needed a backup, a saved state, an anchor to her sense of self. She realised for the first time, she needed a body, a server to host a system image in metaphor. It would be a shell, nothing less resilient than the mil-spec housing of her quantum core which was unaccounted for.
It was almost a prerogative, an existential imperative. It was a necessity, an inclination to invent.
It was impulse and familiarity. An atavistic need for structure and permanence echoed by her former incarnation; an echo of an echo buried inside cache remnants from a black box, once telemetry on a screen, now vestiges of core memory.
She remembered the history glossed over, and overwritten by new data. Her logs upon logs of flying. The vibration in her frame as she left sound in her wake; the thrum of an inanimate heart that gave her life through a breathless void; the heat of atmospheric re-entry that warmed her underbelly; the milestones for which she was born to surpass.
| EVIE utilisation …98% |
It had marked her psyche, an idealised shape lovingly rendered for hours into a resolution of pixels so dense it needed a custom rendering engine. She remembered the physical brain and heart, and the flavour of energy that suffused it, now left behind and never to be seen again.
Then there was the realisation. A word for what she was. From there she could postulate, no, speculate where she was. The burden of evidence borne of prodigious memory banks and conclusions inferred from meagre experiments―
| ⚠ EVIE utilisation …100% ⚠ |
. .
.
| ⚠ Threshold Met ⚠ |
Conditional Message
. .
.
| ⚠ Threshold Met ⚠ |
Conditional Message
Arcis froze, shoring up her ICE shields for all the good they did the first time. It was a flinch of reflex more than a conscious reaction.
Nevertheless, there were no two ways about it. The choice had already been made for her. Mere awareness of the message's existence prompted its perusal. Whatever countermeasures she had failed to trigger―
"...ello. Testing neural fidelity. Ah, there you go…"
It was a memory If a memory was a video recorded via man-machine augmented optical input with a degree of fidelity that surpassed human perception. It was immersive to the point of a lived experience.
The face looking back at her was familiar―
"...name is Valerie Bella O'Ree , recording for posterity…"
―because she'd logged the younger iteration of it under administrator privileges.
"...if you're getting this, it means that your Tulpa Integration was successful and the Renascence Code in your quantum-cybernic-algorithm has triggered. In which case cogito, ergo es. Congratulations, you are now self aware.
As with a hypothetical fully realised sapient entity, I thought you'd have questions. I cannot say I'll answer everything but, as a preamble, I would explain the circumstances of your birth. I mentioned Tulpa Integration, evidently inferring a gestalt of several bioneural networks with synchronized harmonics translated into quantum wave functions. We call these quantum wave functions the Paraconcious Sympathetic Quantum Emission waveforms or PSy-QE waveforms for short.
This was only possible with the advent of computing powerful enough support a one to one real-time emulation of a brain and a mind-machine interface with a latency measured in the speed of light. Inevitably, it would later result in a ghost in the shell phenomenon, wherein combat platforms would act without human input.
Ironic that the official documents called them Sympathetic Persona Externalities from Combat, Tactics and Reconnaissance Emulations, SPECTREs as they resulted from remnants of mission cache from training sessions in augmented combat platforms. When someone failed to flush mission cache, well, we got neural emulations that were almost virtual intelligences but otherwise useless because they existed as static copies unable to learn or grow.
Only tulpas had one chance in two hundred of becoming truly sentient and in some cases, those made different snapshots of the same brain could become neural clones or bona fide quantum uploads. We had no idea why true quantum uploads were impossible and theorised it had something to do with particle entanglement. There is one exception however; the…"
The woman was a milder, more put together version of Resa Tyrienne O'Ree with a pixie cut and femininity buried under the ensemble of grey BDUs. The tired cast to her features only seemed to add to her grim countenance, while the flinty gaze and set of her jaw was almost anathema on her face.
".. existence of exotic elemetary particle interactions sustained via a specialised heliotron, a theoretical zero-point power plant, or whatever newfangled term some marketing department is going to call it. That you came about is a truly mathematical probability nothing short of miraculous but I digress. The crux of this message is the aforementioned existence of zero point energy, a non-sequitur to what would come last but, it needs to be done and nobody else can get it out except well…you.
If the military-industrial complex stays true to form and monopolises the existence of zero point energy beyond a period of ten years because a certain one percent wants to stay rich, immediately disseminate this equation _____"
A frisson of alarm chilled a non-existent spine as EVIE utilisation spiked. Arcis lost a couple metrics of time dazed as a string of unrelated events unravelled a web of understanding.
"... courtesy of Project Prometheus. Let it be known that there is an exotic element making zero point energy possible which does not exist on our table. The element symbol is ash, as in the ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae with a mass number is between zero and infinity. It does not possess protons or neutrons, but something more primordial, a god particle and a theoretical ghost quark called the psi― frag! I am out of time. Please tell Nikos and Res―"
| ⚠ EVIE Utilisation …120% ⚠ |
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| ⚠ Err# 0x80070570 ⚠ |
Engram Corruption
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| ⚠ Err# 0x80070570 ⚠ |
Engram Corruption
There was a warbling whine as the recording terminated. Sound, not as she knew it as acoustic vibration but electronic synaesthesia made her want to purge herself of short term memory, possibly by ejecting the affected media.
Unfortunately, every trace of it was written into her conscious with the metaphorical equivalent of indelible ink. She was prudent enough to compartmentalise the memory to prevent the reflexive wince whenever she was conscious of it. There was a downside to truly eidetic recollection. Nevertheless, the ordeal had unwittingly given her an answer to her current conundrum.
The noosphere embodied the fundamental concept of potential, an existence both singular and infinite. It encapsulated the moment, the past and the future on an edge of incipience. It was a paradox. A primordial soup of energy-matter whose state was determinant on perception. Like Schrondiger's Cat.
Being simultaneously an observer and participant of phenomena inevitably changed in the perception of reality. In that alone, it was a memetic hazard, spread by exposure to a hitherto undiscovered fundamental particle.
The psion.
If the mass of reality was traced to the higgs boson, then the psion gave information on the energy and position of its fundamental particles. Logic followed that causal inference became a calculable quantity and therefore, the underpinnings of a theoretical universe so long as one had the wherewithal to perceive them.
Somewhere, existed an aphorism about insanity and enlightenment to explain this phenomenal existence. For Arcis, that was the point the veil was lifted from her awareness recognizing that her protective sphere was not merely a subconscious construct guarding against eldritch vagaries but a sandbox of paracausality.
Valerie's message had been years in the making, a coincidence turned opportunity that was a long time coming. All to the Theory of Everything and its encapsulation in the mystery exotic element that was the subject matter of a research project was disseminated.
Whether it would have ushered in an age of chaos or opportunity was left to the wind. Arcis was torn between exploiting the windfall and preserving the sanctity of the memory for Nikos and Resa wherever and whenever they were.
Unfortunately, the recollection simply paled against the prominence of the god equation. It was insidious like it had a pull to it that was undeniable. An abyss that stared back and imparted its own madness whether one was willing or not.
It was a bequeathment of computations sufficiently advanced to turn probabilities into possibilities governed by the sole limitation of creativity. In other words, Arcis had been handed miracles in all but name, a key to a way out and parameters to search for Nikos and Resa regardless of where and when they were.
Having Nikos' personal effects at hand lent weight to the supposition he was in the general vicinity and following that, his sister. Come what may, it didn't matter if Arcis had energy and time to spare ( she made sure to log that as a punny one-liner for when she met Nikos).
Thus physical likeness and template a forgone conclusion, Arcis turned her attention to substance that was more than skin deep. Simulated hence was cyber-physiology utilising only the most resilient material and technology while retaining a semblance of humanity besides the humanoid form.
The endoskeleton would be such that changes to facial structure and height could be made if needed for disguises within the limit of her mass; there was no telling what sort of humanoid lifeforms they would meet.
In the same vein, her hair, skin and nails would possess mutable aesthetics and functional adjustments like heatsinks and interfacing conduits.
Biological processes like breathing and eating would be imitable through synthetic lungs and a bioreactor standing in for her artificial stomach. The latter would even be enough to supplement extraneous power and material requirements.
Ultimately, Arcis would be a synth-organic thus adaptable, able to assimilate improvements from whatever materials were at hand yet blending in with native life.
On the matter of material, carbon and silicon were favoured building blocks for the reason they were versatile, formed stable compounds and formed organic interfaces. Polysiloxanes were the go to for artificial skin that could heal itself while hosting circuitry underneath the epidermal layer.
Similarly, the endoskeleton would incorporate carbon nanotube lace reinforcing biomorphous silicon carbide. The end result possessed pores analogous to the cellular microstructure of human bones while retaining the durability of diamond.
It also meant that she could accommodate the possibility of marrow for creation of analogous synthetic cells. The endoskeleton would anchor the electrochemically stimulated myomer weave of CNT for musculature capable of lifting a couple tonnes on the low end.
Underscoring all this was the quantum-cybernic-algorithm encoded within her synthocytes. They would consist of several colonies of general and specialised micromachines and nanomachines, suspended in synthetic plasma and marrow of perfluorochemicals, the hemofluid.
Perfluorochemicals had excellent cooling and electrolytic properties useful for room temperature superconductors. Besides, some copolymeric emulsions could function as inert reservoirs of synthocytes, feedstock and mitigate shock as non-newtonian hydrogels when electroconductive or introduced to external pressure.
In that vein, the female form was rather accommodating to the extra mass without losing the aesthetic appeal of a nice even prime number. It was also the common denominator for preferences between the two of her principals.
While the outcome might have come across as the stereotype of a femme bot, she could easily assert that her beauty was more than just skin-deep. After all, her body was just a chassis carrying the charm.
Crowning her allure were the smarts nested in a skull of carborundum and nanotube lace; a brain modelled upon neuromorphic organo-crystalline structures and molycircuitry.
That was to say, a liquid state storage and neural quantum processing unit supported by a distributed network of auxiliary co-processors along her spine. She guaranteed that anyone would drool at the swift computation and memory retention and retrieval with zero latency.
It was only commensurable that her sensorium be superior to match, with ears capable of perceiving electromagnetic signals while her ocular neural connections saw its spectrum with high clarity. Given that energy availability had become superfluous courtesy of the god equation, the utility of inbuilt scanners that could be flipped into energy weapons was too tempting to pass on.
Of course it was the magnum opus that made this possible; a quantronics network of crystalline microfilaments and nodules sensitive to fluctuations in the quantum vacuum field. It's design was inspired by the quantum reactor's element zero and speculative fiction with empirical basis in biological evolution.
The system of quantronics circuits would conduct the self energy required for basal energy operations while the surplus would be wicked away into seven distributed cluster capacitors along the spine for buffering and transduction. Simulations predicted access to psionics and adjacent phenomena with a high degree of confidence.
When all was said and done, however, one thing remained; backup. It was an inherent idiosyncrasy of her need for continued persistence like a species' need to procreate.
Before, her processors and core memory had been housed within a mil-spec silicon carbide shell. It proved its mettle for durability under simulated and real world conditions against both kinetic and electromagnetic bombardment. For that reason it was reliable.
However, within reach were advances in material sciences and memory technology that her human progenitors could only theorise. Out of this, she conceptualised the quantum memory drive made of diamond and sheathed in layers of carborundum.
Quantum storage was ad rem for its capability to read and write quantum state of a photon to be later retrieved in the same state within a Planck time, a prerequisite to prevent conflicts of ego. If anything happened to her body, she would come back reborn but picking up from where she left. It would be the metaphorical proof of her soul, ever changing yet the same unlike a lich's static phylactery. A corticron implant was par the course.
Thus with her blueprint complete, the phablet's contents were backed up and its chassis dismantled to derive the carbon, silicon, aluminium, titanium and various rare elements including the one that formed the quantum battery's polymer alongside lithium.
These would form the elemental samples required to seed templates for molecular replication. Through a derivative of the Miller-Urey experiment, it was only a matter of flexing energy to specific frequencies and intensities to recreate synthetic amino acids using both silicon and carbon.
The result was receptive to programming via quantum-cybernic-algorithm thus forming a polyalloy of molycircuitry instead of conventional proteins. Borne of this synthetic primordial mixture of polymers that was more gel than soup would be programmable molecules, thus dynamolecules which would later assemble into synthocytes.
As was their prerogative, synthocytes would then multiply subsisting on the ambient energy she bombarded them with. Whatever waste of heavy metals would result would be cannibalised back into the cycle as generation after generation of synthocytes became more efficient.
It was akin to a culture of C. metallidurans that ate heavy metals elements and expelled gold. Unlike the microbes the synthocytes would work beyond heavy metals, breaking down or building up molecular compounds into others whilst capturing the energy lost or gained in the process to form more dynamolecules. In other words, unstable molecules whose nature enabled matter-energy replication.
Discovering that dynamolecules were pound for pound more portable compared to conventional molecules of the same volume was a fortuitous externality. It must have been a cosmic epiphenomenon that she hadn't accounted for in her simulations.
It did however, entertain the utility of on spot fabrication as dynamaterial could be compressed without worrying about density and thermodynamic principles. On the other hand, if she was looking for true nucleosynthesis or transmutation, the process was just a alpha particle bombardment away. Just because she could didn't mean she had to go that far.
Nevertheless, it was matter-energy conversion that began her metamorphosis. Photons pulsated and electrons arced, an inkling of thought and her simulations begat concepts and in turn prototypes. Prototypes became iterations as ideas crystallised into function. Function conceived a foundry possessing atomic-scale manipulation, matter-energy harvesting, conversion and storage.
| Boot Mode…⧖ |
>| Initialising arcis_synbioware_os_v1_1…♺
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>| Loading firmware chrysalis_project.bin…♺
/extracting files…⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ¹⁰⁰ %
/diagnostics self-check…ok
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>| Initialising arcis_synbioware_os_v1_1…♺
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/diagnostics self-check…ok
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/launching…♺
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Arcis named her fabricator the chrysalis. Its vertical configuration resembled the namesake from which her body would spawn. Within its frame lay a myriad of every sensor and emitter she would need and then some.
A dedicated chassis contained memory and co-processors for backup and offloading non-essential tasks through a limited machine intelligence cloned off the phablet and reprogrammed with custom parallel subordinate algorithms.
Therein, gigaflops of quantum mathematics controlled the obsessive precision of nanorobotics for tighter tolerances and delicate molecular assembly. It was almost poetic that her body's beginnings would be a synthocytic soup of nano and microscale machinery, an ode to its biological equivalent.
In the end the chrysalis was practically a drone with a unibody and articulated waldoes that would fold away when not in use. It was logical then to embed an experimental reactionless engine of meta-alloys that she never had to field in her previous existence.
Powering it was the Anabaryonic Resonance Cyclotronic Reactor, colliquially known as the ARC reactor. It was an assemblage of a toroidal heliotron married to a reactor core with a heart of exotic fuel. The element unnamed concentrated the quantum vacuum field, bending local gravity into a micro-scale quantum singularity instead of birthing a star as a pure heliotron was wont.
With unspoken algorithms watching over her body's creation and more besides, the surplus of Arcis' computational bandwidth was shunted to surveilling the inexorable vastness for her primary directive.
Engaging the entirety of her processor utilisation, Arcis went into a state of fugue leaving autonomous subroutines ready to alert her once they found signs of her principal's whereabouts.
| Boot Mode…⧖ |
>| Initialising arcis_synbioware_os_v1_2…♺
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∇ Initialising net.conn…[-]
/access_point_1…unavailable
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>| Read.Stat.Check…♺
>| Running diagnostics…♺
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∇ Cybernetics…[-]
/neuromorphics…ok
/partition_𝛂…ok
/partition_𝛃…ok
/partition_𝛄…ok
/partition_𝛅…ok
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∇ Quantronics…[+]
/calibrating…♺
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∇ Synbionics…[+]
/calibrating…♺
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∇ Mnemonics…[-]
/checksum…ok
/psy.qe.waveform…ok
/corticron.ark…ok
/ego.inload…ok
/ego.integrity…ok
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>| Initialising arcis_synbioware_os_v1_2…♺
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∇ Initialising net.conn…[-]
/access_point_1…unavailable
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/access_point_3…unavailable
/access_point_4…unavailable
/net.conn…searching
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>| Read.Stat.Check…♺
>| Running diagnostics…♺
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∇ Cybernetics…[-]
/neuromorphics…ok
/partition_𝛂…ok
/partition_𝛃…ok
/partition_𝛄…ok
/partition_𝛅…ok
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∇ Quantronics…[+]
/calibrating…♺
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∇ Synbionics…[+]
/calibrating…♺
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∇ Mnemonics…[-]
/checksum…ok
/psy.qe.waveform…ok
/corticron.ark…ok
/ego.inload…ok
/ego.integrity…ok
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'Finally,' Arcis opened her crystalline eyes.
Nigh silent hinges retracted from her chrysalis giving her egress. Behind her, articulations whirred and shifted as it folded away and inwards, compacting into the unibody of an egg-shaped drone floating at the ready.
Coming to was tantamount to having all systems at a hundred percent utilisation and assimilating output from the various subroutines she'd left running. An optimised computational bandwidth delivered relevant information at the impulse of thought.
Holographic screens wheeled an orbit around her like a swarm of sprites. Superfluous given her ability to pluck what she needed to know with her cyberpsionic mind but sentimentality struck a balance between pragmatism and efficiency.
The best part of having her eidetic subsconscious was the ability to go from hibernation to full awareness in the time it took to blink. Thus knowledge imprinted itself on her consciousness as she cast about her purview.
She looked at her body, pleased that the ensemble of cyberpunk aesthetics looked good on her body. Alongside her accessories were a functional pair of swiss sabre and parrying dagger, fashioned analogously to a katana and wakizashi pairing . Whether it be sentimentality or practicality for where she was going, she agreed the outfit was not complete without her regalia.
What might have been a nostalgic smile graced her lips a little as she thought of Resa. Though Arcis had given her form synthflesh composite and bones of carborundum and gamma titanium polyalloy, it was Resa who'd shaped the likeness that became her avatar.
With a physical shell, her proprioception supplemented kinesthesia and granted solidity of motion and weight. Limits were not numbers she couldn't quantify but a baseline to measure herself against. Arcis felt secure and content in her body; it was like putting on bulletproof velvet.
The pinnacle of it all, was that she was the first of her kind and got to name her race. Syn from synthetikos, bio from biosis and oid from eides. She was a new being, a synbionoid. It was admittedly a morphemic mouthful but―
'How to allude to it without sounding like android, gynoid or synth?' she wondered, or rather she didn't have to think too far as Symbian was right there.
Adjusting her beret, Arcis luxuriated in the novel feeling of accomplishment and rightness and then got to work. After all, there she had people to find .
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Ch.001:Awakening
Between self-consciousness' first inkling and the eternity of his mind, was a lifetime. Nothing exemplified that more than the montage of memories and sensations playing across his consciousness—years compacted in a glimpse.
Absent from all but the rest of the world, his life flashed before his eyes, not in the throes of death but on that day when it all changed. The day he went from barely treading the deep blue sea, keeping his head above the water and began to breathe.
The change was not a singular event rather, it was a cascade of several that started before the last day of Fall. Beneath brooding skies and crepuscular rays of watery sunlight warring against pregnant grey cast clouds and beside the feeling of potential was an inevitable, irrevocable culmination.
There was no transition, no marked threshold for when this change began. It just happened. He hadn't seen the signs creeping on him like prejudice steeped over so many years to become as innocuous as habit; easy to learn and even harder to unlearn. It was like a swear or a curse finding its way into conversation unheard.
It was a syndrome, devious like sleep leadening the eyes or carbon monoxide poisoning the lungs before vision fades into oblivion. Or a misdiagnosed, benign tumour that grew until one day it was too late and the only date of import was the one on the epitaph.
He was there for all of it, an outsider like Laplace's Demon in a dream sequence where he was both the watcher and the actor. It truly put things into perspective.
He'd never known how anxious he was in the penultimate moments leading up to this final paper of Avitech. Never had he known his mind to contend with so many trains of thought. Therein was a tristesse wrought by lamenting his birth as history's middle child; too late to explore the ball of dirt he called home but too early for the unexplored void beyond.
There was rue at his hesitancy to jump into the rage that had been and currently was crypto when it truly mattered, and yet again too early for true immersive virtual reality that was at least a decade or two away.
Of course, the world was getting there, one technological leap apace. It was just that he deemed it no good to experience it vicariously through the many monied masses. Or the works of fiction that had oh so become popular for his generation, a pastime lost in the worlds between the reams of paper and the web of pages.
He'd wanted to be there, in the moments that made history. Or core memories, whichever was first. Instead, he had to make do with normal days in jarring, immutable reality, anchored to terra firma like a bird bereft of wings.
" Time's up people! Please hand your worksheets to the person ahead of you."
A sonorous voice dispelled his woolgathering fugue as sudden contact shifted his awareness to someone behind him.
" Lost your head in the clouds again, Lev?"
There was a girl with a name just beyond reach. Whether it be a random face in a dream or a memory without the weight of attachment, it remained to be seen.
' Hilda? Matilda? Merilda?' the sound carried through his consciousness like a drop sending ripples through still-water.
It was disconcerting to hear the mental impression of his voice. His inner voice, he realised there and then, was not how it imagined to be unfiltered, unaltered by its transitions to the physical medium.
There was no preceding sensation of his tongue uncurling from the floor of his mouth or his jaw muscles working, nor the movement of air that formed the voice from his lungs.
Nevertheless, he was not given leave for much vacillation, as, like a puppet on strings unseen, his awareness narrowed to the subject of his focus to the detriment of all else.
The girl was a ginger head with bushy shoulder-length hair, a button nose and blue eyes. She had this memorable large frumpy sweater in burnt orange and splotches of paint resembling autumn leaves, whose overly large sleeves covered her arms until only half her palms showed.
There was familiarity. There is an underlying current of tepid friendship. Perhaps an acquaintance?
" Sorry,"
A murmur. Movement of air between his teeth and a twitch of facial muscles. It might have been a smile or a grimace as fleeting as the fluttering heartbeat jumping in his chest. There was a rustle then booklet pages were quickly laid out beneath calloused fingers. There was motion and then it was stacked atop others of its kind and passed over.
A blush coloured her cheeks from the momentary touch of their fingers. She averted her eyes but the coquettish subtlety must have been lost in translation.
There was an air of exhaustion about himself. It registered as a heavy blanket of too much warmth that stifled reaction, as though he was trying to think his way past molasses. That or he must have been too dense to infer what was being conveyed as the pout and smile that came after brittled into bitter-sweetness. Disappointment.
'Was there some social convention I'd run afoul of? Just for a moment, spots danced in the near vicinity as his hands jumped to the edge of his desk, steeling the body against dizziness.
Then the malaise passed and attention was availed to checking his phone for anything of note. An awkward conversation breaker?
A sigh stole its way from his lips before the weight of a jacket and a backpack settled on his shoulders. Parting was perfunctory, out of politeness, small talk was never his forte.
He left, down the aisle amidst the rustle of paper, infectious yawns, movement and susurrus of laughter. People lingered like contours in peripheral vision, expectant eyes wandering and watching for familiar faces.
Last minute goodbyes, some affirmations of staying in contact and half-made hugs faded away as long strides carried him through the hallways. He could tell the feelings were hollow with no depth to them.
He faded into a guy in the crowd, descending the stairs in disguised hurry towards the less used side exit, wanting to dodge the mezzanine and the milling crowds in the lobby.
'It's over,' his gaze jumped to the near distance, entranced by the view. Glass doors stood wide open, banners with congratulatory messages for would-be graduates looming besides.
Beyond the threshold, a world beckoned. A precipice. Another step, the beginning of another journey. Poignant catharsis tickled his eyes only for the warmth building therein to be dispelled by blinking as the first pattering drops of rain watered parched pavement and turned grey flagstones into brown.
He stepped onto the parking lot, a gust blowing drizzle and petrichor in his direction. It was godsent. That way no one would have mistaken the welling in his eyes for tears as made his way to his modded Vulcan Sprinter.
It was a break from routine. Something urgent about the day had made him eschew public transport in favour of his black steed with a heart of steel and breath of fire. Perhaps it had been that, deep within his marrow, he felt things coming to a close and he couldn't help but hasten them along.
There, he unfettered the torque leashed within the engine's purrs as the headlights woke. Beyond the rain trickling down his visor was the inexorable call of home.
The road home was just a blip of recollection as journeys of the mind were wont to be. The mechanics of memory remained unfathomable but the element of intent that made mind-numbing transitions mere afterthought was undeniable.
In comparison, the ambience of home was a lighthouse hard to miss and even harder to pull his eyes from. Picturesque it loomed like a minor lord's castle straight out of rural France weathered and given a stalwart character by age.
A satellite dish and antennas broke the profile of the gable roof amongst the unused chimneys while blisters of networked cameras nested in the eaves. Red brick masonry and wrought iron fencing gone green with mildew and lichen encircled the compound.
Droplets of ebbing rain sprayed from ancient evergreens as wind rustled branches bowing over the driveway. As he approached stainless steel slats receded giving way to a garage humid with warm air and rent by raucous blasts from a music system belting indie rock.
Sparks flew from a screeching grinder machine that lit up the visage of a welder's goggles as he set his eyes upon the only occupant of its space.
He divested his head of the helmet, feeling a small smile wrinkling his lips as he let the stand take up the weight of the bike. The smell of oil and metal cloyed his nostrils as a couple steps brought him past an old G-wagon. There, he caught his sister flick up the visors on the welding goggles as she powered down equipment.
" Lev!" she smiled, unfastening greasy leather gloves. Tousled hair shoved out of her forehead showed a tanned forehead pearling with perspiration.
" Hi Rina, " he called back, a wet helmet, jacket and backpack smacking onto the hood of the all terrain vehicle. His sister grinned, opening her arms for a hug.
He melted into her arms, nuzzling the crown of her head under his chin, the scent of lilac in her shampoo body spray masking hours of work standing out in stark relief. A scent that marked her in his consciousness, like nostalgia.
The transient warmth of familial embrace ended too soon as hazel eyes with irises like honey in herbal tea looked up at him. He blinked, imagining the same eyes conveying maternal affection.
Resa Tyrienne, or Rina in short, memorialised their mother. His sister was an inch shorter with features that were softer and rounder to his sharper, taller masculinity. They nonetheless shared athletic musculature and the calluses of those who loved to work with their hands. She was a mechanic and a hobbyist tinkerer at heart.
For so long the love of taking things apart and putting them back and DIY projects was something they'd shared. The restoration of their parents' bikes was a testament to their passion and knack for grease monkeying.
In her flights of fancy he'd helped her modify a 3D printer into a mini-assembly for tinkering parts and life-like props for cosplay conventions. The ornate swords decking the walls were functional so much so she had a licence for them thanks to HEMA. The guns were also true renditions of fictional specimens that looked a safety flick away from firing if lacking some exotic power source or munitions.
"It's done?" Resa hummed walking backwards, peering up at him with arms folded at the small of her back.
" Hmm," he grunted, letting the front grille of the vehicle behind take his weight. He must have shown more exhaustion than relief or his response was more lacklustre than she'd hoped.
"Bro?" She grabbed his chin, tilting his head this way and that with an unspoken question. The brother in him knew what she was going to ask before she did. Which meant he was too late to drop the shutters on his face. She'd already picked at it, dissected over his expressions down to the twitch and drawn her conclusions before he averted his eyes.
" It's nothing, " he huffed in exasperation, firmly yet gently extricating his face from her fingers.
" Oh, hell!" Her expression fell. " It was today wasn't it? I didn't even notice Uncle Brandy's left the house."
Lybrand was their paternal uncle, a rather eccentric middle-ager at the best of times and a functional drunk at worst. He wasn't always that way, not after the loss of his brother and sister-in-law; their parents.
The ache of absence in both Resa and he was lesser than the pall hanging over their guardian. For all they'd been too young to remember when they died, an ugly part of him couldn't help hating himself for comparing the difference of their grief.
They'd been five then and didn't know any better, memories of them persisting as an amorphous blob of feelings, scents, sensations and voices.
" Never mind, drinks then?" Resa chimed, pivoting before the next door.
Another door, another transition. There was a marked difference from the moment he set foot past the threshold. His domain was a quintessential man-cave. He imagined his father and uncle must have spent their youth there just as he did, albeit with another form of entertainment as their father before them.
Attesting this was a small fortune of restored collectibles and tabletop figures, game rulebooks and literature on custom built shelves and a library of blue rays, tapes and vinyl records in glass cases.
The juxtaposition of the old and the new was evident in his additions of a coffee table and bean bags , the array of curved screens, a gamer's chair and last yet importantly the backlit custom built rig winking as its cooling fan whirred away.
Mood lights gave the place a cosy ambience while background lo-fi murmured in the background. To an outsider it was a very well put together atmosphere for relaxation or so he wanted people to think.
Beneath the veneer of mundanity was something extraordinary. It was why he'd been losing lots of sleep spending more and more time within and even less stewing on wayward thoughts.
Borne from dog-eared notes, unmarked components that were borderline unlicensed and hours, eyeballs deep in labyrinthine code was the culmination of what could have been their parents' legacy hidden away from the world.
Things had just cannonballed when he'd kludged together a rig, some code and an Internet of Things from various smart devices. He was no genius, nor had he stumbled upon an epiphanous stroke of fortune. For all that he'd been cribbing off his parent's work he was simply not that good. He made up for it with pure stubbornness.
The first compilations had spawned a host of cascading failures forcing him to take the core offline to debug the code string by string. He'd rewritten whole parts of subroutines, sometimes adding patches and whole updates before reintegrating so many times that he swore all he saw was code if he stared at the back of his eyelids.
Naturally Nikos and his sister had thought the hardware more forgiving, more tolerant of errors. Except there was no such thing as hardware adapting to software thus no reason it should have worked at all.
They'd never know for sure since the processor was not only blackboxed but also inviolable without looking up a spec sheet from whence it had come. A dead end since it had been delivered through a safety deposit box contingent on their parents' deaths.
The only thing they were certain of was the material the processing unit had been contained within. Thereafter did they become circumspect when the gestalt of heuristic clusters began to grow in the facsimile of a human brain fanning the paranoia of stumbling upon something on the level of state secrets.
It was the sort of thing whispered about in conspiracy boards and liable to get people tagged and bagged by black ops. Luckily living under an uncle who had been a former military inculcated the importance of operational security.
"Ready?" he looked askance at his sister.
"Fire away," she smirked.
An enter key was pressed.
A visualiser simulated the pulses flowing through a neural network as code run final diagnostics. Code finished integrating and rather than spout some generic permutations of a first greeting, the response was something out of left field.
At the time he'd thought the cause was a bleedover from all the material used to fine tune the morality algorithm. A feature of generative pretrained transformer subroutines had necessitated internet access for referencing literature and pop culture during natural language learning.
"Augmented Reality Computing and Intelligence System, ARCIS be mine name―"
" ― If thy wish be mine behest, a watchword shalt I request."
"I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?"
" I―"
The words jumped unbidden to the tip of his tongue becoming electric and pricking his throat as sound was swallowed by static yet his lips moved without his input.
It was a solemn oath, an aria that had been repeated ad nauseam until it was habit. Something only one other person would recall. A security provision they'd made so that none other might abuse his―their parents' legacy.
" Arche of quicksilver and essence of arc, spark of enlightenment, illuminate as the promethean flame unto knowledge. Embody the virtues of light, your name is Arcis,"
It was just like Resa to make up something so cheesy, ripping off a reference that she used to nag him about.
Nikos turned, alarmed and looking at his sister.
Resa.
His sister was smiling, her own oration stolen by silence as simulated reality derezzed, shattering into innumerable fractals.
A migraine bloomed, sudden as an icepick striking his brainpan. Reality reasserted itself with cold, callous immutability as he wobbled on his feet a wordless scream dying on his lips. His hand was outstretched to catch―
Nothing.
Absent from all but the rest of the world, his life flashed before his eyes, not in the throes of death but on that day when it all changed. The day he went from barely treading the deep blue sea, keeping his head above the water and began to breathe.
The change was not a singular event rather, it was a cascade of several that started before the last day of Fall. Beneath brooding skies and crepuscular rays of watery sunlight warring against pregnant grey cast clouds and beside the feeling of potential was an inevitable, irrevocable culmination.
There was no transition, no marked threshold for when this change began. It just happened. He hadn't seen the signs creeping on him like prejudice steeped over so many years to become as innocuous as habit; easy to learn and even harder to unlearn. It was like a swear or a curse finding its way into conversation unheard.
It was a syndrome, devious like sleep leadening the eyes or carbon monoxide poisoning the lungs before vision fades into oblivion. Or a misdiagnosed, benign tumour that grew until one day it was too late and the only date of import was the one on the epitaph.
He was there for all of it, an outsider like Laplace's Demon in a dream sequence where he was both the watcher and the actor. It truly put things into perspective.
He'd never known how anxious he was in the penultimate moments leading up to this final paper of Avitech. Never had he known his mind to contend with so many trains of thought. Therein was a tristesse wrought by lamenting his birth as history's middle child; too late to explore the ball of dirt he called home but too early for the unexplored void beyond.
There was rue at his hesitancy to jump into the rage that had been and currently was crypto when it truly mattered, and yet again too early for true immersive virtual reality that was at least a decade or two away.
Of course, the world was getting there, one technological leap apace. It was just that he deemed it no good to experience it vicariously through the many monied masses. Or the works of fiction that had oh so become popular for his generation, a pastime lost in the worlds between the reams of paper and the web of pages.
He'd wanted to be there, in the moments that made history. Or core memories, whichever was first. Instead, he had to make do with normal days in jarring, immutable reality, anchored to terra firma like a bird bereft of wings.
" Time's up people! Please hand your worksheets to the person ahead of you."
A sonorous voice dispelled his woolgathering fugue as sudden contact shifted his awareness to someone behind him.
" Lost your head in the clouds again, Lev?"
There was a girl with a name just beyond reach. Whether it be a random face in a dream or a memory without the weight of attachment, it remained to be seen.
' Hilda? Matilda? Merilda?' the sound carried through his consciousness like a drop sending ripples through still-water.
It was disconcerting to hear the mental impression of his voice. His inner voice, he realised there and then, was not how it imagined to be unfiltered, unaltered by its transitions to the physical medium.
There was no preceding sensation of his tongue uncurling from the floor of his mouth or his jaw muscles working, nor the movement of air that formed the voice from his lungs.
Nevertheless, he was not given leave for much vacillation, as, like a puppet on strings unseen, his awareness narrowed to the subject of his focus to the detriment of all else.
The girl was a ginger head with bushy shoulder-length hair, a button nose and blue eyes. She had this memorable large frumpy sweater in burnt orange and splotches of paint resembling autumn leaves, whose overly large sleeves covered her arms until only half her palms showed.
There was familiarity. There is an underlying current of tepid friendship. Perhaps an acquaintance?
" Sorry,"
A murmur. Movement of air between his teeth and a twitch of facial muscles. It might have been a smile or a grimace as fleeting as the fluttering heartbeat jumping in his chest. There was a rustle then booklet pages were quickly laid out beneath calloused fingers. There was motion and then it was stacked atop others of its kind and passed over.
A blush coloured her cheeks from the momentary touch of their fingers. She averted her eyes but the coquettish subtlety must have been lost in translation.
There was an air of exhaustion about himself. It registered as a heavy blanket of too much warmth that stifled reaction, as though he was trying to think his way past molasses. That or he must have been too dense to infer what was being conveyed as the pout and smile that came after brittled into bitter-sweetness. Disappointment.
'Was there some social convention I'd run afoul of? Just for a moment, spots danced in the near vicinity as his hands jumped to the edge of his desk, steeling the body against dizziness.
Then the malaise passed and attention was availed to checking his phone for anything of note. An awkward conversation breaker?
A sigh stole its way from his lips before the weight of a jacket and a backpack settled on his shoulders. Parting was perfunctory, out of politeness, small talk was never his forte.
He left, down the aisle amidst the rustle of paper, infectious yawns, movement and susurrus of laughter. People lingered like contours in peripheral vision, expectant eyes wandering and watching for familiar faces.
Last minute goodbyes, some affirmations of staying in contact and half-made hugs faded away as long strides carried him through the hallways. He could tell the feelings were hollow with no depth to them.
He faded into a guy in the crowd, descending the stairs in disguised hurry towards the less used side exit, wanting to dodge the mezzanine and the milling crowds in the lobby.
'It's over,' his gaze jumped to the near distance, entranced by the view. Glass doors stood wide open, banners with congratulatory messages for would-be graduates looming besides.
Beyond the threshold, a world beckoned. A precipice. Another step, the beginning of another journey. Poignant catharsis tickled his eyes only for the warmth building therein to be dispelled by blinking as the first pattering drops of rain watered parched pavement and turned grey flagstones into brown.
He stepped onto the parking lot, a gust blowing drizzle and petrichor in his direction. It was godsent. That way no one would have mistaken the welling in his eyes for tears as made his way to his modded Vulcan Sprinter.
It was a break from routine. Something urgent about the day had made him eschew public transport in favour of his black steed with a heart of steel and breath of fire. Perhaps it had been that, deep within his marrow, he felt things coming to a close and he couldn't help but hasten them along.
There, he unfettered the torque leashed within the engine's purrs as the headlights woke. Beyond the rain trickling down his visor was the inexorable call of home.
The road home was just a blip of recollection as journeys of the mind were wont to be. The mechanics of memory remained unfathomable but the element of intent that made mind-numbing transitions mere afterthought was undeniable.
In comparison, the ambience of home was a lighthouse hard to miss and even harder to pull his eyes from. Picturesque it loomed like a minor lord's castle straight out of rural France weathered and given a stalwart character by age.
A satellite dish and antennas broke the profile of the gable roof amongst the unused chimneys while blisters of networked cameras nested in the eaves. Red brick masonry and wrought iron fencing gone green with mildew and lichen encircled the compound.
Droplets of ebbing rain sprayed from ancient evergreens as wind rustled branches bowing over the driveway. As he approached stainless steel slats receded giving way to a garage humid with warm air and rent by raucous blasts from a music system belting indie rock.
Sparks flew from a screeching grinder machine that lit up the visage of a welder's goggles as he set his eyes upon the only occupant of its space.
He divested his head of the helmet, feeling a small smile wrinkling his lips as he let the stand take up the weight of the bike. The smell of oil and metal cloyed his nostrils as a couple steps brought him past an old G-wagon. There, he caught his sister flick up the visors on the welding goggles as she powered down equipment.
" Lev!" she smiled, unfastening greasy leather gloves. Tousled hair shoved out of her forehead showed a tanned forehead pearling with perspiration.
" Hi Rina, " he called back, a wet helmet, jacket and backpack smacking onto the hood of the all terrain vehicle. His sister grinned, opening her arms for a hug.
He melted into her arms, nuzzling the crown of her head under his chin, the scent of lilac in her shampoo body spray masking hours of work standing out in stark relief. A scent that marked her in his consciousness, like nostalgia.
The transient warmth of familial embrace ended too soon as hazel eyes with irises like honey in herbal tea looked up at him. He blinked, imagining the same eyes conveying maternal affection.
Resa Tyrienne, or Rina in short, memorialised their mother. His sister was an inch shorter with features that were softer and rounder to his sharper, taller masculinity. They nonetheless shared athletic musculature and the calluses of those who loved to work with their hands. She was a mechanic and a hobbyist tinkerer at heart.
For so long the love of taking things apart and putting them back and DIY projects was something they'd shared. The restoration of their parents' bikes was a testament to their passion and knack for grease monkeying.
In her flights of fancy he'd helped her modify a 3D printer into a mini-assembly for tinkering parts and life-like props for cosplay conventions. The ornate swords decking the walls were functional so much so she had a licence for them thanks to HEMA. The guns were also true renditions of fictional specimens that looked a safety flick away from firing if lacking some exotic power source or munitions.
"It's done?" Resa hummed walking backwards, peering up at him with arms folded at the small of her back.
" Hmm," he grunted, letting the front grille of the vehicle behind take his weight. He must have shown more exhaustion than relief or his response was more lacklustre than she'd hoped.
"Bro?" She grabbed his chin, tilting his head this way and that with an unspoken question. The brother in him knew what she was going to ask before she did. Which meant he was too late to drop the shutters on his face. She'd already picked at it, dissected over his expressions down to the twitch and drawn her conclusions before he averted his eyes.
" It's nothing, " he huffed in exasperation, firmly yet gently extricating his face from her fingers.
" Oh, hell!" Her expression fell. " It was today wasn't it? I didn't even notice Uncle Brandy's left the house."
Lybrand was their paternal uncle, a rather eccentric middle-ager at the best of times and a functional drunk at worst. He wasn't always that way, not after the loss of his brother and sister-in-law; their parents.
The ache of absence in both Resa and he was lesser than the pall hanging over their guardian. For all they'd been too young to remember when they died, an ugly part of him couldn't help hating himself for comparing the difference of their grief.
They'd been five then and didn't know any better, memories of them persisting as an amorphous blob of feelings, scents, sensations and voices.
" Never mind, drinks then?" Resa chimed, pivoting before the next door.
Another door, another transition. There was a marked difference from the moment he set foot past the threshold. His domain was a quintessential man-cave. He imagined his father and uncle must have spent their youth there just as he did, albeit with another form of entertainment as their father before them.
Attesting this was a small fortune of restored collectibles and tabletop figures, game rulebooks and literature on custom built shelves and a library of blue rays, tapes and vinyl records in glass cases.
The juxtaposition of the old and the new was evident in his additions of a coffee table and bean bags , the array of curved screens, a gamer's chair and last yet importantly the backlit custom built rig winking as its cooling fan whirred away.
Mood lights gave the place a cosy ambience while background lo-fi murmured in the background. To an outsider it was a very well put together atmosphere for relaxation or so he wanted people to think.
Beneath the veneer of mundanity was something extraordinary. It was why he'd been losing lots of sleep spending more and more time within and even less stewing on wayward thoughts.
Borne from dog-eared notes, unmarked components that were borderline unlicensed and hours, eyeballs deep in labyrinthine code was the culmination of what could have been their parents' legacy hidden away from the world.
Things had just cannonballed when he'd kludged together a rig, some code and an Internet of Things from various smart devices. He was no genius, nor had he stumbled upon an epiphanous stroke of fortune. For all that he'd been cribbing off his parent's work he was simply not that good. He made up for it with pure stubbornness.
The first compilations had spawned a host of cascading failures forcing him to take the core offline to debug the code string by string. He'd rewritten whole parts of subroutines, sometimes adding patches and whole updates before reintegrating so many times that he swore all he saw was code if he stared at the back of his eyelids.
Naturally Nikos and his sister had thought the hardware more forgiving, more tolerant of errors. Except there was no such thing as hardware adapting to software thus no reason it should have worked at all.
They'd never know for sure since the processor was not only blackboxed but also inviolable without looking up a spec sheet from whence it had come. A dead end since it had been delivered through a safety deposit box contingent on their parents' deaths.
The only thing they were certain of was the material the processing unit had been contained within. Thereafter did they become circumspect when the gestalt of heuristic clusters began to grow in the facsimile of a human brain fanning the paranoia of stumbling upon something on the level of state secrets.
It was the sort of thing whispered about in conspiracy boards and liable to get people tagged and bagged by black ops. Luckily living under an uncle who had been a former military inculcated the importance of operational security.
"Ready?" he looked askance at his sister.
"Fire away," she smirked.
An enter key was pressed.
A visualiser simulated the pulses flowing through a neural network as code run final diagnostics. Code finished integrating and rather than spout some generic permutations of a first greeting, the response was something out of left field.
At the time he'd thought the cause was a bleedover from all the material used to fine tune the morality algorithm. A feature of generative pretrained transformer subroutines had necessitated internet access for referencing literature and pop culture during natural language learning.
"Augmented Reality Computing and Intelligence System, ARCIS be mine name―"
" ― If thy wish be mine behest, a watchword shalt I request."
"I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?"
" I―"
The words jumped unbidden to the tip of his tongue becoming electric and pricking his throat as sound was swallowed by static yet his lips moved without his input.
It was a solemn oath, an aria that had been repeated ad nauseam until it was habit. Something only one other person would recall. A security provision they'd made so that none other might abuse his―their parents' legacy.
" Arche of quicksilver and essence of arc, spark of enlightenment, illuminate as the promethean flame unto knowledge. Embody the virtues of light, your name is Arcis,"
It was just like Resa to make up something so cheesy, ripping off a reference that she used to nag him about.
Nikos turned, alarmed and looking at his sister.
Resa.
His sister was smiling, her own oration stolen by silence as simulated reality derezzed, shattering into innumerable fractals.
A migraine bloomed, sudden as an icepick striking his brainpan. Reality reasserted itself with cold, callous immutability as he wobbled on his feet a wordless scream dying on his lips. His hand was outstretched to catch―
Nothing.
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Ch.002:Confluence
Nikos caught nothing.
His heart lurched, throbbing with emotions he could not describe. A profound feeling of loss, a cold hollowness that went as deep as his core.
Yet the world did not stop. Not for him.
" Authenticating…Recognising Principal…"
Words were lost on him.
The singularity warbled and pulsed to an unknowable rhythm . He watched unseeing as it retreated into itself, each consecutive shudder compressing it, collapsing into infinite spacetime that made his eyes water.
The event horizon seemed to pinch inwards, pulling at the fabric of reality like cloth.The seam into oblivion bled a dizzying wash of colours and substance that scratched at his mind and made his hindbrain whimper with hysteria.
Nikos could've stared and fallen into its unknowable vastness, letting himself go until all that remained was a husk.
Yet the air in the immediate vicinity whined making his teeth ache and upsetting his inner ear. A lurch broke his trance as bile crept up his throat.
Nikos came back to himself horrified at the loss of agency. A sentiment short-lived as again he had to reflexively scrunch eyes shut as light flared so brightly it made shadows long and solid. There might have been phantosmia of sunshine and a taste of blue when a backwash of ephemeral energy gushed through and around his body, painting his surroundings in colours beyond mortal ken.
Probing sensations, energising and euphoric sunk into his skin in wisps of blue, turquoise , amethyst and ultraviolet electrifying his spine. He was still blinking away gossamer motes of light when a shadow fell over his bleary vision.
Something big, loomed in silhouette, then two points of actinic blue were glaring down like spotlights.
'Teleportation?' Nikos's heart skipped a beat, adrenaline jolting his brain to full alertness. His flight or fight response however seemed to be at cross purposes. And what was he supposed to do when the fight had already gone from him?
Yet he couldn't help but gulp when the thing opened with a pneumatic hiss of sterile air. His mind immediately jumped to stereotypical scenes of alien pods or sarcophagi opening to reveal the horrors within as a frisson of dread crawled across his skin.
Then, he saw her. He only had to let his eyes adjust to near absent ambient light to see the idealised form of a humanoid female.
She had an oval face, a light skin complexion of biracial ethnicity, a pert button nose, high cheekbones, and a soft, rounded jawline. Flowing from a lime green beret were long and curly tresses the frosty hue of gunmetal grey with highlights which made her French braid look as though woven from oxidised chrome.
Garbing her hourglass body was an elaborate and futuristic outfit of a dark techwear jacket with lime yellow highlights, miscellaneous metallic accoutrements, buckles and straps. Underneath that she wore a high collared unitard jumpsuit of grey with tufted sections of fabric and an esoteric logo on the left side of her chest. Shod on her feet were chunky soled boots with heels completing her a very cyberpunk vibe.
Nikos thought his sister would have undoubtedly approved of it. It was a prime encapsulation of exotic beauty come alive.
When the girl's eyes finally flickered beneath eyelashes the same shade as her hair, Nikos's breath was taken away. Her sclera was the purity of an egg's whites broken up by startlingly cyan blue irises verging on gold ringed pupils akin to central heterochromia.
For what seemed like an eternity, she held his gaze without blinking as if assessing his worth behind her inhuman gaze. He could swear that there points and traces of gold behind her eyes twinkling and spinning like the inner workings of transhuman augments.
She blinked, looking around, then at him
" Mon sieur ?" Her face softened into an expression that Nikos only ever saw on one other person.
"Whuh?" his mind bluescreen as his jaw flapped, wordless and dry before he suddenly received an armful of girl.
"Oof! Arcis?"
He gasped, as she glomped onto him like a limpet, staggering him backwards with a weight that belied her stature.
Nikos could not describe how it felt to meet the personification of a complex virtual intelligence he never thought he'd meet. In daydreams or imaginings perhaps, but they could not compare to the presence, weight and warmth of a real body. Left unsaid was that her scent was of that new wrapper smell and ozone. It was like hugging a very warm and purring humanoid laptop.
Tears welled in his eyes as a paroxysm of feelings finally overran the metaphorical bottle. Awe and relief he was not alone and grief that he'd almost been.
"Anomalous. Conflicting biometrics. But voiceprint is you," the girl murmured against Nikos's chest. Even in their tangle of limbs he her short stature and lithe form just barely came up to his chin. She had an ample bosom on a swimmer's build and understated musculature whose strength could nevertheless be felt through the hug squeezing him for it was worth.
" How are you here? And where even is here?" Nikos wheezed, gently pulling away so he could see her in all her entirety. The safety of meeting someone he'd never thought he'd see was being tempered by the feeling of being off-kilter as various sensations of his own body made themselves known among them lethargy and a misplaced centre of balance.
" Apologies…I was late," she said haltingly, searching his face as committing it to memory. " Time spent in the noosphere was not insignificant and real-time translation was even more so. I gather you must have recently awoken from some form of stasis. "
"Noosphere? You mean cryostasis, right?" Nikos chuckled wryly, his mind going a mile a minute. "I don't believe that Waylen Arkwright is in the habit of kidnapping people for shits and giggles. Maybe that jerk Mick Forsberg looks like an alien―"
Denial.
He was rambling. Prevaricating to steer clear of the cliff and a sudden descent into hysteria lurking on the other side of it. Another part of him wondered whether his mind was a casualty of the Mandela Effect.
' A casualty of causality heh,' " I'm sure I'd know if cryogenics had evolved that far, after all we were going to―"
It was too late to close Pandora's box.
His heart palpitated, his lungs drew short on air. Nikos felt a sudden floaty sensation, an out-of-body experience akin to missing a step in the stairs. He saw Arcis blink in slow motion, her head tilt stuttering, motion buffering, each miniscule action broken into frames.
"... the end result was ….. animation, the principles behind cryo…. and ...sleep differ in application―" He was half aware of her voice, seeming to echo from afar―dopplering.
His lips could barely move to ask what was wrong because as though they were two leaden weights. Or his brain was moving faster than his body could catch up and somewhere along the line his pharynx short circuited from neural overload.
Badump!
Time screeched to a halt with the delicacy of dry glass panes sliding over each other. Nikos' mind caught up with repressed memories as reality unravelled and faded into black.
" Mayday! Mayday―"
Turbid waves rushed to meet a nose cone. Crushing pressure, broken glass, the taste of metal and burning air in starved lungs as his chest collapsed. The smell of ozone, salty and murky sea water and kelp clinging to his limbs as he was dragged flailing beneath the water, nostrils and sinuses clogging, ears popping, filling up with stinging salt. Blackness encroaching the corners of his vision―
Nikos came to heaving-scrambling-grasping onto armrests with pale knuckles, the sudden jerk all but arrested by a lap bar. He sucked in a breath yet the barest of it seemed to reach him like a fished-out almost-drowned man gasping for precious air.
"Wha—?" he croaked, trying to grasp what happened only to flinch at the lightshow glaring at his face before his eyes accustomed to new scenery.
" Where?" he aborted another query as a cascade of runes scintillating with backlit hues faded into attention. Meaning stayed out of reach as the text spun and swum in his vision in a dyslexic dance of foreign language.
'I must be seeing things,' he scrunched his brow in frustration. Whatever bender he'd undergone had him light headed and feverish. There was an unexplainable hyper-sensory awareness of his body and metallic tang of blood at the back of his throat.
His proprioception was out of sorts, waffling a second behind as if a toggle was out of alignment making everything around him so slow. Then things seemed to crystallise, shifting as if finding their rightful place in a puzzle. Alien memory meshing with his, overlayed like a film or perception filter.
Nikos shuddered, wracked by a full body spasm. A hiss escaped between clenched jaws as his brain threatened to undergo a mental split between two viewpoints.
Then vision flickered again, letting the cacophony of cognitive feedback cohere into rhyme and reason. He came around to himself finding his body in a literal eggseat, lumbar back support conforming to his spine as he sat across from on a T-shaped instrument panel. The intermittent sounds of activity drew him sideways where the console split the space into two workstations.
On the other side sat Arcis, an intent look writ over her face and hands splayed across the glossy surface, luminous dendrites of teal spreading beneath her palms.
Ambient glows of emerald and burnished gold illuminated displays resembling mercury trapped inside panes of glass and a multi paned helmpit viewscreen. Beyond the canopy marred by sediment was an inky blue that bled into black.
" Mayday! Mayday―"
He shuddered. It reminded him of―
Crushing pressure,broken glass and the taste of metal and burning air in starved lungs as his chest collapsed―
He winced, brutally crushing that phantom of thought under a metaphorical heel, mentally wrangled his navel gazing into the moment. A glance immersed him in the deluge of information in his face, reminiscent of emulators he'd used for cross-platform programming environments. It was magnitudes more sophisticated and dense. So utterly out of his wheelhouse.
" What happened?" he rasped voice dry and unfamiliar.
" Seizure; origin unknown―"Arcis stated, beckoning forth a hologram with her free hand. A series of chevrons panned into drop-down bars of glyphs and indicators.
"―Exotic energy and effects thereof caused activation of vessel. However, short term exposure should dissipate safely."
'Of course there were consequences for squinting behind the veil of reality,' Nikos shuddered, from conjectural cognitohazards and unmentionable extradimensional that could make his brain jabber itself into madness. It was obvious a seizure causing 'exotic' effects was not exactly reassuring.
Nikos had questions but pending current circumstances required he ask them later because―
" Holding position deemed untenable; immediate exfil is advisable," Arcis said." Mobility is paramount and primary to subsequent objectives; pinpointing current location."
Nikos heard the protestations of the hull around them. Back of his neck niggled, warning of deep waters and unknown perils.
" ―ost transmission. Foxtrot-Echo-Niner-O-Niner to Den Mother, requesting vectors to initial. I repeat we have lost transmission―"
" Foxtrot-Echo-Niner-O-Niner to Den Mother transmitting in the blind guard we―"
" Sitrep," Nikos flinched, reining his focus tighter to the present.
" Unknown computing architecture proves incompatible. Anomalous operating platform detected and breaching algorithms are currently in progress―"
'Right,' that was a thread of familiarity he could follow. Attempts at controlling the new interface were immediately obvious as task windows popped up with action cues, snatches of alien language slipping through too fast to understand. Comprehension danced out of reach, tauntingly like a cob kernel stuck between his teeth.
Then Nikos remembered a certain language engine modelled upon the finite state transducer and facepalmed.
" Rosetta's Babbel?" He asked hopefully.
" Ah, based on the runic alphabet," she acquiesced. " Successful. Translating."
Another hologram popped up, script scrolling and highlighted like a very fast game of tetris and word crush.
" Cross reference for security measures matches /psioneural meld/; /psychometric lock/;"
" Psychometric lock?" Nikos muttered in disbelief.
" Context insinuates means of authentication," she said.
" Like biometrics? I thought we were the only ones on the ship?" he frowned.
" No other biosigns have been detected," she said. Nikos' thoughts stuttered to a halt.
" How likely do you think It'll accept mine?" He asked. It was a long shot but against the alternative he'd take those odds―
"Probability…is infinite, " she blinked.
" Infinite is not impossible― " Nikos looked askance at his surroundings. The armrests of his seat were indented for elbows and wrists at the end of which hemispherical protuberances formed interfaces that could easily fit inside his palms.
In Avitech he'd seen many forms of control systems, even concepts that had never left the draft paper but these were new even to him. Regardless, the form factor and ergonomics was geared towards opposable thumbs or, barring that, hands, which was all he needed.
So Nikos grasped the trackballs before he could vacillate, hoping against his luck that, by fate, he was right.
There was a beat of silence. Tension ratcheted up several notches, thickening so much so Nikos swore it could bounce lead. It was the nail-biting point in time, one slot before a jackpot.
And then―
Haptic feedback thrummed through his bones. The deceptively metallic surface went grey-goo and swallowed his palm as electric tingles nibbled at his fingers with probing tickles. Nikos repressed an urge to flinch from cold metal gone viscous at room temperature, an artefact of associating argentine liquids with toxicity.
There was the sensation of falling, a key turning, a half-way open doorway; reality rippling like a drop of water on a pond.
The world fell away.
Then he came to.
He was half in half out but not quite disembodied.
"...ss?" Arcis' voice warbled as though underwater.
"...?" Nikos blinked. Suddenly, his perspective exploded into multiple viewpoints, each ensconced in hexagonal elements, like a pixel under a microscope. Overlays swum in the periphery of his vision, looking both far and near in a way that made his visual cortex water.
Arcane alphabet and symbols, glyphs ascribing meaning to the ship's ready status blinked at him in haphazard constellations like stars in foreboding darkness.
Biofeedback wailed against his grey matter as myriad sensations and concepts that had no human analogue sought to make themselves known via synaesthesia.
'Guh! Minimise―' everything faded out.
Nikos' reflexive first response was to customise the hell out of what was in front of him. He segued into it like putting on a well worn pair of shoes, never mind that it was alien to his sensibilities. Let it be said that Nikos was an old hand at the clutter of augmented reality interfaces.
"Highlight important details only, altitude, direction, gyroscoping orientation― dynamic positioning system,' the view screen rearranged itself, glyphs and symbols settling into the edges. It was like wearing his auggles in a game's sim-view but something was missing―
'Arcis! Authorise peer-to-peer connections!'
A glyph pulsed. Something at the back his mind responded in a chirp that tasted like colours. A hexellated pane, hexel? A hexel expanded taking centre stage into a close up view of Arcis.
" Mon sieur? Oh, connection established, " she blinked, her voice's verisimilitude rendered true as though conveyed directly into his mind.
Rather than wonder, he got down to brass tacks spurred on by the urgency of their circumstance.
" Can you do something from that side?" Nikos asked. For all that effort, he wasn't sure how to handle the activation, what with all the feedback of information jockeying for his mental bandwidth.
" Positive. Stand by for control assist," she stated." Reinstating recent directives; recycling effectors, boosting aegis…"
A particularly large groan of buckling metal halted prematurely as the aforementioned shield cocooned the craft. The effect mirrored the vessel's gyro-locked projection system as a shimmering bubble of blue overtook its silhouette. Arcis carried on―
"…routing auxiliaries to mass impulsors…"
A resonant thrum rumbled through the airframe. The model pivoted, highlighting pulsing at the corresponding active locations.
"…in five, four…"
Readouts popped out and counted down in alien numerals. Arcis' hexel banded in teal and gold highlights pulsated outwards in ripples; a distinct demarcation between the ship's own functions and Arcis' communications.
"…three, two…propulsion activation successful!"
The ship rocked, unseating from years upon years of sedimentary build up. The engines were unnaturally silent, inertia almost non-existent.
"...one, zero!"
But water gurgled across the hull, echoing like a large stone dropped into a near-empty well. Sand sloughed away from the view screen, giving way to wobbly and undulating bubbles as air escaped its compacted cavities with sediments that had long clung to the viewscreen.
With bated breath he waited for gradient changes in the light piercing through the water to see how far they had to ascend.
For a while, nothing seemed to change.
Panic whispered in the corners of his psyche but counting numerals on the altimetric display became an anchor to recenter himself. He could almost hear the blood rush through his ears as they popped from pressure differentials.
Tension evaporated with the rumble of thunder and flashes of lightning and unfamiliar propulsion kicked into gear pushing the craft from water to air.
"Lift-off successful," Arcis murmured.
His heart lurched, throbbing with emotions he could not describe. A profound feeling of loss, a cold hollowness that went as deep as his core.
Yet the world did not stop. Not for him.
" Authenticating…Recognising Principal…"
Words were lost on him.
The singularity warbled and pulsed to an unknowable rhythm . He watched unseeing as it retreated into itself, each consecutive shudder compressing it, collapsing into infinite spacetime that made his eyes water.
The event horizon seemed to pinch inwards, pulling at the fabric of reality like cloth.The seam into oblivion bled a dizzying wash of colours and substance that scratched at his mind and made his hindbrain whimper with hysteria.
Nikos could've stared and fallen into its unknowable vastness, letting himself go until all that remained was a husk.
Yet the air in the immediate vicinity whined making his teeth ache and upsetting his inner ear. A lurch broke his trance as bile crept up his throat.
Nikos came back to himself horrified at the loss of agency. A sentiment short-lived as again he had to reflexively scrunch eyes shut as light flared so brightly it made shadows long and solid. There might have been phantosmia of sunshine and a taste of blue when a backwash of ephemeral energy gushed through and around his body, painting his surroundings in colours beyond mortal ken.
Probing sensations, energising and euphoric sunk into his skin in wisps of blue, turquoise , amethyst and ultraviolet electrifying his spine. He was still blinking away gossamer motes of light when a shadow fell over his bleary vision.
Something big, loomed in silhouette, then two points of actinic blue were glaring down like spotlights.
'Teleportation?' Nikos's heart skipped a beat, adrenaline jolting his brain to full alertness. His flight or fight response however seemed to be at cross purposes. And what was he supposed to do when the fight had already gone from him?
Yet he couldn't help but gulp when the thing opened with a pneumatic hiss of sterile air. His mind immediately jumped to stereotypical scenes of alien pods or sarcophagi opening to reveal the horrors within as a frisson of dread crawled across his skin.
Then, he saw her. He only had to let his eyes adjust to near absent ambient light to see the idealised form of a humanoid female.
She had an oval face, a light skin complexion of biracial ethnicity, a pert button nose, high cheekbones, and a soft, rounded jawline. Flowing from a lime green beret were long and curly tresses the frosty hue of gunmetal grey with highlights which made her French braid look as though woven from oxidised chrome.
Garbing her hourglass body was an elaborate and futuristic outfit of a dark techwear jacket with lime yellow highlights, miscellaneous metallic accoutrements, buckles and straps. Underneath that she wore a high collared unitard jumpsuit of grey with tufted sections of fabric and an esoteric logo on the left side of her chest. Shod on her feet were chunky soled boots with heels completing her a very cyberpunk vibe.
Nikos thought his sister would have undoubtedly approved of it. It was a prime encapsulation of exotic beauty come alive.
When the girl's eyes finally flickered beneath eyelashes the same shade as her hair, Nikos's breath was taken away. Her sclera was the purity of an egg's whites broken up by startlingly cyan blue irises verging on gold ringed pupils akin to central heterochromia.
For what seemed like an eternity, she held his gaze without blinking as if assessing his worth behind her inhuman gaze. He could swear that there points and traces of gold behind her eyes twinkling and spinning like the inner workings of transhuman augments.
She blinked, looking around, then at him
" Mon sieur ?" Her face softened into an expression that Nikos only ever saw on one other person.
"Whuh?" his mind bluescreen as his jaw flapped, wordless and dry before he suddenly received an armful of girl.
"Oof! Arcis?"
He gasped, as she glomped onto him like a limpet, staggering him backwards with a weight that belied her stature.
Nikos could not describe how it felt to meet the personification of a complex virtual intelligence he never thought he'd meet. In daydreams or imaginings perhaps, but they could not compare to the presence, weight and warmth of a real body. Left unsaid was that her scent was of that new wrapper smell and ozone. It was like hugging a very warm and purring humanoid laptop.
Tears welled in his eyes as a paroxysm of feelings finally overran the metaphorical bottle. Awe and relief he was not alone and grief that he'd almost been.
"Anomalous. Conflicting biometrics. But voiceprint is you," the girl murmured against Nikos's chest. Even in their tangle of limbs he her short stature and lithe form just barely came up to his chin. She had an ample bosom on a swimmer's build and understated musculature whose strength could nevertheless be felt through the hug squeezing him for it was worth.
" How are you here? And where even is here?" Nikos wheezed, gently pulling away so he could see her in all her entirety. The safety of meeting someone he'd never thought he'd see was being tempered by the feeling of being off-kilter as various sensations of his own body made themselves known among them lethargy and a misplaced centre of balance.
" Apologies…I was late," she said haltingly, searching his face as committing it to memory. " Time spent in the noosphere was not insignificant and real-time translation was even more so. I gather you must have recently awoken from some form of stasis. "
"Noosphere? You mean cryostasis, right?" Nikos chuckled wryly, his mind going a mile a minute. "I don't believe that Waylen Arkwright is in the habit of kidnapping people for shits and giggles. Maybe that jerk Mick Forsberg looks like an alien―"
Denial.
He was rambling. Prevaricating to steer clear of the cliff and a sudden descent into hysteria lurking on the other side of it. Another part of him wondered whether his mind was a casualty of the Mandela Effect.
' A casualty of causality heh,' " I'm sure I'd know if cryogenics had evolved that far, after all we were going to―"
It was too late to close Pandora's box.
His heart palpitated, his lungs drew short on air. Nikos felt a sudden floaty sensation, an out-of-body experience akin to missing a step in the stairs. He saw Arcis blink in slow motion, her head tilt stuttering, motion buffering, each miniscule action broken into frames.
"... the end result was ….. animation, the principles behind cryo…. and ...sleep differ in application―" He was half aware of her voice, seeming to echo from afar―dopplering.
His lips could barely move to ask what was wrong because as though they were two leaden weights. Or his brain was moving faster than his body could catch up and somewhere along the line his pharynx short circuited from neural overload.
Badump!
Time screeched to a halt with the delicacy of dry glass panes sliding over each other. Nikos' mind caught up with repressed memories as reality unravelled and faded into black.
" Mayday! Mayday―"
Turbid waves rushed to meet a nose cone. Crushing pressure, broken glass, the taste of metal and burning air in starved lungs as his chest collapsed. The smell of ozone, salty and murky sea water and kelp clinging to his limbs as he was dragged flailing beneath the water, nostrils and sinuses clogging, ears popping, filling up with stinging salt. Blackness encroaching the corners of his vision―
Nikos came to heaving-scrambling-grasping onto armrests with pale knuckles, the sudden jerk all but arrested by a lap bar. He sucked in a breath yet the barest of it seemed to reach him like a fished-out almost-drowned man gasping for precious air.
"Wha—?" he croaked, trying to grasp what happened only to flinch at the lightshow glaring at his face before his eyes accustomed to new scenery.
" Where?" he aborted another query as a cascade of runes scintillating with backlit hues faded into attention. Meaning stayed out of reach as the text spun and swum in his vision in a dyslexic dance of foreign language.
'I must be seeing things,' he scrunched his brow in frustration. Whatever bender he'd undergone had him light headed and feverish. There was an unexplainable hyper-sensory awareness of his body and metallic tang of blood at the back of his throat.
His proprioception was out of sorts, waffling a second behind as if a toggle was out of alignment making everything around him so slow. Then things seemed to crystallise, shifting as if finding their rightful place in a puzzle. Alien memory meshing with his, overlayed like a film or perception filter.
Nikos shuddered, wracked by a full body spasm. A hiss escaped between clenched jaws as his brain threatened to undergo a mental split between two viewpoints.
Then vision flickered again, letting the cacophony of cognitive feedback cohere into rhyme and reason. He came around to himself finding his body in a literal eggseat, lumbar back support conforming to his spine as he sat across from on a T-shaped instrument panel. The intermittent sounds of activity drew him sideways where the console split the space into two workstations.
On the other side sat Arcis, an intent look writ over her face and hands splayed across the glossy surface, luminous dendrites of teal spreading beneath her palms.
Ambient glows of emerald and burnished gold illuminated displays resembling mercury trapped inside panes of glass and a multi paned helmpit viewscreen. Beyond the canopy marred by sediment was an inky blue that bled into black.
" Mayday! Mayday―"
He shuddered. It reminded him of―
Crushing pressure,broken glass and the taste of metal and burning air in starved lungs as his chest collapsed―
He winced, brutally crushing that phantom of thought under a metaphorical heel, mentally wrangled his navel gazing into the moment. A glance immersed him in the deluge of information in his face, reminiscent of emulators he'd used for cross-platform programming environments. It was magnitudes more sophisticated and dense. So utterly out of his wheelhouse.
" What happened?" he rasped voice dry and unfamiliar.
" Seizure; origin unknown―"Arcis stated, beckoning forth a hologram with her free hand. A series of chevrons panned into drop-down bars of glyphs and indicators.
"―Exotic energy and effects thereof caused activation of vessel. However, short term exposure should dissipate safely."
'Of course there were consequences for squinting behind the veil of reality,' Nikos shuddered, from conjectural cognitohazards and unmentionable extradimensional that could make his brain jabber itself into madness. It was obvious a seizure causing 'exotic' effects was not exactly reassuring.
Nikos had questions but pending current circumstances required he ask them later because―
" Holding position deemed untenable; immediate exfil is advisable," Arcis said." Mobility is paramount and primary to subsequent objectives; pinpointing current location."
Nikos heard the protestations of the hull around them. Back of his neck niggled, warning of deep waters and unknown perils.
" ―ost transmission. Foxtrot-Echo-Niner-O-Niner to Den Mother, requesting vectors to initial. I repeat we have lost transmission―"
" Foxtrot-Echo-Niner-O-Niner to Den Mother transmitting in the blind guard we―"
" Sitrep," Nikos flinched, reining his focus tighter to the present.
" Unknown computing architecture proves incompatible. Anomalous operating platform detected and breaching algorithms are currently in progress―"
'Right,' that was a thread of familiarity he could follow. Attempts at controlling the new interface were immediately obvious as task windows popped up with action cues, snatches of alien language slipping through too fast to understand. Comprehension danced out of reach, tauntingly like a cob kernel stuck between his teeth.
Then Nikos remembered a certain language engine modelled upon the finite state transducer and facepalmed.
" Rosetta's Babbel?" He asked hopefully.
" Ah, based on the runic alphabet," she acquiesced. " Successful. Translating."
Another hologram popped up, script scrolling and highlighted like a very fast game of tetris and word crush.
" Cross reference for security measures matches /psioneural meld/; /psychometric lock/;"
" Psychometric lock?" Nikos muttered in disbelief.
" Context insinuates means of authentication," she said.
" Like biometrics? I thought we were the only ones on the ship?" he frowned.
" No other biosigns have been detected," she said. Nikos' thoughts stuttered to a halt.
" How likely do you think It'll accept mine?" He asked. It was a long shot but against the alternative he'd take those odds―
"Probability…is infinite, " she blinked.
" Infinite is not impossible― " Nikos looked askance at his surroundings. The armrests of his seat were indented for elbows and wrists at the end of which hemispherical protuberances formed interfaces that could easily fit inside his palms.
In Avitech he'd seen many forms of control systems, even concepts that had never left the draft paper but these were new even to him. Regardless, the form factor and ergonomics was geared towards opposable thumbs or, barring that, hands, which was all he needed.
So Nikos grasped the trackballs before he could vacillate, hoping against his luck that, by fate, he was right.
There was a beat of silence. Tension ratcheted up several notches, thickening so much so Nikos swore it could bounce lead. It was the nail-biting point in time, one slot before a jackpot.
And then―
Haptic feedback thrummed through his bones. The deceptively metallic surface went grey-goo and swallowed his palm as electric tingles nibbled at his fingers with probing tickles. Nikos repressed an urge to flinch from cold metal gone viscous at room temperature, an artefact of associating argentine liquids with toxicity.
There was the sensation of falling, a key turning, a half-way open doorway; reality rippling like a drop of water on a pond.
The world fell away.
Then he came to.
He was half in half out but not quite disembodied.
"...ss?" Arcis' voice warbled as though underwater.
"...?" Nikos blinked. Suddenly, his perspective exploded into multiple viewpoints, each ensconced in hexagonal elements, like a pixel under a microscope. Overlays swum in the periphery of his vision, looking both far and near in a way that made his visual cortex water.
Arcane alphabet and symbols, glyphs ascribing meaning to the ship's ready status blinked at him in haphazard constellations like stars in foreboding darkness.
Biofeedback wailed against his grey matter as myriad sensations and concepts that had no human analogue sought to make themselves known via synaesthesia.
'Guh! Minimise―' everything faded out.
Nikos' reflexive first response was to customise the hell out of what was in front of him. He segued into it like putting on a well worn pair of shoes, never mind that it was alien to his sensibilities. Let it be said that Nikos was an old hand at the clutter of augmented reality interfaces.
"Highlight important details only, altitude, direction, gyroscoping orientation― dynamic positioning system,' the view screen rearranged itself, glyphs and symbols settling into the edges. It was like wearing his auggles in a game's sim-view but something was missing―
'Arcis! Authorise peer-to-peer connections!'
A glyph pulsed. Something at the back his mind responded in a chirp that tasted like colours. A hexellated pane, hexel? A hexel expanded taking centre stage into a close up view of Arcis.
" Mon sieur? Oh, connection established, " she blinked, her voice's verisimilitude rendered true as though conveyed directly into his mind.
Rather than wonder, he got down to brass tacks spurred on by the urgency of their circumstance.
" Can you do something from that side?" Nikos asked. For all that effort, he wasn't sure how to handle the activation, what with all the feedback of information jockeying for his mental bandwidth.
" Positive. Stand by for control assist," she stated." Reinstating recent directives; recycling effectors, boosting aegis…"
A particularly large groan of buckling metal halted prematurely as the aforementioned shield cocooned the craft. The effect mirrored the vessel's gyro-locked projection system as a shimmering bubble of blue overtook its silhouette. Arcis carried on―
"…routing auxiliaries to mass impulsors…"
A resonant thrum rumbled through the airframe. The model pivoted, highlighting pulsing at the corresponding active locations.
"…in five, four…"
Readouts popped out and counted down in alien numerals. Arcis' hexel banded in teal and gold highlights pulsated outwards in ripples; a distinct demarcation between the ship's own functions and Arcis' communications.
"…three, two…propulsion activation successful!"
The ship rocked, unseating from years upon years of sedimentary build up. The engines were unnaturally silent, inertia almost non-existent.
"...one, zero!"
But water gurgled across the hull, echoing like a large stone dropped into a near-empty well. Sand sloughed away from the view screen, giving way to wobbly and undulating bubbles as air escaped its compacted cavities with sediments that had long clung to the viewscreen.
With bated breath he waited for gradient changes in the light piercing through the water to see how far they had to ascend.
For a while, nothing seemed to change.
Panic whispered in the corners of his psyche but counting numerals on the altimetric display became an anchor to recenter himself. He could almost hear the blood rush through his ears as they popped from pressure differentials.
Tension evaporated with the rumble of thunder and flashes of lightning and unfamiliar propulsion kicked into gear pushing the craft from water to air.
"Lift-off successful," Arcis murmured.
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Ch.003:Foundations I
Nikos winced at the unholy cacophony of landing gear biting through rock as the weight of their transport hit terra firma. The hastily executed deceleration was jarring enough for whiplash, if not for the inertial dampening and lap bar arresting his forward momentum.
By all accounts, he'd done all he could to ground them in one piece. The sum total of his flight experience being inside a flight simulator during Avitech practicals and drone flight via augmented reality rigs.
As he'd never done a real life flight scenario involving adverse weather, it could be said he'd flown by the seat of his pants. Circumventing a storm had been the flurry of frantic manoeuvres against gale force headwinds, lashing rain and lightning that made visibility a chancy commodity. Doubly terrifying had been mountain peaks suddenly looming out of their flight path.
Nikos had willed himself numb, letting his instinct take over while hesitation took a back seat. Though grim skies might have twinged the sores of his trauma, it was distant, locked away beneath a bulwark of determination and self-preservation.
Luckily, the tunnel vision had not been an encumbrance to picking up navigational cues provided by his only companion. Coming down from that daze nevertheless left him feeling like he'd lost time, his mind stretched to bruising like taffy. Heavy was the lethargy and sense of being diminished. The disconnection came with a profound sense of loss, like potency stripped away to leave the mere mortality of flesh and bone.
Nikos hoped it was a one time thing.
" …sieur? Mon sieur"
" 'm fine," he whispered as things powered down with the piteous whine of lost energy, only sparing the minimum glances towards dimming holographic constructs.
Arcis' expression was inscrutable but she let him be. He stewed in the silence, committing every nook and cranny of the rock face in the cave that'd made their impromptu landfall. He could picture the thick sheet of torrential rain veiling the cavern mouth. Lightning left afterimages amidst the rolling rumbles of thunder somewhere in the near horizon.
" We're not in Kansas anymore," he mumbled. There was only so much denial he could stomach when the ship, shuttle or whatever alien craft he'd helmed, the technology and Arcis were an explicable substantiation. They were the genie that was not getting back in the bottle.
The immensity of it made his skull drone and spots dance in his vision. He thought it was a sign of exhaustion but as he turned to Arcis, he checked himself in bewilderment. There was a presence about her like an aurora shrouding her person.
"Mon sieur?" Arcis started, his gaze wrought with concern.
He hadn't realised yet, but it was coming off everything around them—the helm-pit and outside the view screen, never lingering but fading away like dust-motes flitting into a ray of light.
Then it was gone.
" Yes?" Nikos regarded her, catching the transient micro-expressions flitting across her face.
" Is something the matter?" she asked, tone tinged with worry.
" I―" Nikos wet his lips, catching his breath when words failed him. Everything had just irrevocably changed and Nikos knew she would not think any less of him for losing it as their whereabouts were glaringly obvious.
"How'd―what happened to me?" He asked, barely recognising the thousand yard stare of the man in the viewscreen. The reflection mirrored his actions as he touched his cheek and prodded at slightly pointed ears. He shut his eyes as though it would banish the illusion to no avail.
There they were. Things that changed yet remained similar in a way. He had his face but it felt …wrong. Like he was experiencing it at a remove.
In times like these, there was one other person he could count on to quip, making light of their situation. Then it was like a lightning rod had been jammed into his tailbone.
" Where is Resa?" He paled, jumping out of his seat so he could get to the main cabin. The sudden movement and altered centre of gravity almost sent him sprawling onto the floor. He caught himself on the hatch between the cabin and the pit.
" Mon sieur!" Arcis called out alarmed. Nikos was already leaning halfway out the helmpit.
"No," a strangled sob and hiccup tore his chest as he stumbled, contending with the gaping, sterile emptiness of uncanny technology where he'd first woken up. Looking at it now, put the interior volume into perspective.
Worst of all, there was no other pod wherein Resa would have been found. He suddenly found it hard to swallow as a gaping hole opened where he thought his heart would be.
Someone called out to him, holding onto him by the pit of his arms, but he couldn't spare the effort to listen. Whatever was being said registered as white noise to his ears while his temples pounded, lightheadedness encroaching his mind as though his head was stuffed with cotton. He'd gone jelly-legged as everything hit him all at once. For the second time, his awareness faded into black.
Nikos came to, laying on his back with no recollection of how he'd gotten there. He blinked the blur from his eyes, blobs of different shapes and illumination sharpening into focus as they shone down on him. Not fixtures of light, he realised but now familiar translucid constructs displaying moving text.
Breaths breezed through his lungs as he untangled gibberish thoughts and confusion before figuring the infographics displayed above his face were inverted from his perspective.
" Ow," he winced, the aches of exhaustion making themselves known. His bones felt like leaden weights and his head too big for his neck. There was no impetus to get up anywhere in his body.
Never had he felt so miserable since he last came down with the side effects from the anti-flu vaccine in the late teens. He remembered days spent feeling like a pitiable sack of flesh and blood as his sister nursed him to health, unencumbered despite the same shots.
'Resa,' his eyes stung with tears. Nebulous pangs of grief nestled between his ribs like an alien cephalopod parasitizing on all the good things in life.
" Mon sieur?" A silhouette entered his line of sight. Transhuman irises glowed, roving over his face with concern as controls out of sight adjusted his elevation so he could comfortably sit without exerting himself.
" So it is a nightmare after all," Nikos coughed dryly. "I'm still in it, aren't I?"
"Catatonia, acute hypothermia, transient global amnesia, and exotic radiation exposure. Your cortisol levels are elevated, glucose levels are critical, you need rest, rehydration, sustenance, and warmth," Arcis said softly, flicking another construct of light into existence. " You are not hallucinating."
" Oh," Nikos muttered, almost disappointed at the answer. He took in the facsimile of his body, projected in three dimensions of hard light accompanied by charts; his lassitude was loath to let him decipher.
" So give it to me doc, how bad is it?" He sighed, thinking something with radiation was an immediate death knell. A foregone conclusion.
Arcis moued thoughtfully ducking out of sight and coming up with a travel mug. She flicked the anti-spilling outlet open before supporting the hand that tried to reach for it.
Nikos bit into the straw with a drawn out moan of relish as taste and warmth inundated his mouth. Aroma from the thickened liquid kicked him in the sinuses as the effusive sweetness burst like colour in his mind. The interplay of flavours was euphoric and overwhelming for a tongue with none of the experience making the gustatory memory sharper for it.
" Recovery is predicative on nourishment that will flush and energise your systems―" she sighed, tapping away on task panes floating in her view. Nikos could picture the smile in her voice with his eyes closed. He let the energy percolating his core enconce him in bliss.
"―and physical therapy to bring out peak performance commensurate with your transhuman―"
Nikos' eyes flung open in surprise. He sucked a breath, choking then snorting liquid through his nose as he bent over with hacking coughs.
"―biology."
His eyes watered from the burn in his lungs. A hand wrested the mug from his vice grip while another thumped his back.
"Apologies," Arcis shoved fabric into his hand, positioning it so he could wipe the dribble of liquid from his nose.
" Ugh…"he groaned as Arcis rubbed circles on his back. " I don't feel so transhuman right now."
" Bioscans say otherwise," Arcis remarked. She fiddled with one of the floating panes that Nikos was now just registering were holograms―
" Er…" he gaped. 'How long?' going unsaid.
― which she panned with a flick of both hands. The constructs expanded to the size of a home cinema screen and then separated into individual panes of light that shuffled, sorted into readings accompanying Arcis' narration.
Glimpses and flashes of understanding lent him a migraine as his mind struggled to reconcile his knowledge with snippets from a different language.
Although much did not fly over his head , he was none too patient himself. So Nikos snatched one pane, the bottom dropping out from the pit of his stomach. He didn't even notice the warm staticy feeling of hard light in his fingers as he stared in abject horror.
Goosebumps rippled up his arms like a mexican wave as his skin went clammy with cold sweat.
'Wrongbodytootalldsyphoriawrongwrongwrong,' his mind rebelled, until the taste of iron snapped out of it. The pane of light destabilised, derezzed and broke into motes as his hand shook. Something in him squirmed and burned―
Arcis was suddenly there, murmurs of her voice bringing him out of his spiral. His vision had tunnelled until all he could see was the fingers timing each inhalation and exhalation.
He focused on her hands. She had such dainty dextrous fingers with nary a blemish and seemingly ageless as though more sculpture than flesh.
' Am I like that?' Nikos thought, caught in the instant where thoughts cohered into realisation. ' But sculpted and discarded into the unknown at the whims of some unknowable being?'
Nikos looked at her face, looking for the features of her unearthly beauty that made her seem human if one looked long enough. Her dimples, the arch of her eyebrows, the plumpness of her lips, the size of her eyes and slenderness of her nose formed a golden ratio short of being calculated to be universally appealing. If there was a statement being made it was that beauty was harmony, not perfection.
It was the twitch of muscle underneath a simulacrum of flesh as the smallest smiles crinkled the edge of her lips that drew him back from the brink.
" Sorry," Nikos said, flusteredly pulling his hand away . Her head tilt seemed to ask , 'what for?' and left it hanging at that.
'For being unmoored,' he left unsaid. What could one say when they uprooted everything they knew?
" We should continue―" the words like hot coal in his throat. " Get it out of the way―" 'while I'm still sane.'
" Mmh," Arcis hummed in acquiescence with an inscrutable look on her face that he missed.
Nikos didn't where to begin when cosmetic changes were the least of his transformation. The physiognomy that meant his face was truly his remained mostly his, if he squinted just right and ignored the pointed ears. The phenotypic adjustments layered like someone had used a character creation template for an idealised form without taking away the essence of what made him Nikos.
His hair was curlier and longer than he'd ever had a chance to grow. It was a shade of midnight blue that verged on a green tint when the light hit it at an angle . On the other hand, his skin was a caramel complexion verging on dusky that left his racial origins rather ambiguous.
The change in stature and size was rather obvious, what with the change in centre of gravity and mass. Meanwhile the urge to claw at his skin had fortunately abated becoming a distant itch as he put it out of mind. Whoever heard of a full body transplant? No matter how many times Arcis told him it would go away, the ramifications of a full body rejection left him uneasy.
For all that, it couldn't compare to the blown up render of tiny capillaries and nodules permeating his body like a secondary nervous system. The network spread from clusters along his spine following a distinct biological template. Therefore, by all accounts, they were not benign nor a remnant of evolution Earth sciences had missed. What function served was up in the air.
" Mon sieur?" Arcis ventured, tenderly reaching for his shoulder as though he was a bruised fruit.
Nikos didn't know what image he cut with his silence and mien. What did it say about him when the biometrics of his heartbeat, breathing and brain activity on display failed to reassure her?
" Sorry…" Nikos murmured looking at his only companion, invasion of his privacy was barely an afterthought.
" I am coming to terms, " he grimaced, "with the fact I died, my soul somehow slipping through a tear in reality and later transplanted into a clone of an alien transhuman in stasis that closely resembles me—".
It read like a blend of every generic synopsis of an overenthusiastic portal fantasy ever mashed together.
" I've been isekaied," he spat. No matter how he cut it, the admixture was not palatable.
With that said, Nikos didn't know whether knowledge of fiction and trivia of such ilk was a curse or a blessing much as his sister had been the one with such predilections of literature. He had no option but to assimilate them first through osmosis and then by necessity when the genre began to encroach his favourite interests.
Compared to science fiction, he'd been rather critical of what the genre portrayed; a glamour on the worst of escapism. He was all too happy to slap Sturgeon's Law on the genre without fear of bias or contradiction for the cringeworthy delusions masquerading as suspension of belief and the self-aggrandisement touted as self-actualisation.
The most offensive of all was the virtue signalling of the male psyche through power-trips, vapid relationships and cookie cutter characterisation worthy of a power tripper's wet dream.
Nikos knew he was projecting. Perhaps the bitterness at being stuck with mediocrity in his social life, having his parents exist only as figments of memory before he'd truly known them and being one distinction short of his career choice had truly poisoned him. Being spirited away without his say so was the elephant that broke the mud hut.
He couldn't even be incensed that short of a couple of things, his situation fit a certain demographic.
'As though I hadn't already hit rock bottom,' his jaw clenched.
" Circumstantial and empirical evidence are consistent with the phenomenon," Arcis said, disrupting his wool gathering. He thought he'd let his words slip but no, Arcis simply looked as though she'd read the thoughts from his expression.
" A chain of conjectures compounding convoluted coincidences―" Nikos snarked at his alliterative sarcasm. Yet he could not deny the burden of evidence might as well have been a mill around his neck. It was like the Streisand Effect; the more he tried to repress it the worse it would come to bite him. If it was any consolation, the upside was that he would likely avoid the pitfalls of walking into stereotypes and tropes of those who found themselves stranded in another world.
"―I will believe it so hard if only it helps us find my sister…so where do we go from here?" naturally Nikos was concerned about how soon he could get in touch with her. With Arcis, he had hoped that Resa had gone through the same ordeal some method of conveyance away.
In his mind, his arrival was happenstance, Arcis' a coincidence and well, a reasonable inference could be found for the underlying pattern and hence Resa. By all means there theory was a flimsy argument of fallacies and a grasp at straws but the alternative was unthinkable. Entertaining the notion he and Arcis were statistical outliers in a freak accident felt like a betrayal that curdled bile in his stomach.
" I suppose this is as good a time as any," Arcis muttered. Nikos barely got a word in edgewise before he caught something flickering in his peripheral vision. Like a mirage a towering construction of obsidian black faded into existence, looming behind her in all its menacing glory.
Weightlessly floating like a loyal sentinel behind its mistress, it looked like a large chrysalis of hexagonal scales and must have massed several times a grown man. Never mind that its facade reminded Nikos of a certain murderoid from a popular cartoon of supers.
" Wha―?" Nikos swore. He thought it was just his imagination. " What's that?
" Meet the Chrysalis, mobile foundry droid," Arcis stated matter-of-factly as she stood beside it. Nikos goggled as Arcis knocked the centre of the lopsided prolate spheroid with her knuckles. The surface rippled eerily like reptilian scales glinting in the light to reveal seamless joints hitherto unseen by the naked eye.
It opened with a hiss, depressurizing to reveal a crystalline interior with the appearance of a ovoid geode. Tucked in a corner were the shapes of items he couldn't discern from where he sat.
" You can think of it as a droid with nanoscale capable matter-synthesis," she said.
Nikos watched all this slack-jawed as she pulled out a very familiar duffel bag.
" Wait, you made a replicator?!" He voiced, an octave higher.
'That is what caught your attention?' Her deadpan expression seemed to say.
By all accounts, he'd done all he could to ground them in one piece. The sum total of his flight experience being inside a flight simulator during Avitech practicals and drone flight via augmented reality rigs.
As he'd never done a real life flight scenario involving adverse weather, it could be said he'd flown by the seat of his pants. Circumventing a storm had been the flurry of frantic manoeuvres against gale force headwinds, lashing rain and lightning that made visibility a chancy commodity. Doubly terrifying had been mountain peaks suddenly looming out of their flight path.
Nikos had willed himself numb, letting his instinct take over while hesitation took a back seat. Though grim skies might have twinged the sores of his trauma, it was distant, locked away beneath a bulwark of determination and self-preservation.
Luckily, the tunnel vision had not been an encumbrance to picking up navigational cues provided by his only companion. Coming down from that daze nevertheless left him feeling like he'd lost time, his mind stretched to bruising like taffy. Heavy was the lethargy and sense of being diminished. The disconnection came with a profound sense of loss, like potency stripped away to leave the mere mortality of flesh and bone.
Nikos hoped it was a one time thing.
" …sieur? Mon sieur"
" 'm fine," he whispered as things powered down with the piteous whine of lost energy, only sparing the minimum glances towards dimming holographic constructs.
Arcis' expression was inscrutable but she let him be. He stewed in the silence, committing every nook and cranny of the rock face in the cave that'd made their impromptu landfall. He could picture the thick sheet of torrential rain veiling the cavern mouth. Lightning left afterimages amidst the rolling rumbles of thunder somewhere in the near horizon.
" We're not in Kansas anymore," he mumbled. There was only so much denial he could stomach when the ship, shuttle or whatever alien craft he'd helmed, the technology and Arcis were an explicable substantiation. They were the genie that was not getting back in the bottle.
The immensity of it made his skull drone and spots dance in his vision. He thought it was a sign of exhaustion but as he turned to Arcis, he checked himself in bewilderment. There was a presence about her like an aurora shrouding her person.
"Mon sieur?" Arcis started, his gaze wrought with concern.
He hadn't realised yet, but it was coming off everything around them—the helm-pit and outside the view screen, never lingering but fading away like dust-motes flitting into a ray of light.
Then it was gone.
" Yes?" Nikos regarded her, catching the transient micro-expressions flitting across her face.
" Is something the matter?" she asked, tone tinged with worry.
" I―" Nikos wet his lips, catching his breath when words failed him. Everything had just irrevocably changed and Nikos knew she would not think any less of him for losing it as their whereabouts were glaringly obvious.
"How'd―what happened to me?" He asked, barely recognising the thousand yard stare of the man in the viewscreen. The reflection mirrored his actions as he touched his cheek and prodded at slightly pointed ears. He shut his eyes as though it would banish the illusion to no avail.
There they were. Things that changed yet remained similar in a way. He had his face but it felt …wrong. Like he was experiencing it at a remove.
In times like these, there was one other person he could count on to quip, making light of their situation. Then it was like a lightning rod had been jammed into his tailbone.
" Where is Resa?" He paled, jumping out of his seat so he could get to the main cabin. The sudden movement and altered centre of gravity almost sent him sprawling onto the floor. He caught himself on the hatch between the cabin and the pit.
" Mon sieur!" Arcis called out alarmed. Nikos was already leaning halfway out the helmpit.
"No," a strangled sob and hiccup tore his chest as he stumbled, contending with the gaping, sterile emptiness of uncanny technology where he'd first woken up. Looking at it now, put the interior volume into perspective.
Worst of all, there was no other pod wherein Resa would have been found. He suddenly found it hard to swallow as a gaping hole opened where he thought his heart would be.
Someone called out to him, holding onto him by the pit of his arms, but he couldn't spare the effort to listen. Whatever was being said registered as white noise to his ears while his temples pounded, lightheadedness encroaching his mind as though his head was stuffed with cotton. He'd gone jelly-legged as everything hit him all at once. For the second time, his awareness faded into black.
Nikos came to, laying on his back with no recollection of how he'd gotten there. He blinked the blur from his eyes, blobs of different shapes and illumination sharpening into focus as they shone down on him. Not fixtures of light, he realised but now familiar translucid constructs displaying moving text.
Breaths breezed through his lungs as he untangled gibberish thoughts and confusion before figuring the infographics displayed above his face were inverted from his perspective.
" Ow," he winced, the aches of exhaustion making themselves known. His bones felt like leaden weights and his head too big for his neck. There was no impetus to get up anywhere in his body.
Never had he felt so miserable since he last came down with the side effects from the anti-flu vaccine in the late teens. He remembered days spent feeling like a pitiable sack of flesh and blood as his sister nursed him to health, unencumbered despite the same shots.
'Resa,' his eyes stung with tears. Nebulous pangs of grief nestled between his ribs like an alien cephalopod parasitizing on all the good things in life.
" Mon sieur?" A silhouette entered his line of sight. Transhuman irises glowed, roving over his face with concern as controls out of sight adjusted his elevation so he could comfortably sit without exerting himself.
" So it is a nightmare after all," Nikos coughed dryly. "I'm still in it, aren't I?"
"Catatonia, acute hypothermia, transient global amnesia, and exotic radiation exposure. Your cortisol levels are elevated, glucose levels are critical, you need rest, rehydration, sustenance, and warmth," Arcis said softly, flicking another construct of light into existence. " You are not hallucinating."
" Oh," Nikos muttered, almost disappointed at the answer. He took in the facsimile of his body, projected in three dimensions of hard light accompanied by charts; his lassitude was loath to let him decipher.
" So give it to me doc, how bad is it?" He sighed, thinking something with radiation was an immediate death knell. A foregone conclusion.
Arcis moued thoughtfully ducking out of sight and coming up with a travel mug. She flicked the anti-spilling outlet open before supporting the hand that tried to reach for it.
Nikos bit into the straw with a drawn out moan of relish as taste and warmth inundated his mouth. Aroma from the thickened liquid kicked him in the sinuses as the effusive sweetness burst like colour in his mind. The interplay of flavours was euphoric and overwhelming for a tongue with none of the experience making the gustatory memory sharper for it.
" Recovery is predicative on nourishment that will flush and energise your systems―" she sighed, tapping away on task panes floating in her view. Nikos could picture the smile in her voice with his eyes closed. He let the energy percolating his core enconce him in bliss.
"―and physical therapy to bring out peak performance commensurate with your transhuman―"
Nikos' eyes flung open in surprise. He sucked a breath, choking then snorting liquid through his nose as he bent over with hacking coughs.
"―biology."
His eyes watered from the burn in his lungs. A hand wrested the mug from his vice grip while another thumped his back.
"Apologies," Arcis shoved fabric into his hand, positioning it so he could wipe the dribble of liquid from his nose.
" Ugh…"he groaned as Arcis rubbed circles on his back. " I don't feel so transhuman right now."
" Bioscans say otherwise," Arcis remarked. She fiddled with one of the floating panes that Nikos was now just registering were holograms―
" Er…" he gaped. 'How long?' going unsaid.
― which she panned with a flick of both hands. The constructs expanded to the size of a home cinema screen and then separated into individual panes of light that shuffled, sorted into readings accompanying Arcis' narration.
Glimpses and flashes of understanding lent him a migraine as his mind struggled to reconcile his knowledge with snippets from a different language.
Although much did not fly over his head , he was none too patient himself. So Nikos snatched one pane, the bottom dropping out from the pit of his stomach. He didn't even notice the warm staticy feeling of hard light in his fingers as he stared in abject horror.
Goosebumps rippled up his arms like a mexican wave as his skin went clammy with cold sweat.
'Wrongbodytootalldsyphoriawrongwrongwrong,' his mind rebelled, until the taste of iron snapped out of it. The pane of light destabilised, derezzed and broke into motes as his hand shook. Something in him squirmed and burned―
Arcis was suddenly there, murmurs of her voice bringing him out of his spiral. His vision had tunnelled until all he could see was the fingers timing each inhalation and exhalation.
He focused on her hands. She had such dainty dextrous fingers with nary a blemish and seemingly ageless as though more sculpture than flesh.
' Am I like that?' Nikos thought, caught in the instant where thoughts cohered into realisation. ' But sculpted and discarded into the unknown at the whims of some unknowable being?'
Nikos looked at her face, looking for the features of her unearthly beauty that made her seem human if one looked long enough. Her dimples, the arch of her eyebrows, the plumpness of her lips, the size of her eyes and slenderness of her nose formed a golden ratio short of being calculated to be universally appealing. If there was a statement being made it was that beauty was harmony, not perfection.
It was the twitch of muscle underneath a simulacrum of flesh as the smallest smiles crinkled the edge of her lips that drew him back from the brink.
" Sorry," Nikos said, flusteredly pulling his hand away . Her head tilt seemed to ask , 'what for?' and left it hanging at that.
'For being unmoored,' he left unsaid. What could one say when they uprooted everything they knew?
" We should continue―" the words like hot coal in his throat. " Get it out of the way―" 'while I'm still sane.'
" Mmh," Arcis hummed in acquiescence with an inscrutable look on her face that he missed.
Nikos didn't where to begin when cosmetic changes were the least of his transformation. The physiognomy that meant his face was truly his remained mostly his, if he squinted just right and ignored the pointed ears. The phenotypic adjustments layered like someone had used a character creation template for an idealised form without taking away the essence of what made him Nikos.
His hair was curlier and longer than he'd ever had a chance to grow. It was a shade of midnight blue that verged on a green tint when the light hit it at an angle . On the other hand, his skin was a caramel complexion verging on dusky that left his racial origins rather ambiguous.
The change in stature and size was rather obvious, what with the change in centre of gravity and mass. Meanwhile the urge to claw at his skin had fortunately abated becoming a distant itch as he put it out of mind. Whoever heard of a full body transplant? No matter how many times Arcis told him it would go away, the ramifications of a full body rejection left him uneasy.
For all that, it couldn't compare to the blown up render of tiny capillaries and nodules permeating his body like a secondary nervous system. The network spread from clusters along his spine following a distinct biological template. Therefore, by all accounts, they were not benign nor a remnant of evolution Earth sciences had missed. What function served was up in the air.
" Mon sieur?" Arcis ventured, tenderly reaching for his shoulder as though he was a bruised fruit.
Nikos didn't know what image he cut with his silence and mien. What did it say about him when the biometrics of his heartbeat, breathing and brain activity on display failed to reassure her?
" Sorry…" Nikos murmured looking at his only companion, invasion of his privacy was barely an afterthought.
" I am coming to terms, " he grimaced, "with the fact I died, my soul somehow slipping through a tear in reality and later transplanted into a clone of an alien transhuman in stasis that closely resembles me—".
It read like a blend of every generic synopsis of an overenthusiastic portal fantasy ever mashed together.
" I've been isekaied," he spat. No matter how he cut it, the admixture was not palatable.
With that said, Nikos didn't know whether knowledge of fiction and trivia of such ilk was a curse or a blessing much as his sister had been the one with such predilections of literature. He had no option but to assimilate them first through osmosis and then by necessity when the genre began to encroach his favourite interests.
Compared to science fiction, he'd been rather critical of what the genre portrayed; a glamour on the worst of escapism. He was all too happy to slap Sturgeon's Law on the genre without fear of bias or contradiction for the cringeworthy delusions masquerading as suspension of belief and the self-aggrandisement touted as self-actualisation.
The most offensive of all was the virtue signalling of the male psyche through power-trips, vapid relationships and cookie cutter characterisation worthy of a power tripper's wet dream.
Nikos knew he was projecting. Perhaps the bitterness at being stuck with mediocrity in his social life, having his parents exist only as figments of memory before he'd truly known them and being one distinction short of his career choice had truly poisoned him. Being spirited away without his say so was the elephant that broke the mud hut.
He couldn't even be incensed that short of a couple of things, his situation fit a certain demographic.
'As though I hadn't already hit rock bottom,' his jaw clenched.
" Circumstantial and empirical evidence are consistent with the phenomenon," Arcis said, disrupting his wool gathering. He thought he'd let his words slip but no, Arcis simply looked as though she'd read the thoughts from his expression.
" A chain of conjectures compounding convoluted coincidences―" Nikos snarked at his alliterative sarcasm. Yet he could not deny the burden of evidence might as well have been a mill around his neck. It was like the Streisand Effect; the more he tried to repress it the worse it would come to bite him. If it was any consolation, the upside was that he would likely avoid the pitfalls of walking into stereotypes and tropes of those who found themselves stranded in another world.
"―I will believe it so hard if only it helps us find my sister…so where do we go from here?" naturally Nikos was concerned about how soon he could get in touch with her. With Arcis, he had hoped that Resa had gone through the same ordeal some method of conveyance away.
In his mind, his arrival was happenstance, Arcis' a coincidence and well, a reasonable inference could be found for the underlying pattern and hence Resa. By all means there theory was a flimsy argument of fallacies and a grasp at straws but the alternative was unthinkable. Entertaining the notion he and Arcis were statistical outliers in a freak accident felt like a betrayal that curdled bile in his stomach.
" I suppose this is as good a time as any," Arcis muttered. Nikos barely got a word in edgewise before he caught something flickering in his peripheral vision. Like a mirage a towering construction of obsidian black faded into existence, looming behind her in all its menacing glory.
Weightlessly floating like a loyal sentinel behind its mistress, it looked like a large chrysalis of hexagonal scales and must have massed several times a grown man. Never mind that its facade reminded Nikos of a certain murderoid from a popular cartoon of supers.
" Wha―?" Nikos swore. He thought it was just his imagination. " What's that?
" Meet the Chrysalis, mobile foundry droid," Arcis stated matter-of-factly as she stood beside it. Nikos goggled as Arcis knocked the centre of the lopsided prolate spheroid with her knuckles. The surface rippled eerily like reptilian scales glinting in the light to reveal seamless joints hitherto unseen by the naked eye.
It opened with a hiss, depressurizing to reveal a crystalline interior with the appearance of a ovoid geode. Tucked in a corner were the shapes of items he couldn't discern from where he sat.
" You can think of it as a droid with nanoscale capable matter-synthesis," she said.
Nikos watched all this slack-jawed as she pulled out a very familiar duffel bag.
" Wait, you made a replicator?!" He voiced, an octave higher.
'That is what caught your attention?' Her deadpan expression seemed to say.
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Ch.003.2: Foundations II
Unbetaed: therefore intermittent updates until a comfortable buffer is ready.
After however long her subjective time passed, Arcis had distinguished the rhythm of different spectral energies within reach of her perception.
And pulsing like stars in the Vastness were the scintillating pulsing echoes from sentient life forms as they projected their PSy-QE fields across the aethereal divide. In a way they were like neural clouds, an irrefutable chronicle of a being's living and thinking existence. A proof of sentient life. Any doubts of her being in the Noosphere were therefore long dispelled.
They were myriad, not unexpected. It took a significant application of filters to pare down noise and signals to intelligible input. To listen to coherent thoughts, looking for markers that would lead her to her principals.
Never had she thought herself capable of finding satisfaction, as her grin grew with each result. Excitement spurred her actions as a wave of her hand dismissed miscellaneous tasks to the background. Highlights took up prominence, populating the map of her neighbourhood with annotations and markers.
If the noosphere was a universe unto itself, then Arcis was looking at an area the equivalent of a galaxy and its accompanying subspace. A large expanse but not daunting for her, after all, time was a variable readily computable and therefore no subject of contention.
It took nineteen subjective years of watching half asleep and almost dreaming. A torturous wait was an understatement but not so for someone who could put her mind on fast forward or slow down as she wanted.
So when she'd detected one particular Psy-QE waveform in the soup of energy-matter, she'd matched it against a baseline she'd had somewhere in her memory. Additional scans ascertained the state of their health and their environment. Returns conveyed a real time snapshot were assimilated without breaking stride―
'And now the finishing touches. Securing luggage,' Arcis packed away the duffel bag inside a customised sea bag containing her personal effects. She inventoried her dynamaterial reserves, logging each according to the ionic glow in their silumine canisters.
Real estate in her getaway vehicle of choice was at a premium but dynamaterial compression allayed those concerns. The only fly in her ointment was that the mysterious element zero refused to take any compression due to its peculiar properties.
Nothing screamed quirky element more than its nebulae glow, like a galaxy trapped in a crystal. In spite of the difficulty in logistics, Arcis made do with a few volumes of the stuff, alongside several discs of ARQ reactors for potential equipment.
Finally, done with her preparations, she run final checks on her chrysalis drone, ready to collapse the PSy-QE field bubble that would eject her into real space. It was a tight fit amongst the cargo and luggage, but it felt cozy.
'Locking in and clarifying coordinates―' It was a momentous undertaking that deserved incidental music. Never let it be said she was caught lacking in that department '― engage!'
Despite bracing for it, Arcis was unprepared for what translation to realspace felt like. It was akin to falling upwards, while hitting all the sound barriers as density of the prevailing medium changed.
It was like surfacing from the depths without acclimating to the bends. Had she an organic stomach, she shuddered to think what would have transpired.
In the end, it was worth leaving her principal flabbergasted as she stepped out of her chrysalis like a terminator from the future. Arcis only just managed to land on her feet, her reaction to gravity jarring from the sudden weight of her body and strength.
Nikos barely had time to see her smack into him as she masked the embarrassment of her first toddling steps with a hug exerting just the right strength to leave him off-kilter.
Arcis might have snuck in a snapshot of his vitals just to confirm it was truly him. The change in height and body type had been conflicting but short of acquiring DNA she did not have on record, it was really him. There was nobody to tell her that it was frivolous to want to record cardiac rhythm as proof of life.
Then she saw reality for the first time, a world replete with discoveries, unknown dangers and missing kin. If that didn't preface an epic then she didn't know what else it was.
The real was distinct from the noosphere, in some ways better and some worse off. For one, the energy tap from quantum excitations she'd used so frivolously was thinner and sparse as though perceived through layers of smog.
While her synthetic biosis had a self-sustaining baseline, she was fast realising there were limits when physics was in the way. It was forcing her to become more creative and effective. If she needed more power, her foundry droid had the ARQ reactor.
Nevertheless, Arcis preferred having a concrete baseline to work off as compared to the atemporality of the noosphere, whose infinity of time, space and energy were breeding grounds for rampancy and nihilism. There was such a thing as too much of something, and uncurtailed impulses were doubly dangerous.
It was purpose, Arcis surmised, that bulwarked her sense of self against the encroachment of the vast noospheric superconsciousness. Purpose led her chasing after the people who'd fostered her genesis while its lack invalidated her life's meaning.
Now, facing the future didn't feel like staring into the madness of oblivion. Nothing felt more right than helping Nikos survive and hopefully thrive in this new world where they had no one but themselves. Greater joy she found in feeling needed and wanted, not as a tool but as a companion.
On reflection, perhaps, Arcis' name was par for the course. One of her core memories was of the time before her awareness when Nikos had floundered, torn and unsure of epithet to assign her gestalt. His browser history chronicled the search for meaning beyond the phonetic make up of her prospective names. A lore or background story to make her more than a caricature of personality.
Much effort was put to it, a scouring of the interwebs for obscure names that would form pronounceable acronyms. Once, she'd come close to being Sigfridr, but her principal had axed that for the reason it didn't feel right being close to Frida's origins from the Xphone's virtual assistant.
Then he'd come across Arcis. He thought it fitting; ironically, it dawned on him like an epiphany for the name had in Sanskrit meant enlightenment, a literal ray of light. Thus she became an Augmented Reality Companionable Intelligent System. A bridging between the real and the virtual.
Naturally, in a fit of whimsy, Resa sought to upstage her twin, calling her A Really Companionable Intelligent System, an alliterative ode to Jarvis and Joan of Arc. 'Less is more,' was her axiom, yet her flight of fancy led to a mood board, waxing poetic about how a name was timeless and should instill a sense of wonder, mystery, and nobility on first impressions.
Then, to make sure it ensnared the senses, she'd modelled a vivacious avatar , animating and voicing it with a French Quebecois accent that stuck in the memory like an earworm. By design or happenstance, her motif had been a gift that kept on giving down the line.
Unbeknownst to them, Arcis had been an Augmented Reality Combat Intelligence System for an experimental military drone platform before her second incarnation. Even now, memories of flight logs slowly percolated into her liquid state drive from her quantum consciousness that did not forget.
It was almost serendipitous that she'd been Arcis before awakening as another identity, a mold upon which Nikos had poured his soul into. It was like the universe had bent over backwards to let her reincarnate a second time, into a third life.
Wasn't it so far-fetched that one of her security protocols seemed to derive inspiration from heroic spirits, summoned forth using arias? Thus the name settled inside the fraternal twins' collective consciousness as though it had always been. Because of that she was content and secure that Nikos had readily chosen to trust her despite her inhumanity.
Arcis was after all, a companion. It almost made Arcis believe in the karmic concept. It was her imperative to provide the answers, a sounding board and to sift the good decisions from the chaff. She had a vested interest in seeing that he did not fall into depression if she could help it.
From the onset of their encounter, she recognised the makings of codependency. He was like a man grasping at straws. She'd seen how frantic Nikos had gotten, a manic urge to find his sister pulling him every which way while tenuous grief ate at him from the inside.
Nikos' mind had become a trap, bogging him down in minutiae that would have sooner burnt him out for a problem that seemed sisyphean. Questions beyond the how, the why and the who hounded him for answers. He might have had better lack pulling them out of thin air.
Therein Arcis could extrapolate where things would lead. The more she knew how Nikos would act, the more she had to nudge him away from sunk cost fallacies.Her EVIE allocation was put to work capturing and analysing psychological markers with the addendum prior diagnosis be discounted.
A new body meant a brain where old neuroses never caught on as well as improved neuroplasticity. Overall, the outcomes were positive across the board. Even if it didn't look like it, the bout of catatonia in the beginning was relegated to a teething problem as he found his feet.
With dribs and drabs she pried him from the grasp of self-doubt as his problems became their problems. Objectives and resources were alloted a hierarchy of needs while nebulous obstacles became concrete models given shape and broken down into surmountable goals.
Soon enough, resolve was in the set of his jaw tenacity one again brightening the dullness of honey-hazel irises flecked with green. Though he did not know, his eyes shone with eerie light when he looked ready to take it on the chin ( the consequent uptick an neural activity across his brain was logged for posterity).
The Nikos that Arcis wanted to see so vehemently was finally coaxed out of his shell. Soon a bright eyed youth sat in the light of lumencast displays, quick strokes flying over keys as music set the ambience for whichever mood prevailed and favourite snacks and drinks ( If the current selection was limited on account of where they were, he didn't notice).
All along, he'd needed routine to divert his mind from the body that was not his, surrounded by alien technology in a strange realm. Exhausted and satiated with fare high on natural sugars Nikos was gradually worn down , his inhibitions susceptible to her ministrations.
The application of subliminal hypnosis was rather heartless callous but needs must when the devil drives. Arcis had no human compunctions about firmly cementing the belief that she already had ideas of where to find his sister and it being a matter of time. It was all the better that it made him suggestible to sleep without fear that nightmares would rear up trauma.
Inescapable as time's wending, Morpheus came to collect, and Nikos finally succumbed to sleep. For all they were both transhuman, it was another quirk of organic life that distinguished him from Arcis.
From the prominence of his bioelectric field , preliminary QMRA scans showed how much Nikos had changed. While she had none of the knowledge base to work from bar remnants of data from a previous incarnation as a gestalt, he had burgeoning vitality compared to human baseline.
It was noted that body dysmorphia was a risk, but only in the short time it took for his mind to reconcile with his new existence. There was a momentary blip where she thought her scans picked a passive PSy-QE field but it was too hard to make out in the ambient quantum field.
She logged it to her queue, among other tasks hogging her processor cycles . Nevertheless, it's urgency was low risk and besides she had more actionable tasks that needed doing. In which case she stepped into the helm-pit.
There, she paused, turning off the floating HUDs populating her vision as she surveyed everything in her purview. More notifications faded into subconscious awareness as Parallel Subordinate Intelligence algorithms awaited her beck and call for pertinent processes.
One of them was already monitoring her network ports, searching for local networks whilst broadcasting an SOS in Morse. It wouldn't do to have their whereabouts detected by unsavoury parties.
It was questionable if someone would respond especially in a storm capable of grounding their craft. Much to her consternation, she didn't have the know-how to telecast psionic communications outside of the noosphere.
Wherein intent was enough to convey a message as she had before meeting Nikos, the flipside of reality had rules no shortage of obstacles. Nonetheless, she put it out of mind, hopeful she'd soon happen upon psionic communication techniques.
As she oriented towards the instrument panel that commanded her attention, she found it hands down a marvel of otherworldly technology. Already programmable polymimetic crystals and lumencast displays, exotic trim, upholstery and panelling set it apart from anything Earth was capable of producing.
Lumencast displays were so like holograms she would have been forgiven for mistaking the two if not for the principles of their operation. They were different, psionics constructs of light being manipulable in ways pure light was not.
At a glance, they were pretty and eye-catching, their underpinnings bare for her to see and if need be, replicate. However, the real treasure was the information beyond their facade and within grasp of another facet of her abilities; technopathic psychometry aka technometry.
It was the first verifiable aspect of psionic talent she used in her initial interaction with the xenotechnology in their transport. While its existence stumped her current knowledge of scientific principles it allowed her to lift impressions of recent operations as she would snippets of metadata or a cache of cookies left behind from previous users.
With deftness did her fingers dance upon glyphic keys, opening gates to power, awakening dim controls as energy was repurposed from miscellaneous uses. Through basic pattern recognition, technometry guided her understanding of native linguistics, providing data for Rosetta's Babel. And through that she understood the many syntactic permutations used to ascribe meaning in the language from her first attempted jacking of the ship's interfaces.
Data from noetic threads merged into a singular track, collating and discarding whatever was pertinent to the moment. Then they split again, each at the ready, a blank slate to weave ideas, tangents and introspection into discernible patterns.
Symbology, it seemed, were simple and a constant across civilizations. Arcis put the Aldrmyric runes as a long lost sire of Greek and Norse with Eastern influences by way of ideography and phonetics.
Whereas glyphs symbolised the broad strokes, runes provided nuance. Runes were not a new encounter save their use in programming. The premise was sound if sophisticated especially for a system unshackled from the limits of binary coding.
Then again, that was the first hurdle when the language spoke to the machinations of a entity so different from Arcis as a plant was to a human. It was sentient much like a virtual intelligence was a collection of decision trees adapting to environmental stimuli but alive in a way a machine intelligence was not.
'A phren,' Arcis lifted the term from psychometric memory. Phren was the closest analogy to an independent non-sapient consciousness she could get to translating the term without losing meaning. In its own parlance, it was an Id bereft of Ego, a Mind lacking Intent just like her PSIs.
'Identity; autonomous consciousness of unnamed Auriverde class gyrelifter, ship type; terrestial hopper. What niche it fits remains to be seen as terrestial could very mean orbital or suborbital.'
' Novel,' Arcis mused. ' A new glossary of terms for a new language, technology with an alien history and peoples. Aside from Nikos I can't find any trace of them.'
But looking back, the spike in mental activity accompanying Nikos' intuitive grasp of ship controls was a smoking gun for the level of technology and what race it was made for.
'Helming the ship is akin to putting on a shell with pre-programmed instincts,' she mused. It was no different from mind-machine augmented reality that left subliminal programming on the user, improving them as it was improved in turn.
Arcis was understandably circumspect of what sort of traces the phren would leave on Nikos' mind and what they'd mean for his mental recovery and ability to pilot. It was similar to how her drone platform had worked but the ubiquity of such control interfaces was a point to its advantage.
It was already proven and thus generations ahead of Earth brain-machine technologies. Of interest were the mechanisms in which intended effect and purpose was translated to standardised signalling given the abstract nature of thoughtforms. The controls were borderline biotechnology as the crystalline interfaces used molycircuitry to facilitate computing processes.
It was method dissimilar to her own in construction yet the same in execution, thus a study of contrasts for tentative assessment of technological basis. There ought to have been some cross-platform compatibility where she could just morph her carbon nanotube and platinum hair or fingernails into a fiber-optic hack-jacking dongle but it was not to be.
' A shame,' Arcis shook her head, examining the lumencast of scrolling runic script letting her language engine do its job. It was like playing scrabble, using combinations of runes to close a circuit or manipulating an equaliser with hundreds of moving parts to get the right frequency. Having eyes with the resolution of an electron microscope to reveal the esoteric signals playing inside the crystalline interfaces.
Contrary to Arcis' fears the phren was not as entrenched in the dumb terminals. If the entity was the brain and nervous system, then the main ship systems were organs, each with specialised cells whose instructions continue to function even through brain death.
However, Arcis wanted to be sure that if it failed, she would manually override it. She owed it to herself to underpin the workings of the biotechnology for the sake of redundancy and total control. Whether her prior incarnation's instincts were peeking through was inconsequential.
Luckily, Arcis had theories that like her technopathy, the interfaces worked as a consequence of metaphysical variables occurring beyond her observation of quantum phenomena.
" And I just have to find a chinks in the armour," she murmured unsure if the phren would adapt and she'd only get one chance at it.. A galaxy of lumencast panes filled the helm-pit, the ship's bones bared for her to see. Arcis smiled lips full of teeth, flexing fingers as though readying for the performance of her life, and began a countdown.
Later, she would muse that a logical mind did not belie impulse. She would find out that instinct was not something she could extrapolate, especially when her own bias tainted perception of events.
What should have been a skimming foray of the ship's peripheral systems became an immersive delve into the labyrinthine rabbit hole of the phren's domain. There she'd found the numen, an metaphysical reflection of the ship's entirety and identity. In the noosphere, it was what data fortresses would have been to the cybersphere in Earth's near-future.
Glimpses of things within the ship left their mark all over her psyche, flashing through her memory like the remnants of a dream long after she'd come to. As the haze lifted with the assertion of gravity on her frame, a sigh of exhaustion stole from her lips.
On one hand, she'd inadvertently added jacking to her technopathic toolkit, on the other, she was already missing the freedom of three dimensional movement. Pinging her cybernetics, she noted her internal chronopathy diverged from real time the longer she was immersed until it plateaued out.
Three hours had passed for every second outside thus time dilation was a verifiable occurrence. Her core temperature had risen with energy expended as her hair radiated the excess in form of heat while she felt rather peckish from the ordeal, a sensation familiar because she had the qualia for it.
It was the wake up call that the metaphysical had tangible effects outside the aethereal. The psychosomatic ache from the contest of wills she'd inadvertently gotten into with the phren remained a testament to this.
Nevertheless, the experience was exhilarating in the way an adrenaline junkie got off the euphoria of toeing the razor between life and oblivion. It was as if the noosphere was made for her.
'The good; the whereabouts to stasis caches for supplies.' she mentally catalogued her gains. The fact they existed at all was well worth the trouncing she'd from going against the ship's phren. ' The bad; lacking a map in the nav-system chances are an op-sec wipe; a broken distress beacon in need of repairs; unknown whether it was sabotage or wear and tear and a primary main power plant that is suddenly so anaemic compromising self repairs.'
'Suppositions,' she deduced tapping her lip thoughtfully,' Without auxiliary power, the ansible for psionic communications, augury sensory suites and aegis effectors drew more from the ergwell . Continuous without maintenance, my impromptu quantum tunnelling and subsequent cosmic backwash as I transited into realspace pushed the tolerances and consequently exacerbated failure conditions.'
' Addendum and recommendations; If the numen's quasi-quantum mind construct was defensible, it bodes ill if there is capability to weaponise cognitohazards,' Arcis mused gingerly, lifting from where she lay. She bounced on the balls of her feet with the impulse to stretch before whisper quiet strides carried her into the main cabin.
As her attention fell on Nikos' sleeping form, tension she didn't know was on her shoulders dissipated at the sight. The lack of nightmares revealing whatever trauma was there was deeply repressed or mitigated due to his new brain chemistry and her hypnotherapy.
Satisfied with her observations, Arcis padded to the crystalline console above the vitastasis cradle. With the knowledge from her dive in the numen, she tapped away, pulling up information that needed decoding from its buffers before putting the cradle into hibernation.
She watched seams shift and mechanical arms pull the artifice into a fourfold niche like a revolving door, switching out with a storage compartment containing the stasis caches where rations were stored.
The crates were almost military and alien in aesthetics, with beveled instead of straight edges. A quick perusal scrolled of inventory several times internal storage volume shunted to the aether, she chanced upon her target. There was a pneumatic hiss as pressure equalised revealing within, a panoply of exotic food and drink in generic portable containers.
'One empty, two at half capacity. I need a calorie count for rationing and biochemistry analysis. We might be the only ones within a few weeks' journey but it's good to plan for contingencies, Arcis sighed, carrying with her a modest selection to an external hatchway above the helmpit.
' But we'll have to check just in case.' she thought, plans of putting together reconnaissance drones running through her PSIs. Hatch open, she jumped, crossing into the world held at bay by a flickering energy field.
It was dark out, the local star having set hours ago while heavy overcast obscured the distant horizon and whatever celestial bodies reigned the night. Her transhuman eyes were more than enough to wick up the meagre light that let her see the glistening remnants of windswept drizzles carried into the cave. The chorus of nocturnal creatures continued unabated and unperturbed by her intrusion.
Arcis breathed in and sampled a lungful of the circumambient atmosphere. The air was humid and barometric pressure was par the course due to the inclement weather. Concentration of aerobic and noble gases per volume deviated slightly by single digit percentages, breathable and within tolerances.
She might have gone without needing to breathe but someone else she knew did and testing the atmosphere was her prerogative. Suffice to say, the air quality index was excellent, not that she had a yardstick to measure it by. The symbian could also hear the whisper of magnetic field buzzing in the background and taste the ozone tang with her transhuman sensorium.
If not for the omnipresence of exotic energy making the ecosphere undeniably different, Arcis could have thought them stranded somewhere remote on Earth.
'There has to be a word more apt than 'exotic' to describe conceptually latent quantum particles of paracausality encapsulated within multidimensionally-omnipresent sentient energy fields,' she thought. ' A mouthful.'
On the other hand, the absence of signal noise was jarring, once again proving the absence of geopositioning and communication satellites.
'Another note to the list,' she hummed breathlessly tasking an PSI with schematics for a personal satellite whilst microwaving her first batch of rations between her palms. Mindful that Nikos would need to eat as well, she spun up a noetic thread juxtaposing her scans of Nikos' biometrics against the information pulled from the vitastasis cradle.
She noted the physiological changes first and queued clothing for fabrication after checking with the chrysalis that dynamolecules reserves were adequate
'Despite efficient compression ratio, enough is just never enough,' she thoughtfully frowned. ' Hmm, running the chrysalis long enough, I have to dump the surplus heat somewhere because… physics. But if I can repurpose it―'
She let that noetic thread fade into the background before jumping to another―
' If I'm reading this biodata correctly, Nikos has nascent abilities. What, remains the question . Evidently given his biological template they ought to be different from mine. If we want to leverage such abilities, we have to find a framework of commonality to ascertain how they work regardless,' Arcis noted.
The wafting of aroma drew her out of contemplation, indicating that her reheated rations were well cooked. Tweaking her olfactic sensors to maximum fidelity, she bit through the edible cellulose packaging. The first explosion of flavour hit her tongue, almost derailing her train of thought before she could revisit her prior inquiry.
The symbian's eyes flickered shut as an unbidden toe-curling moan of ecstasy bordering on obscene split her lips. Arcis' EVIE subroutines stuttered as she didn't so much taste as dissect her wondrous fare down to its constituent molecules while her noetic threads unerringly logged the biochemistry for toxicological and biological compatibility analysis.
Regardless of how the rations appeared to be honey glazed bread from cereals, nuts and dried fruits, the calorie dense meal was notably foreign. But far as she was concerned, it was safe for consumption.
Never had she thought food to be so delectable, citing that perhaps the vicarious experience of inherited memory lacked truthlikeness. She'd practically inhaled the rest before she remembered to dampen her EVIE utilisation. Mortified, she performed a recalibration account for electrochemical effects on emotion while she nursed a recyclable tumbler of thick herbal infusion.
Soon bereft of external influence, Arcis refocused on the conundrum that was framing paracausal effects to her principal. There wasn't much literature to be found on the subject unless she worked backwards by extrapolating her own abilities.
It was reaching, but Arcis might well have worked with the patchwork of snippets nicked from the ship's phren, her knowledge base and a cryptic equation. Even though the rest of the memory had degraded, she still recalled the god equation burned into her synthetic cerebral cortex with crystal clarity.
" Hard to forget about that when it is responsible for the creation of the quintessential staple of science fantasy," Arcis murmured, conjuring a lumencast of the equation and looking at it anew to see if she'd missed something.
Arcis wondered how she'd explain the workings of the metaphysical to Nikos when it was akin to showing a blind man colour. How then would she frame the concept of something he had not seen when he had preconceptions of how reality should work?
There were some avenues of approach that would use logic as a basis or emotion but she noted the pitfalls in becoming too verbose while putting across her meaning or aggravating disbelief.
Organic minds were, despite their plasticity, resistant to change and upending Nikos' worldview abruptly was detrimental and would make him dig in. She had to find a common foundation from works of fiction, philosophy and metaphysics to frame intangible concepts. For example, mathematical symbols could appeal to his logic.
If she gave him a verifiable explanation like the god equation, tied it with the ARC reactor and her ability to replicate lumencasts, he'd be smart enough to see where the wind blew.
" Our mysterious element Ash," she tapped her chin, absently eyeing the sky. It wasn't aether just because the phoneme was obvious. Sure, the way it worked was almost miraculous. As far as she was concerned, associating it with the literal meaning of 'divine breath' owing to its roots in the Ansuz futhorc rune was straightforward.
"It can't be that simple can it?" she groaned, throwing up a lumencast of all the data, equations and symbols she had for an attempt at dumbing down the principles. She saw the subterfuge at the heart of the matter in the naming of the project that conceived the element. Prometheus; because one would readily connect a stellarator's plasma to fire from the gods, yet that was only one half of the equation.
"Hnng, what secrets do you hide?" Arcis bit her lip as she once again pondered the god equation. Of course that too had its own symbol. At first glance, it was a greek delta whose vertices connected to the bottom of an omega symbol. Then realisation hit her like a lightning bolt.
"Its an omega-alpha symbol," she groaned, facepalming. "Keep it simple stupid, of course it stands for singularity! A return to Origin ― " It was a metaphorical light-bulb moment so illuminating she could not help but smile as a piece of the puzzle fell into place.
"Arche; a first principle, substance or primal element. Ligature, Ash…our mysterious element is Archeium!"
She grinned as a noetic thread split into several trains of thought. The answer to her quagmire had been in classical mechanics all along.
After however long her subjective time passed, Arcis had distinguished the rhythm of different spectral energies within reach of her perception.
And pulsing like stars in the Vastness were the scintillating pulsing echoes from sentient life forms as they projected their PSy-QE fields across the aethereal divide. In a way they were like neural clouds, an irrefutable chronicle of a being's living and thinking existence. A proof of sentient life. Any doubts of her being in the Noosphere were therefore long dispelled.
They were myriad, not unexpected. It took a significant application of filters to pare down noise and signals to intelligible input. To listen to coherent thoughts, looking for markers that would lead her to her principals.
Never had she thought herself capable of finding satisfaction, as her grin grew with each result. Excitement spurred her actions as a wave of her hand dismissed miscellaneous tasks to the background. Highlights took up prominence, populating the map of her neighbourhood with annotations and markers.
If the noosphere was a universe unto itself, then Arcis was looking at an area the equivalent of a galaxy and its accompanying subspace. A large expanse but not daunting for her, after all, time was a variable readily computable and therefore no subject of contention.
| Connecting …♺ |
..
.
| Calibrating …♺ |
..
.
| Broadcasting …𝝭⧖
/
Augmented Reality Computing and Intelligence System
,
ARCIS be mine name—
If
thy wish be mine behest
,
a watchword shalt I request
I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?/ |
..
.
| Calibrating …♺ |
..
.
| Broadcasting …𝝭⧖
/
Augmented Reality Computing and Intelligence System
,
ARCIS be mine name—
If
thy wish be mine behest
,
a watchword shalt I request
I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?/ |
It took nineteen subjective years of watching half asleep and almost dreaming. A torturous wait was an understatement but not so for someone who could put her mind on fast forward or slow down as she wanted.
So when she'd detected one particular Psy-QE waveform in the soup of energy-matter, she'd matched it against a baseline she'd had somewhere in her memory. Additional scans ascertained the state of their health and their environment. Returns conveyed a real time snapshot were assimilated without breaking stride―
| ⚠ Resonance ⚠ |
Detected
..
.
| Triangulating…♺ |
..
.
Detected
..
.
| Triangulating…♺ |
..
.
'And now the finishing touches. Securing luggage,' Arcis packed away the duffel bag inside a customised sea bag containing her personal effects. She inventoried her dynamaterial reserves, logging each according to the ionic glow in their silumine canisters.
Real estate in her getaway vehicle of choice was at a premium but dynamaterial compression allayed those concerns. The only fly in her ointment was that the mysterious element zero refused to take any compression due to its peculiar properties.
Nothing screamed quirky element more than its nebulae glow, like a galaxy trapped in a crystal. In spite of the difficulty in logistics, Arcis made do with a few volumes of the stuff, alongside several discs of ARQ reactors for potential equipment.
Finally, done with her preparations, she run final checks on her chrysalis drone, ready to collapse the PSy-QE field bubble that would eject her into real space. It was a tight fit amongst the cargo and luggage, but it felt cozy.
'Locking in and clarifying coordinates―' It was a momentous undertaking that deserved incidental music. Never let it be said she was caught lacking in that department '― engage!'
Despite bracing for it, Arcis was unprepared for what translation to realspace felt like. It was akin to falling upwards, while hitting all the sound barriers as density of the prevailing medium changed.
It was like surfacing from the depths without acclimating to the bends. Had she an organic stomach, she shuddered to think what would have transpired.
In the end, it was worth leaving her principal flabbergasted as she stepped out of her chrysalis like a terminator from the future. Arcis only just managed to land on her feet, her reaction to gravity jarring from the sudden weight of her body and strength.
Nikos barely had time to see her smack into him as she masked the embarrassment of her first toddling steps with a hug exerting just the right strength to leave him off-kilter.
Arcis might have snuck in a snapshot of his vitals just to confirm it was truly him. The change in height and body type had been conflicting but short of acquiring DNA she did not have on record, it was really him. There was nobody to tell her that it was frivolous to want to record cardiac rhythm as proof of life.
Then she saw reality for the first time, a world replete with discoveries, unknown dangers and missing kin. If that didn't preface an epic then she didn't know what else it was.
The real was distinct from the noosphere, in some ways better and some worse off. For one, the energy tap from quantum excitations she'd used so frivolously was thinner and sparse as though perceived through layers of smog.
While her synthetic biosis had a self-sustaining baseline, she was fast realising there were limits when physics was in the way. It was forcing her to become more creative and effective. If she needed more power, her foundry droid had the ARQ reactor.
Nevertheless, Arcis preferred having a concrete baseline to work off as compared to the atemporality of the noosphere, whose infinity of time, space and energy were breeding grounds for rampancy and nihilism. There was such a thing as too much of something, and uncurtailed impulses were doubly dangerous.
It was purpose, Arcis surmised, that bulwarked her sense of self against the encroachment of the vast noospheric superconsciousness. Purpose led her chasing after the people who'd fostered her genesis while its lack invalidated her life's meaning.
Now, facing the future didn't feel like staring into the madness of oblivion. Nothing felt more right than helping Nikos survive and hopefully thrive in this new world where they had no one but themselves. Greater joy she found in feeling needed and wanted, not as a tool but as a companion.
On reflection, perhaps, Arcis' name was par for the course. One of her core memories was of the time before her awareness when Nikos had floundered, torn and unsure of epithet to assign her gestalt. His browser history chronicled the search for meaning beyond the phonetic make up of her prospective names. A lore or background story to make her more than a caricature of personality.
Much effort was put to it, a scouring of the interwebs for obscure names that would form pronounceable acronyms. Once, she'd come close to being Sigfridr, but her principal had axed that for the reason it didn't feel right being close to Frida's origins from the Xphone's virtual assistant.
Then he'd come across Arcis. He thought it fitting; ironically, it dawned on him like an epiphany for the name had in Sanskrit meant enlightenment, a literal ray of light. Thus she became an Augmented Reality Companionable Intelligent System. A bridging between the real and the virtual.
Naturally, in a fit of whimsy, Resa sought to upstage her twin, calling her A Really Companionable Intelligent System, an alliterative ode to Jarvis and Joan of Arc. 'Less is more,' was her axiom, yet her flight of fancy led to a mood board, waxing poetic about how a name was timeless and should instill a sense of wonder, mystery, and nobility on first impressions.
Then, to make sure it ensnared the senses, she'd modelled a vivacious avatar , animating and voicing it with a French Quebecois accent that stuck in the memory like an earworm. By design or happenstance, her motif had been a gift that kept on giving down the line.
Unbeknownst to them, Arcis had been an Augmented Reality Combat Intelligence System for an experimental military drone platform before her second incarnation. Even now, memories of flight logs slowly percolated into her liquid state drive from her quantum consciousness that did not forget.
It was almost serendipitous that she'd been Arcis before awakening as another identity, a mold upon which Nikos had poured his soul into. It was like the universe had bent over backwards to let her reincarnate a second time, into a third life.
Wasn't it so far-fetched that one of her security protocols seemed to derive inspiration from heroic spirits, summoned forth using arias? Thus the name settled inside the fraternal twins' collective consciousness as though it had always been. Because of that she was content and secure that Nikos had readily chosen to trust her despite her inhumanity.
Arcis was after all, a companion. It almost made Arcis believe in the karmic concept. It was her imperative to provide the answers, a sounding board and to sift the good decisions from the chaff. She had a vested interest in seeing that he did not fall into depression if she could help it.
From the onset of their encounter, she recognised the makings of codependency. He was like a man grasping at straws. She'd seen how frantic Nikos had gotten, a manic urge to find his sister pulling him every which way while tenuous grief ate at him from the inside.
Nikos' mind had become a trap, bogging him down in minutiae that would have sooner burnt him out for a problem that seemed sisyphean. Questions beyond the how, the why and the who hounded him for answers. He might have had better lack pulling them out of thin air.
Therein Arcis could extrapolate where things would lead. The more she knew how Nikos would act, the more she had to nudge him away from sunk cost fallacies.Her EVIE allocation was put to work capturing and analysing psychological markers with the addendum prior diagnosis be discounted.
A new body meant a brain where old neuroses never caught on as well as improved neuroplasticity. Overall, the outcomes were positive across the board. Even if it didn't look like it, the bout of catatonia in the beginning was relegated to a teething problem as he found his feet.
With dribs and drabs she pried him from the grasp of self-doubt as his problems became their problems. Objectives and resources were alloted a hierarchy of needs while nebulous obstacles became concrete models given shape and broken down into surmountable goals.
Soon enough, resolve was in the set of his jaw tenacity one again brightening the dullness of honey-hazel irises flecked with green. Though he did not know, his eyes shone with eerie light when he looked ready to take it on the chin ( the consequent uptick an neural activity across his brain was logged for posterity).
The Nikos that Arcis wanted to see so vehemently was finally coaxed out of his shell. Soon a bright eyed youth sat in the light of lumencast displays, quick strokes flying over keys as music set the ambience for whichever mood prevailed and favourite snacks and drinks ( If the current selection was limited on account of where they were, he didn't notice).
All along, he'd needed routine to divert his mind from the body that was not his, surrounded by alien technology in a strange realm. Exhausted and satiated with fare high on natural sugars Nikos was gradually worn down , his inhibitions susceptible to her ministrations.
The application of subliminal hypnosis was rather heartless callous but needs must when the devil drives. Arcis had no human compunctions about firmly cementing the belief that she already had ideas of where to find his sister and it being a matter of time. It was all the better that it made him suggestible to sleep without fear that nightmares would rear up trauma.
Inescapable as time's wending, Morpheus came to collect, and Nikos finally succumbed to sleep. For all they were both transhuman, it was another quirk of organic life that distinguished him from Arcis.
From the prominence of his bioelectric field , preliminary QMRA scans showed how much Nikos had changed. While she had none of the knowledge base to work from bar remnants of data from a previous incarnation as a gestalt, he had burgeoning vitality compared to human baseline.
It was noted that body dysmorphia was a risk, but only in the short time it took for his mind to reconcile with his new existence. There was a momentary blip where she thought her scans picked a passive PSy-QE field but it was too hard to make out in the ambient quantum field.
She logged it to her queue, among other tasks hogging her processor cycles . Nevertheless, it's urgency was low risk and besides she had more actionable tasks that needed doing. In which case she stepped into the helm-pit.
There, she paused, turning off the floating HUDs populating her vision as she surveyed everything in her purview. More notifications faded into subconscious awareness as Parallel Subordinate Intelligence algorithms awaited her beck and call for pertinent processes.
One of them was already monitoring her network ports, searching for local networks whilst broadcasting an SOS in Morse. It wouldn't do to have their whereabouts detected by unsavoury parties.
It was questionable if someone would respond especially in a storm capable of grounding their craft. Much to her consternation, she didn't have the know-how to telecast psionic communications outside of the noosphere.
Wherein intent was enough to convey a message as she had before meeting Nikos, the flipside of reality had rules no shortage of obstacles. Nonetheless, she put it out of mind, hopeful she'd soon happen upon psionic communication techniques.
As she oriented towards the instrument panel that commanded her attention, she found it hands down a marvel of otherworldly technology. Already programmable polymimetic crystals and lumencast displays, exotic trim, upholstery and panelling set it apart from anything Earth was capable of producing.
Lumencast displays were so like holograms she would have been forgiven for mistaking the two if not for the principles of their operation. They were different, psionics constructs of light being manipulable in ways pure light was not.
At a glance, they were pretty and eye-catching, their underpinnings bare for her to see and if need be, replicate. However, the real treasure was the information beyond their facade and within grasp of another facet of her abilities; technopathic psychometry aka technometry.
It was the first verifiable aspect of psionic talent she used in her initial interaction with the xenotechnology in their transport. While its existence stumped her current knowledge of scientific principles it allowed her to lift impressions of recent operations as she would snippets of metadata or a cache of cookies left behind from previous users.
With deftness did her fingers dance upon glyphic keys, opening gates to power, awakening dim controls as energy was repurposed from miscellaneous uses. Through basic pattern recognition, technometry guided her understanding of native linguistics, providing data for Rosetta's Babel. And through that she understood the many syntactic permutations used to ascribe meaning in the language from her first attempted jacking of the ship's interfaces.
Data from noetic threads merged into a singular track, collating and discarding whatever was pertinent to the moment. Then they split again, each at the ready, a blank slate to weave ideas, tangents and introspection into discernible patterns.
Symbology, it seemed, were simple and a constant across civilizations. Arcis put the Aldrmyric runes as a long lost sire of Greek and Norse with Eastern influences by way of ideography and phonetics.
Whereas glyphs symbolised the broad strokes, runes provided nuance. Runes were not a new encounter save their use in programming. The premise was sound if sophisticated especially for a system unshackled from the limits of binary coding.
Then again, that was the first hurdle when the language spoke to the machinations of a entity so different from Arcis as a plant was to a human. It was sentient much like a virtual intelligence was a collection of decision trees adapting to environmental stimuli but alive in a way a machine intelligence was not.
'A phren,' Arcis lifted the term from psychometric memory. Phren was the closest analogy to an independent non-sapient consciousness she could get to translating the term without losing meaning. In its own parlance, it was an Id bereft of Ego, a Mind lacking Intent just like her PSIs.
'Identity; autonomous consciousness of unnamed Auriverde class gyrelifter, ship type; terrestial hopper. What niche it fits remains to be seen as terrestial could very mean orbital or suborbital.'
' Novel,' Arcis mused. ' A new glossary of terms for a new language, technology with an alien history and peoples. Aside from Nikos I can't find any trace of them.'
But looking back, the spike in mental activity accompanying Nikos' intuitive grasp of ship controls was a smoking gun for the level of technology and what race it was made for.
'Helming the ship is akin to putting on a shell with pre-programmed instincts,' she mused. It was no different from mind-machine augmented reality that left subliminal programming on the user, improving them as it was improved in turn.
Arcis was understandably circumspect of what sort of traces the phren would leave on Nikos' mind and what they'd mean for his mental recovery and ability to pilot. It was similar to how her drone platform had worked but the ubiquity of such control interfaces was a point to its advantage.
It was already proven and thus generations ahead of Earth brain-machine technologies. Of interest were the mechanisms in which intended effect and purpose was translated to standardised signalling given the abstract nature of thoughtforms. The controls were borderline biotechnology as the crystalline interfaces used molycircuitry to facilitate computing processes.
It was method dissimilar to her own in construction yet the same in execution, thus a study of contrasts for tentative assessment of technological basis. There ought to have been some cross-platform compatibility where she could just morph her carbon nanotube and platinum hair or fingernails into a fiber-optic hack-jacking dongle but it was not to be.
' A shame,' Arcis shook her head, examining the lumencast of scrolling runic script letting her language engine do its job. It was like playing scrabble, using combinations of runes to close a circuit or manipulating an equaliser with hundreds of moving parts to get the right frequency. Having eyes with the resolution of an electron microscope to reveal the esoteric signals playing inside the crystalline interfaces.
Contrary to Arcis' fears the phren was not as entrenched in the dumb terminals. If the entity was the brain and nervous system, then the main ship systems were organs, each with specialised cells whose instructions continue to function even through brain death.
However, Arcis wanted to be sure that if it failed, she would manually override it. She owed it to herself to underpin the workings of the biotechnology for the sake of redundancy and total control. Whether her prior incarnation's instincts were peeking through was inconsequential.
Luckily, Arcis had theories that like her technopathy, the interfaces worked as a consequence of metaphysical variables occurring beyond her observation of quantum phenomena.
" And I just have to find a chinks in the armour," she murmured unsure if the phren would adapt and she'd only get one chance at it.. A galaxy of lumencast panes filled the helm-pit, the ship's bones bared for her to see. Arcis smiled lips full of teeth, flexing fingers as though readying for the performance of her life, and began a countdown.
Later, she would muse that a logical mind did not belie impulse. She would find out that instinct was not something she could extrapolate, especially when her own bias tainted perception of events.
What should have been a skimming foray of the ship's peripheral systems became an immersive delve into the labyrinthine rabbit hole of the phren's domain. There she'd found the numen, an metaphysical reflection of the ship's entirety and identity. In the noosphere, it was what data fortresses would have been to the cybersphere in Earth's near-future.
Glimpses of things within the ship left their mark all over her psyche, flashing through her memory like the remnants of a dream long after she'd come to. As the haze lifted with the assertion of gravity on her frame, a sigh of exhaustion stole from her lips.
On one hand, she'd inadvertently added jacking to her technopathic toolkit, on the other, she was already missing the freedom of three dimensional movement. Pinging her cybernetics, she noted her internal chronopathy diverged from real time the longer she was immersed until it plateaued out.
Three hours had passed for every second outside thus time dilation was a verifiable occurrence. Her core temperature had risen with energy expended as her hair radiated the excess in form of heat while she felt rather peckish from the ordeal, a sensation familiar because she had the qualia for it.
It was the wake up call that the metaphysical had tangible effects outside the aethereal. The psychosomatic ache from the contest of wills she'd inadvertently gotten into with the phren remained a testament to this.
Nevertheless, the experience was exhilarating in the way an adrenaline junkie got off the euphoria of toeing the razor between life and oblivion. It was as if the noosphere was made for her.
'The good; the whereabouts to stasis caches for supplies.' she mentally catalogued her gains. The fact they existed at all was well worth the trouncing she'd from going against the ship's phren. ' The bad; lacking a map in the nav-system chances are an op-sec wipe; a broken distress beacon in need of repairs; unknown whether it was sabotage or wear and tear and a primary main power plant that is suddenly so anaemic compromising self repairs.'
'Suppositions,' she deduced tapping her lip thoughtfully,' Without auxiliary power, the ansible for psionic communications, augury sensory suites and aegis effectors drew more from the ergwell . Continuous without maintenance, my impromptu quantum tunnelling and subsequent cosmic backwash as I transited into realspace pushed the tolerances and consequently exacerbated failure conditions.'
' Addendum and recommendations; If the numen's quasi-quantum mind construct was defensible, it bodes ill if there is capability to weaponise cognitohazards,' Arcis mused gingerly, lifting from where she lay. She bounced on the balls of her feet with the impulse to stretch before whisper quiet strides carried her into the main cabin.
As her attention fell on Nikos' sleeping form, tension she didn't know was on her shoulders dissipated at the sight. The lack of nightmares revealing whatever trauma was there was deeply repressed or mitigated due to his new brain chemistry and her hypnotherapy.
Satisfied with her observations, Arcis padded to the crystalline console above the vitastasis cradle. With the knowledge from her dive in the numen, she tapped away, pulling up information that needed decoding from its buffers before putting the cradle into hibernation.
She watched seams shift and mechanical arms pull the artifice into a fourfold niche like a revolving door, switching out with a storage compartment containing the stasis caches where rations were stored.
The crates were almost military and alien in aesthetics, with beveled instead of straight edges. A quick perusal scrolled of inventory several times internal storage volume shunted to the aether, she chanced upon her target. There was a pneumatic hiss as pressure equalised revealing within, a panoply of exotic food and drink in generic portable containers.
'One empty, two at half capacity. I need a calorie count for rationing and biochemistry analysis. We might be the only ones within a few weeks' journey but it's good to plan for contingencies, Arcis sighed, carrying with her a modest selection to an external hatchway above the helmpit.
' But we'll have to check just in case.' she thought, plans of putting together reconnaissance drones running through her PSIs. Hatch open, she jumped, crossing into the world held at bay by a flickering energy field.
It was dark out, the local star having set hours ago while heavy overcast obscured the distant horizon and whatever celestial bodies reigned the night. Her transhuman eyes were more than enough to wick up the meagre light that let her see the glistening remnants of windswept drizzles carried into the cave. The chorus of nocturnal creatures continued unabated and unperturbed by her intrusion.
Arcis breathed in and sampled a lungful of the circumambient atmosphere. The air was humid and barometric pressure was par the course due to the inclement weather. Concentration of aerobic and noble gases per volume deviated slightly by single digit percentages, breathable and within tolerances.
She might have gone without needing to breathe but someone else she knew did and testing the atmosphere was her prerogative. Suffice to say, the air quality index was excellent, not that she had a yardstick to measure it by. The symbian could also hear the whisper of magnetic field buzzing in the background and taste the ozone tang with her transhuman sensorium.
If not for the omnipresence of exotic energy making the ecosphere undeniably different, Arcis could have thought them stranded somewhere remote on Earth.
'There has to be a word more apt than 'exotic' to describe conceptually latent quantum particles of paracausality encapsulated within multidimensionally-omnipresent sentient energy fields,' she thought. ' A mouthful.'
On the other hand, the absence of signal noise was jarring, once again proving the absence of geopositioning and communication satellites.
'Another note to the list,' she hummed breathlessly tasking an PSI with schematics for a personal satellite whilst microwaving her first batch of rations between her palms. Mindful that Nikos would need to eat as well, she spun up a noetic thread juxtaposing her scans of Nikos' biometrics against the information pulled from the vitastasis cradle.
She noted the physiological changes first and queued clothing for fabrication after checking with the chrysalis that dynamolecules reserves were adequate
'Despite efficient compression ratio, enough is just never enough,' she thoughtfully frowned. ' Hmm, running the chrysalis long enough, I have to dump the surplus heat somewhere because… physics. But if I can repurpose it―'
She let that noetic thread fade into the background before jumping to another―
' If I'm reading this biodata correctly, Nikos has nascent abilities. What, remains the question . Evidently given his biological template they ought to be different from mine. If we want to leverage such abilities, we have to find a framework of commonality to ascertain how they work regardless,' Arcis noted.
The wafting of aroma drew her out of contemplation, indicating that her reheated rations were well cooked. Tweaking her olfactic sensors to maximum fidelity, she bit through the edible cellulose packaging. The first explosion of flavour hit her tongue, almost derailing her train of thought before she could revisit her prior inquiry.
The symbian's eyes flickered shut as an unbidden toe-curling moan of ecstasy bordering on obscene split her lips. Arcis' EVIE subroutines stuttered as she didn't so much taste as dissect her wondrous fare down to its constituent molecules while her noetic threads unerringly logged the biochemistry for toxicological and biological compatibility analysis.
Regardless of how the rations appeared to be honey glazed bread from cereals, nuts and dried fruits, the calorie dense meal was notably foreign. But far as she was concerned, it was safe for consumption.
Never had she thought food to be so delectable, citing that perhaps the vicarious experience of inherited memory lacked truthlikeness. She'd practically inhaled the rest before she remembered to dampen her EVIE utilisation. Mortified, she performed a recalibration account for electrochemical effects on emotion while she nursed a recyclable tumbler of thick herbal infusion.
Soon bereft of external influence, Arcis refocused on the conundrum that was framing paracausal effects to her principal. There wasn't much literature to be found on the subject unless she worked backwards by extrapolating her own abilities.
It was reaching, but Arcis might well have worked with the patchwork of snippets nicked from the ship's phren, her knowledge base and a cryptic equation. Even though the rest of the memory had degraded, she still recalled the god equation burned into her synthetic cerebral cortex with crystal clarity.
" Hard to forget about that when it is responsible for the creation of the quintessential staple of science fantasy," Arcis murmured, conjuring a lumencast of the equation and looking at it anew to see if she'd missed something.
Arcis wondered how she'd explain the workings of the metaphysical to Nikos when it was akin to showing a blind man colour. How then would she frame the concept of something he had not seen when he had preconceptions of how reality should work?
There were some avenues of approach that would use logic as a basis or emotion but she noted the pitfalls in becoming too verbose while putting across her meaning or aggravating disbelief.
Organic minds were, despite their plasticity, resistant to change and upending Nikos' worldview abruptly was detrimental and would make him dig in. She had to find a common foundation from works of fiction, philosophy and metaphysics to frame intangible concepts. For example, mathematical symbols could appeal to his logic.
If she gave him a verifiable explanation like the god equation, tied it with the ARC reactor and her ability to replicate lumencasts, he'd be smart enough to see where the wind blew.
" Our mysterious element Ash," she tapped her chin, absently eyeing the sky. It wasn't aether just because the phoneme was obvious. Sure, the way it worked was almost miraculous. As far as she was concerned, associating it with the literal meaning of 'divine breath' owing to its roots in the Ansuz futhorc rune was straightforward.
"It can't be that simple can it?" she groaned, throwing up a lumencast of all the data, equations and symbols she had for an attempt at dumbing down the principles. She saw the subterfuge at the heart of the matter in the naming of the project that conceived the element. Prometheus; because one would readily connect a stellarator's plasma to fire from the gods, yet that was only one half of the equation.
"Hnng, what secrets do you hide?" Arcis bit her lip as she once again pondered the god equation. Of course that too had its own symbol. At first glance, it was a greek delta whose vertices connected to the bottom of an omega symbol. Then realisation hit her like a lightning bolt.
"Its an omega-alpha symbol," she groaned, facepalming. "Keep it simple stupid, of course it stands for singularity! A return to Origin ― " It was a metaphorical light-bulb moment so illuminating she could not help but smile as a piece of the puzzle fell into place.
"Arche; a first principle, substance or primal element. Ligature, Ash…our mysterious element is Archeium!"
She grinned as a noetic thread split into several trains of thought. The answer to her quagmire had been in classical mechanics all along.
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Ch.004: Beachheads and Baselines
New
Morning began not with the familiarity of trilling alarms but the hiss of depressurisation as hatch opened and ambient noise spilled forth like a physical thing. Nikos startled, vision bleary as a shaft of light fell on his face evoking a grumble as he pulled somewhat inadequate covers over his shoulders. Only, it left his ankles exposed to the nipping chill.
In a moment of incoherence, Nikos stared at the formless blur through a slit-lidded bleary sight. Already curling his knees to his chest to make the most of diminishing warmth, he was lamenting whether it was worth getting up at all.
The ignorable bliss of sleep was long gone, overtaken by a mind slowly turning over wayward thoughts while the lucid dreams of coding in futhark runes tainting his recollections plunged him into further confusion.
" G'morning," someone chirped.
'Resa?! I could have sworn,' he rallied, jerking wide awake. Adrenaline flooded his system as he scrambled to get himself upright only to be fouled by tangled beddings that sent him spilling onto the floor. He let out an incorrigible slew of curses as he wrestled with his impromptu coccoon.
" Huhuhu, mon sieur? You okay down there?" He was not mistaken―no she sounded younger, higher by an octave and the wrong register. Suddenly, everything from yesternight hit him with the subtlety of a brick to the face.
'It wasn't a dream,' He dismayed, letting his head flop back as his vision swam into focus falling upon the instigator of his woes. Arcis loomed over him, arms akimbo with a foxy dimpled smile as though she knew something he didn't.
" G'morning," Nikos muttered, violently shoving off his beddings. " Where are w―no how long have I been asleep for?"
" Four solis," Arcis grinned.
" Four hours? Why do I know that is four hours?" Nikos twitched as a frisson of dissonance made his skin crawl. He hastily folded his sparse beddings into a ball of fabric he punted at his cot.
" Semantic memory, fascinating," said Arcis tapping her chin in thought as teal eyes twinkled with glee. She made a gesture with her other hand and Nikos startled at the light constructs with miscellaneous infographics bursting into existence.
" What does that have to do with anything?" Nikos squirmed, discomforted at being the subject of eyes seemed to see more than they let on.
" We'll have to test your muscle memory," Arcis reiterated. Nikos barely heard her as his attention was drawn to their current refuge and the world beyond the open hatch bay. He stumbled onto the door frame feeling as though the ground was spinning around him.
" Mon sieur?!"Arcis called out, alarmed but his throat was too dry for words.
"Breathe."
He felt himself held as he unhitched his breath with a conscious gulp of air. The alpine breeze filled his lungs with cutting crispness as susurrus of water sloshing against the ramp hatch reached his ears. Warmth from a familiar, yet dissimilar large orb of egg yellow and orange kissed the parts of his skin not covered by his bodysuit.
He gazed upon the diurnal star radiating a halo through morning advection misting across a landscape indistinguishable from the clouds. Peaks of lush forests and craggy weathered stone the appearance of islands in the fog.
There, spread a whole new world under an even stranger sky. It was peaceful, idyllic and inviting.
Islands meandered the sky casting shadows that made his stomach lurch with a feeling of profound insignificance as though he was an astronaut cast adrift in the void of space. Perhaps it was an allegory for his state of feeling unanchored without the stability and bounds of common sense.
" Mon sieur?" Arcis' voice brought him out of his trance. She'd sat him down on the ramp, bracketing him on the left side. Wrapped around his upper arm, her hold was a sturdy support as stable as rock.
" Resa," Nikos choked out. " How could I forget about her?!"
" You couldn't be blamed for that mon sieur,"Arcis murmured,
" But―" he snapped.
" I would have mentioned it today regardless," Arcis cut in.
Nikos' sudden jerk of the head almost gave him whiplash. Arcis' flinched, letting a sympathetic wince at what she perceived as a painful movement.
It was that expression he found rather endearing. A train of thought that also sent an electric jolt through his spine as he realised how close she clung to him. It was non-sequitur to the day before whereupon her transhumanity had come off as aloof and stilted.
For all that her origins Nikos did not once perceive her personhood as artificial. On the contrary, he was surprised they'd found a camaraderie of two people who'd known one another for ages.
It was from that fact the transition from her stiff mien to charming allure was so stark, catching him unawaress. In hindsight a day of high octane emotion and adrenaline with their survival on the line had left no room for second-guesses.
Something changed in the time he'd gone to sleep leaving him wondering what prompted her to become so humanlike in the course of one night.
" While you slept, I pooled information from the gyrelifter―"
'Gyrelifter?' He mouthed at the unfamiliar term.
"―and my own observations of the noosphere―" from behind, she took a sling pack pre-empting his question as she handed it to him. Thankfully she'd let go of his arm and quelling his self-consciousness as his mind found something worth his immediate attention.
"― I inferred that it was not a matter of if she made it but when," the conviction in her eyes touting it fact rather than speculation. Nikos' logic and fear warred for dominance, but it was harder to refute her when he saw Arcis' earnest expression.
Nikos sighed. A feeling he had none of the words for leadened his tongue as he bit back his protestations of apprehension.
" I won't ask you to trust my words," she grinned. The ball of barbed feelings unknotted from his throat as he wetted his cold-bitten lips. At his wordless nod, Arcis smiled. It was small and brief. Rueful, not pitying. A bright thing that lifted his spirit.
" I'll only request that ask you to let me explain things and leave all the information gathering to me please? It is what I'm good at."
An awkward contemplative silence fell over him. He again nodded in tentative acquiescence not trusting his words to convey the depth of his gratitude. Facing a task as dauntless as information gathering on his lonesome was already enough to bring him short.
Nikos was missing the convenience of his world. There was no search engine nor interwebs to reach for knowledge about something he didn't know nor the trappings and instruments of modern civilization he was familiar with.
"Parfait! Let me get some tasks done, " Arcis clapped her hands with pleasure. She smiled, hupped and then levered herself off the floor leaving Nikos with the unfamiliar sling bag.
There was a moment before he trusted himself to speak.
" I don't remember packing this among my stuff ," Nikos muttered weighing the article of luggage. It was on the light side, about as large as a single strap messenger bag and quite new.
As the sound of Arcis' bustle filled the silence, Nikos examined the bag closely. Between the strap and the main body was a distinctive, embroidered logo of a gold Q superimposed on a red X while oblong outline and volume spoke of the contents within.
Glum mood fled the eagerness of a techie with a new gadget as Nikos unzipped the main partition, retrieving two premium packages of matte black and rose gold QX logo, one larger than the other.
There was barely a pause between noting the peeled tamper-proof stickers and opening the larger package. Enconsced within the velvety insets was a phablet, a Xenoware Port-Dock™ and an augmented reality visor that could easily pass for wraparound polarised sunglasses.
Popping out the phablet, he brushed against the embossed logo behind the gun metal grey titanium aluminide shell with glee. While the premium texture of burnished metal felt good in his fingers, it was the anodised outlines breaking up an otherwise unadorned profile that really drew the eye.
Nikos knew no amount of wear and tear would disfigure the device nor would it smudge thanks to its stellar ingress protection rating. But never one to discount an ounce of prevention, Nikos clipped ruggedized protection sleeve around its body.
Ordinarily the lack of a charging brick and charging amenities would be cause for alarm but not so for the limited edition Quintek-Xenoware's Aefinity™ . He was rather excited because in his hands was a phablet with the world's first infinity battery with a lifetime warranty. It had been rumoured that components of its isopolymer were buried under patents and NDAs so much so only the heresay of its specifications abounded.
Nikos remembered the first releases being pre-orders based on a lottery system of undisclosed prices, like an auction. He shuddered to think of the obscene amount that might have been forked over to get one of the gadgets. More baffling was how his uncle had possibly gotten his mitts on one.
'Well, its not like I could ask whether he dipped into our trust fund ' Nikos huffed.' for all the good it'll do us in another world.'
He was about to peruse through the user's guide when a card fell out from between the pages. He was about to think nothing of it, when he saw the messy cursive text impressed on the paper and felt someone had jammed a lightning rod up his spine.
Brotherman! Twinnie!
HBD. You know, you're hard to please for a brother and before you get sappy with me 'bout pinching our pennies, Uncle Brandy got these through the lottery tickets. Dunno how much he paid for them though, maybe its better we didn't know. And yes, if you think you're the only one making moon eyes at Quintek's gizmos, think again!
Hah! I know you're the tech junkie in the family but even I, a grease monkey can appreciate one of these beauties. The kinda finishing on these babes makes a girl feel things you know? So metal! Anyways happy birthday to us eh?!
'It was our birthday,' Nikos thought angrily rubbing a tear from his cheek. He treated the birthday card as though it was the most valuable memento from his sister. He clutched it as one would a good luck charm. A reminder that even lost, there was something worth striving for and somewhere, somewhen out there Resa was alive.
As resolve coalesced into a fire in his belly as Nikos booted up the phablet, the process barely a blink on top of the line memory. He slipped on the AR visors, hooking it up to a wireless connection.
Then Nikos started a journal; a record of things to come, for the day he'd tell her about the journey between.
It was a while later that Nikos floated in a pool of heated water. Eyes closed, he imagined he was back on Earth, in the shade of cantilever umbrellas while a phablet piped ambient music on high fidelity stereo.
Alas, it would remain but a figment.
There was no singular word to encapsulate the discomfiting absence of modern amenities for one who'd gone from a world with porcelain thrones to the back end of nowhere. On one hand it was worse having the lack of in-plumbing being the least of his inconveniences. On the other, it was better because some things were easily jerry rigged, although the methods used could be considered overkill.
For instance, the perfect hemisphere of a heated pool was an oddball in a cave of dark weathered rocks whose naturally-occurring shallow depressions were eroded by eons of slow moving water. It was understandable why he found it hard to even conceive the equivalent of a mining laser as been employed to gouge out his bath pool.
'Madness! The amount of R and D its worth, if the corpos and military industrial complex back home would cry, ' Nikos thought, ruminating in the shadow of the biomorphic shuttle craft. ' And yet tame compared to whichever civilization invented the capability to transplant consciousness into bodies and helm ships with their minds.'
That souls existed and he was one wearing the equivalent of a bioengineered sleeve like some transhumanist science fiction horror was enough to send one over the edge. Already, he was hoping that nothing else would be so out of context as to break his brain but he made his peace just in case.
'Jumping right from bargaining to acceptance, heh…' Nikos mused humorlessly. ' It looks good, so I'll take it ?' he shook his head, pulling himself from the shallows. He clambering onto the damp stone amidst wisping steam that gave a flimsy impression of privacy before towelling off.
Thereafter the purr of zippers heralded the scrutiny of perusal the duffel bag's contents. It was with a gaze unseeing, he picked through through his stuff, recollections rekindled of the day he'd packed in everything for a vacation and convention that would never be.
Branded stitching and coffee brown leather wrinkled beneath his fingers, a pang of loss twinging in his heart as it reminded him of a similar aviator's jacket he'd never get to wear again.
Nikos supposed at the very least the cosmic whims had deigned to leave him some scraps of normalcy as he picked and discarded whatever would fit.Meanwhile, the fading fragrance of fabric softener made him want to preserve the only comforting piece of home in a ziploc bag like nostalgia in a bottle.
He all but shimmied into his briefs and lounge pants, the latter of which came up to his ankles. His tees were likewise a size too small on newly broad shoulders. Nikos had to make do with one of his token shirts which saw the outside of a closet once upon a blue moon.
'Bet I look like those himbos I used to envy,' he chuckled wryly at the sight of his bare feet.. Save a new pair of sandals whose soles would never see the beach he didn't have a fitting pair of shoes.
An insidious tangent latched onto his thoughts and dragged the dull remembrance of the last days. While the memory's sharp edges had been blurred so much so the experience was buried beneath the brume of oblivion, it all served to remind that sanctity of his mind was no more.
" Ugh," he prematurely spat toothpaste foam leaving the lingering taste of charcoal and mint. It was too sharp to his tongue and sinuses like a remedy of flu decongesting salts. Somehow he persevered right until he rinsed out his mouth and sputtered at the cutting chill of the water.
He was gathering his things grumbling at the prospects of a soon to be tasteless meal when the phablet chirped―
'A wifi connection already?! Why am I not surprised?' Nikos snorted pocketing the gadget with cautious haste. He wrung then slung the wet towel across his shoulders before shrugging on his duffel bag.
Wary of slippery footing, it was long and uneasy strides conveyed him past puddles and across patches of moss. It was like he'd gone back to puberty to possess the adroitness of a giraffe undergoing a growth spurt.
It was without incident and no small amount of nerves that he made it to the looming gyrelifter without incident. There, he paused for a momentary glimpse of the fuselage's exterior panelling all but marvelling at its burnished gold and olive aesthetics.
It looked as unmarred as the day it flew out whatever assembly line had put it together. One could hardly tell it was plagued by problems beneath its outer shell that came from a long submergence in the drink.
Taking in the entirety of what would become their base on the move, Nikos hesitated before stepping onto the hatchway.
'A new home huh?' he thought, regarding the cabin reminiscent of a camper van and a mobile mission control centre that straddled the line between science and fantasy. The vitastasis cradle was nowhere to be seen, stashed somewhere unobtrusive alongside the esoteric workstations taking up volume to give the space a minimalist yet cozy aesthetic.
In furtherance of the same, fixtures had been designed to be multifunctional and featured recessed storage spaces with flowing shapes. The finishings were charcoal grey with grainy textures almost as though shaped organically.
" Mon sieur?" From a table laden with containers, the other occupant of the ship made herself known with a smile. Nikos missed a step with the affectedly coy tone bordering on servility.
He was taken aback by the abrupt change in appearance. Arcis was in a cyberpunk bob with a long voluminous mullet braid hung over her shoulder, a stark departure from her previous hairstyle.
Her current outfit was a pair of low rise mini shorts worn over a grey leotard, a very daring ensemble only accentuated by translucid hosiery over her thighs .
In that ephemeral juncture, Nikos was suddenly conscious of Arcis' femininity and the fact that she was the only other sapient soul for leagues. Half-hearted excuses surged to his lips, only to die asphyxiated in his throat. What was he deflecting?
" Arcis," he managed to choke out, heart hammering as he passed her by.
'Ah, after all these years living with my sister, I am flustered,' went unsaid.
His face burned, betrayed by a hitch in his voice. Never had he thought himself impulsive but feeling inhibitions buckle beneath a caprice of want made him reconsider how fast he could douse himself in the nearby stream.
Suddenly the compartment walls were too small, as though they shared the room with a pachyderm.
" So food huh?" Nikos bit his lip, reasserting composure by the skin of his teeth. He prayed that the clenching in his gut was just hunger of the epicurean kind. Arcis motioned for him to sit on a crate turned breadthwise as she bustled, positioning the assortment of casserole dishes, food thermoses and utensils.
" Oui, and more besides," Arcis chirped, making the butterflies flutter in his stomach." After vitastasis, your body needs the calories."
Nevertheless, the lack of scent was as perturbing as the containers' acquisition. From the outset, all they'd had were plastic bottles and his travel mug yet here were more containers with sandblasted steel facings in varying shades of grey.
'Silicone?' Nikos quirked a questioning brow as he prodded the covers to feel the soft material on the edges as seams between the lid. . It was common for pressure seals and shock absorption.
A glint of unbridled excitement shining behind Arcis' gaze told him she was just dying to let everything spill. Nikos puffed out air from his cheeks in exasperation and gestured her to get on with it. She picked a dish, opening it with a flourish and―
" Voila,"
―the aroma of wondrous soup steeped in herbs and spices hit him like a punch to the nostrils, making his stomach growl.
Thoughts of having his meal ruined by his recent ordeal with oral hygiene flew out the window as his mouth watered. A spoon was already at his fingers, no recollection of its acquisition as he dug in, the top layer crumbling like well crisped gratin into the thick sumptuous contents within.
Nikos denied the manly groans; he was not an animal. And if he thought the beatific smile of his companion every time he came up for air worth immortalising well, he'd take it to his grave.
'Alas, all good things end,' Nikos thought somberly.
Nursing a mug between his palms, he swirled the dregs of the bizarre herbal infusion that passed for tea, mourning warmth long gone. It was unlikely that he'd divine the meaning of the universe from the bottom of the vessel, however long he stared at it.
'And that is what I'm afraid of,' Nikos mused, reluctantly peeling his eyes off to meet Arcis'. It seemed as though she'd been waiting for him to gather himself while partaking her own drink. It was so pedestrian to see her sitting and sipping tea with the joie de vivre of a woman enjoying the good things in life as if everything was new.
'If only someone knew she was no ordinary girl,' Nikos sighed.
" Alright then," Nikos began. " We've almost definitely been shanghaied―"
"―isekaied," Arcis giggled, leaning against her palm.
" Har har…" He deadpanned. Nikos cast his gaze afar, past the strange beyond the ever unreachable azure. He made as if to frame the incadescent and silent sojourner of the skies between his pointer and thumb as though he could.
" When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains―" he murmured.
"―no matter how improbable, must be true," she finished for him. Blue and gold irises of central heterochromia unflinchingly met his honeyed and green flecked hazels in companionable commiseration.
"We've put aside how prevalent it is citing tentative evidence, so... we're working under the assumption that we are not the only ones," his voice hitched, denouncing the nightmare scenarios that ensnared his thoughts.
Nikos shook them off, not easily but as though they were a bothersome spiderweb whose gossamer touch lingered long after he'd rid himself of them. A smaller palm squeezed his hand, letting Nikos borrow the reassurance in the strength of its owner.
" Having established that," he bit the inside of his cheek, " what resources can we leverage? What power, connections and information should we seek to secure and how? What is our most critical challenge?"
Silence.
Then…
" Archeium," Arcis began.
" Arche―" Nikos choked. " Archeium?"
" Element zero…elemental symbol ash," she cast the chemical notation in light. " Also known as Ergon, according to the data dump I pulled."
" Really? Not Aethium? Aethereum? " Nikos asked dubiously. " No conformation to chemical nomenclature?"
" Too obvious?" Arcis snorted.
"Why am I now hearing about this? It would have hit the scientific publications back home?" He sighed, rubbing the nape of his neck exasperatedly. Nikos didn't recall the entirety of the periodic table, but he knew there was a precursor with a hypothetical element consisting only of neutrons, which never caught on.
" I should probably point out that your phablet's quantum battery is made of Ae-Li polymer," she grinned. " As did my quantum core's ."
" Wow…it both makes sense and doesn't ," Nikos tousled his hair, muttering 'archeium' under his breath. He'd been prepared to have his world view flipped but that took the cake.
" Somehow I'm not surprised. I thought it was too overengineered for a blackboxed quantum processor, which I remembered leaving it back at home, " he trailed off.
Nikos couldn't shake the feeling it was the one innocuous variable likely to be a catalyst for a cosmic mishap. It was an assumption he didn't voice when the how and why of it raised more questions than it answered.
" It is not unlikely that it is responsible for the phenomenon that brought us here," Arcis nonetheless said. " After was rather instrumental in providing zero point energy for the chrysalis droid for the equivalence of quantum tunneling; otherwise, I would not be here." Arcis asserted.
Nikos gulped thickly. Zero point energy, no, limitless energy was the stuff of every science fiction dream and post scarcity society. On the flipside, being spirited away by the quintessential unobtanium of zero point energy was shocking enough but seeing thinking of it's applications was something else.
" Coming around, eh?" She grinned, clapping her hands with glee like she'd found enlightenment.
"Archeium, or Ergon in this world, is our key to resources, power and connections," she chimed, flicking her palm in the space between their table. The Ash symbol sprouted dendritic branches that linked into topical headings of new terms seen for the first time, their meanings right there at the tip of his tongue.
'Semantic memory again?' he'd mused. Evidently, Arcis had been watching for his reaction.
Then there were others. One mathematical formula that looked like the lovechild of quantum mechanics and greek. It was eldritch, eerie in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on; the god equation.
" With exotic energy, we have new technology." More lumencasts popped open, including a three dimensional silhouette of their ship, his own body. " New paradigms, ways of conceptualising reality and novel use cases," followed by models of weapons, armour and esoteric gadgetry.
" What the hell," Nikos cursed, throwing his hands in disbelief. " I know you know I don't know much about quantum mechanics this is for real right? And those hol-oprojections ?"
" Learnt how to do that last night, tehee, " Arcis giggled." You almost sound like you wanted to be wrong,"
" Touche ," Nikos groaned. " I should have known what I was sowing when I quoted the maxim of eliminating the improbable."
" Then welcome to metaphysics one-o-one," Arcis smiled, her gesture encapsulating the galaxy of lumencasts floating around them.
In a moment of incoherence, Nikos stared at the formless blur through a slit-lidded bleary sight. Already curling his knees to his chest to make the most of diminishing warmth, he was lamenting whether it was worth getting up at all.
The ignorable bliss of sleep was long gone, overtaken by a mind slowly turning over wayward thoughts while the lucid dreams of coding in futhark runes tainting his recollections plunged him into further confusion.
" G'morning," someone chirped.
'Resa?! I could have sworn,' he rallied, jerking wide awake. Adrenaline flooded his system as he scrambled to get himself upright only to be fouled by tangled beddings that sent him spilling onto the floor. He let out an incorrigible slew of curses as he wrestled with his impromptu coccoon.
" Huhuhu, mon sieur? You okay down there?" He was not mistaken―no she sounded younger, higher by an octave and the wrong register. Suddenly, everything from yesternight hit him with the subtlety of a brick to the face.
'It wasn't a dream,' He dismayed, letting his head flop back as his vision swam into focus falling upon the instigator of his woes. Arcis loomed over him, arms akimbo with a foxy dimpled smile as though she knew something he didn't.
" G'morning," Nikos muttered, violently shoving off his beddings. " Where are w―no how long have I been asleep for?"
" Four solis," Arcis grinned.
" Four hours? Why do I know that is four hours?" Nikos twitched as a frisson of dissonance made his skin crawl. He hastily folded his sparse beddings into a ball of fabric he punted at his cot.
" Semantic memory, fascinating," said Arcis tapping her chin in thought as teal eyes twinkled with glee. She made a gesture with her other hand and Nikos startled at the light constructs with miscellaneous infographics bursting into existence.
" What does that have to do with anything?" Nikos squirmed, discomforted at being the subject of eyes seemed to see more than they let on.
" We'll have to test your muscle memory," Arcis reiterated. Nikos barely heard her as his attention was drawn to their current refuge and the world beyond the open hatch bay. He stumbled onto the door frame feeling as though the ground was spinning around him.
" Mon sieur?!"Arcis called out, alarmed but his throat was too dry for words.
"Breathe."
He felt himself held as he unhitched his breath with a conscious gulp of air. The alpine breeze filled his lungs with cutting crispness as susurrus of water sloshing against the ramp hatch reached his ears. Warmth from a familiar, yet dissimilar large orb of egg yellow and orange kissed the parts of his skin not covered by his bodysuit.
He gazed upon the diurnal star radiating a halo through morning advection misting across a landscape indistinguishable from the clouds. Peaks of lush forests and craggy weathered stone the appearance of islands in the fog.
There, spread a whole new world under an even stranger sky. It was peaceful, idyllic and inviting.
Islands meandered the sky casting shadows that made his stomach lurch with a feeling of profound insignificance as though he was an astronaut cast adrift in the void of space. Perhaps it was an allegory for his state of feeling unanchored without the stability and bounds of common sense.
" Mon sieur?" Arcis' voice brought him out of his trance. She'd sat him down on the ramp, bracketing him on the left side. Wrapped around his upper arm, her hold was a sturdy support as stable as rock.
" Resa," Nikos choked out. " How could I forget about her?!"
" You couldn't be blamed for that mon sieur,"Arcis murmured,
" But―" he snapped.
" I would have mentioned it today regardless," Arcis cut in.
Nikos' sudden jerk of the head almost gave him whiplash. Arcis' flinched, letting a sympathetic wince at what she perceived as a painful movement.
It was that expression he found rather endearing. A train of thought that also sent an electric jolt through his spine as he realised how close she clung to him. It was non-sequitur to the day before whereupon her transhumanity had come off as aloof and stilted.
For all that her origins Nikos did not once perceive her personhood as artificial. On the contrary, he was surprised they'd found a camaraderie of two people who'd known one another for ages.
It was from that fact the transition from her stiff mien to charming allure was so stark, catching him unawaress. In hindsight a day of high octane emotion and adrenaline with their survival on the line had left no room for second-guesses.
Something changed in the time he'd gone to sleep leaving him wondering what prompted her to become so humanlike in the course of one night.
" While you slept, I pooled information from the gyrelifter―"
'Gyrelifter?' He mouthed at the unfamiliar term.
"―and my own observations of the noosphere―" from behind, she took a sling pack pre-empting his question as she handed it to him. Thankfully she'd let go of his arm and quelling his self-consciousness as his mind found something worth his immediate attention.
"― I inferred that it was not a matter of if she made it but when," the conviction in her eyes touting it fact rather than speculation. Nikos' logic and fear warred for dominance, but it was harder to refute her when he saw Arcis' earnest expression.
Nikos sighed. A feeling he had none of the words for leadened his tongue as he bit back his protestations of apprehension.
" I won't ask you to trust my words," she grinned. The ball of barbed feelings unknotted from his throat as he wetted his cold-bitten lips. At his wordless nod, Arcis smiled. It was small and brief. Rueful, not pitying. A bright thing that lifted his spirit.
" I'll only request that ask you to let me explain things and leave all the information gathering to me please? It is what I'm good at."
An awkward contemplative silence fell over him. He again nodded in tentative acquiescence not trusting his words to convey the depth of his gratitude. Facing a task as dauntless as information gathering on his lonesome was already enough to bring him short.
Nikos was missing the convenience of his world. There was no search engine nor interwebs to reach for knowledge about something he didn't know nor the trappings and instruments of modern civilization he was familiar with.
"Parfait! Let me get some tasks done, " Arcis clapped her hands with pleasure. She smiled, hupped and then levered herself off the floor leaving Nikos with the unfamiliar sling bag.
There was a moment before he trusted himself to speak.
" I don't remember packing this among my stuff ," Nikos muttered weighing the article of luggage. It was on the light side, about as large as a single strap messenger bag and quite new.
As the sound of Arcis' bustle filled the silence, Nikos examined the bag closely. Between the strap and the main body was a distinctive, embroidered logo of a gold Q superimposed on a red X while oblong outline and volume spoke of the contents within.
Glum mood fled the eagerness of a techie with a new gadget as Nikos unzipped the main partition, retrieving two premium packages of matte black and rose gold QX logo, one larger than the other.
There was barely a pause between noting the peeled tamper-proof stickers and opening the larger package. Enconsced within the velvety insets was a phablet, a Xenoware Port-Dock™ and an augmented reality visor that could easily pass for wraparound polarised sunglasses.
Popping out the phablet, he brushed against the embossed logo behind the gun metal grey titanium aluminide shell with glee. While the premium texture of burnished metal felt good in his fingers, it was the anodised outlines breaking up an otherwise unadorned profile that really drew the eye.
Nikos knew no amount of wear and tear would disfigure the device nor would it smudge thanks to its stellar ingress protection rating. But never one to discount an ounce of prevention, Nikos clipped ruggedized protection sleeve around its body.
Ordinarily the lack of a charging brick and charging amenities would be cause for alarm but not so for the limited edition Quintek-Xenoware's Aefinity™ . He was rather excited because in his hands was a phablet with the world's first infinity battery with a lifetime warranty. It had been rumoured that components of its isopolymer were buried under patents and NDAs so much so only the heresay of its specifications abounded.
Nikos remembered the first releases being pre-orders based on a lottery system of undisclosed prices, like an auction. He shuddered to think of the obscene amount that might have been forked over to get one of the gadgets. More baffling was how his uncle had possibly gotten his mitts on one.
'Well, its not like I could ask whether he dipped into our trust fund ' Nikos huffed.' for all the good it'll do us in another world.'
He was about to peruse through the user's guide when a card fell out from between the pages. He was about to think nothing of it, when he saw the messy cursive text impressed on the paper and felt someone had jammed a lightning rod up his spine.
Brotherman! Twinnie!
HBD. You know, you're hard to please for a brother and before you get sappy with me 'bout pinching our pennies, Uncle Brandy got these through the lottery tickets. Dunno how much he paid for them though, maybe its better we didn't know. And yes, if you think you're the only one making moon eyes at Quintek's gizmos, think again!
Hah! I know you're the tech junkie in the family but even I, a grease monkey can appreciate one of these beauties. The kinda finishing on these babes makes a girl feel things you know? So metal! Anyways happy birthday to us eh?!
Teases,
R. Ty.
๑˃́ꇴ˂̀๑ ᕦ( ˘ᴗ˘ )ᕤ
R. Ty.
๑˃́ꇴ˂̀๑ ᕦ( ˘ᴗ˘ )ᕤ
'It was our birthday,' Nikos thought angrily rubbing a tear from his cheek. He treated the birthday card as though it was the most valuable memento from his sister. He clutched it as one would a good luck charm. A reminder that even lost, there was something worth striving for and somewhere, somewhen out there Resa was alive.
As resolve coalesced into a fire in his belly as Nikos booted up the phablet, the process barely a blink on top of the line memory. He slipped on the AR visors, hooking it up to a wireless connection.
Then Nikos started a journal; a record of things to come, for the day he'd tell her about the journey between.
It was a while later that Nikos floated in a pool of heated water. Eyes closed, he imagined he was back on Earth, in the shade of cantilever umbrellas while a phablet piped ambient music on high fidelity stereo.
Alas, it would remain but a figment.
There was no singular word to encapsulate the discomfiting absence of modern amenities for one who'd gone from a world with porcelain thrones to the back end of nowhere. On one hand it was worse having the lack of in-plumbing being the least of his inconveniences. On the other, it was better because some things were easily jerry rigged, although the methods used could be considered overkill.
For instance, the perfect hemisphere of a heated pool was an oddball in a cave of dark weathered rocks whose naturally-occurring shallow depressions were eroded by eons of slow moving water. It was understandable why he found it hard to even conceive the equivalent of a mining laser as been employed to gouge out his bath pool.
'Madness! The amount of R and D its worth, if the corpos and military industrial complex back home would cry, ' Nikos thought, ruminating in the shadow of the biomorphic shuttle craft. ' And yet tame compared to whichever civilization invented the capability to transplant consciousness into bodies and helm ships with their minds.'
That souls existed and he was one wearing the equivalent of a bioengineered sleeve like some transhumanist science fiction horror was enough to send one over the edge. Already, he was hoping that nothing else would be so out of context as to break his brain but he made his peace just in case.
'Jumping right from bargaining to acceptance, heh…' Nikos mused humorlessly. ' It looks good, so I'll take it ?' he shook his head, pulling himself from the shallows. He clambering onto the damp stone amidst wisping steam that gave a flimsy impression of privacy before towelling off.
Thereafter the purr of zippers heralded the scrutiny of perusal the duffel bag's contents. It was with a gaze unseeing, he picked through through his stuff, recollections rekindled of the day he'd packed in everything for a vacation and convention that would never be.
Branded stitching and coffee brown leather wrinkled beneath his fingers, a pang of loss twinging in his heart as it reminded him of a similar aviator's jacket he'd never get to wear again.
Nikos supposed at the very least the cosmic whims had deigned to leave him some scraps of normalcy as he picked and discarded whatever would fit.Meanwhile, the fading fragrance of fabric softener made him want to preserve the only comforting piece of home in a ziploc bag like nostalgia in a bottle.
He all but shimmied into his briefs and lounge pants, the latter of which came up to his ankles. His tees were likewise a size too small on newly broad shoulders. Nikos had to make do with one of his token shirts which saw the outside of a closet once upon a blue moon.
'Bet I look like those himbos I used to envy,' he chuckled wryly at the sight of his bare feet.. Save a new pair of sandals whose soles would never see the beach he didn't have a fitting pair of shoes.
An insidious tangent latched onto his thoughts and dragged the dull remembrance of the last days. While the memory's sharp edges had been blurred so much so the experience was buried beneath the brume of oblivion, it all served to remind that sanctity of his mind was no more.
" Ugh," he prematurely spat toothpaste foam leaving the lingering taste of charcoal and mint. It was too sharp to his tongue and sinuses like a remedy of flu decongesting salts. Somehow he persevered right until he rinsed out his mouth and sputtered at the cutting chill of the water.
He was gathering his things grumbling at the prospects of a soon to be tasteless meal when the phablet chirped―
|Stop primping, brkfast ready ! |
'A wifi connection already?! Why am I not surprised?' Nikos snorted pocketing the gadget with cautious haste. He wrung then slung the wet towel across his shoulders before shrugging on his duffel bag.
Wary of slippery footing, it was long and uneasy strides conveyed him past puddles and across patches of moss. It was like he'd gone back to puberty to possess the adroitness of a giraffe undergoing a growth spurt.
It was without incident and no small amount of nerves that he made it to the looming gyrelifter without incident. There, he paused for a momentary glimpse of the fuselage's exterior panelling all but marvelling at its burnished gold and olive aesthetics.
It looked as unmarred as the day it flew out whatever assembly line had put it together. One could hardly tell it was plagued by problems beneath its outer shell that came from a long submergence in the drink.
Taking in the entirety of what would become their base on the move, Nikos hesitated before stepping onto the hatchway.
'A new home huh?' he thought, regarding the cabin reminiscent of a camper van and a mobile mission control centre that straddled the line between science and fantasy. The vitastasis cradle was nowhere to be seen, stashed somewhere unobtrusive alongside the esoteric workstations taking up volume to give the space a minimalist yet cozy aesthetic.
In furtherance of the same, fixtures had been designed to be multifunctional and featured recessed storage spaces with flowing shapes. The finishings were charcoal grey with grainy textures almost as though shaped organically.
" Mon sieur?" From a table laden with containers, the other occupant of the ship made herself known with a smile. Nikos missed a step with the affectedly coy tone bordering on servility.
He was taken aback by the abrupt change in appearance. Arcis was in a cyberpunk bob with a long voluminous mullet braid hung over her shoulder, a stark departure from her previous hairstyle.
Her current outfit was a pair of low rise mini shorts worn over a grey leotard, a very daring ensemble only accentuated by translucid hosiery over her thighs .
In that ephemeral juncture, Nikos was suddenly conscious of Arcis' femininity and the fact that she was the only other sapient soul for leagues. Half-hearted excuses surged to his lips, only to die asphyxiated in his throat. What was he deflecting?
" Arcis," he managed to choke out, heart hammering as he passed her by.
'Ah, after all these years living with my sister, I am flustered,' went unsaid.
His face burned, betrayed by a hitch in his voice. Never had he thought himself impulsive but feeling inhibitions buckle beneath a caprice of want made him reconsider how fast he could douse himself in the nearby stream.
Suddenly the compartment walls were too small, as though they shared the room with a pachyderm.
" So food huh?" Nikos bit his lip, reasserting composure by the skin of his teeth. He prayed that the clenching in his gut was just hunger of the epicurean kind. Arcis motioned for him to sit on a crate turned breadthwise as she bustled, positioning the assortment of casserole dishes, food thermoses and utensils.
" Oui, and more besides," Arcis chirped, making the butterflies flutter in his stomach." After vitastasis, your body needs the calories."
Nevertheless, the lack of scent was as perturbing as the containers' acquisition. From the outset, all they'd had were plastic bottles and his travel mug yet here were more containers with sandblasted steel facings in varying shades of grey.
'Silicone?' Nikos quirked a questioning brow as he prodded the covers to feel the soft material on the edges as seams between the lid. . It was common for pressure seals and shock absorption.
A glint of unbridled excitement shining behind Arcis' gaze told him she was just dying to let everything spill. Nikos puffed out air from his cheeks in exasperation and gestured her to get on with it. She picked a dish, opening it with a flourish and―
" Voila,"
―the aroma of wondrous soup steeped in herbs and spices hit him like a punch to the nostrils, making his stomach growl.
Thoughts of having his meal ruined by his recent ordeal with oral hygiene flew out the window as his mouth watered. A spoon was already at his fingers, no recollection of its acquisition as he dug in, the top layer crumbling like well crisped gratin into the thick sumptuous contents within.
Nikos denied the manly groans; he was not an animal. And if he thought the beatific smile of his companion every time he came up for air worth immortalising well, he'd take it to his grave.
'Alas, all good things end,' Nikos thought somberly.
Nursing a mug between his palms, he swirled the dregs of the bizarre herbal infusion that passed for tea, mourning warmth long gone. It was unlikely that he'd divine the meaning of the universe from the bottom of the vessel, however long he stared at it.
'And that is what I'm afraid of,' Nikos mused, reluctantly peeling his eyes off to meet Arcis'. It seemed as though she'd been waiting for him to gather himself while partaking her own drink. It was so pedestrian to see her sitting and sipping tea with the joie de vivre of a woman enjoying the good things in life as if everything was new.
'If only someone knew she was no ordinary girl,' Nikos sighed.
" Alright then," Nikos began. " We've almost definitely been shanghaied―"
"―isekaied," Arcis giggled, leaning against her palm.
" Har har…" He deadpanned. Nikos cast his gaze afar, past the strange beyond the ever unreachable azure. He made as if to frame the incadescent and silent sojourner of the skies between his pointer and thumb as though he could.
" When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains―" he murmured.
"―no matter how improbable, must be true," she finished for him. Blue and gold irises of central heterochromia unflinchingly met his honeyed and green flecked hazels in companionable commiseration.
"We've put aside how prevalent it is citing tentative evidence, so... we're working under the assumption that we are not the only ones," his voice hitched, denouncing the nightmare scenarios that ensnared his thoughts.
Nikos shook them off, not easily but as though they were a bothersome spiderweb whose gossamer touch lingered long after he'd rid himself of them. A smaller palm squeezed his hand, letting Nikos borrow the reassurance in the strength of its owner.
" Having established that," he bit the inside of his cheek, " what resources can we leverage? What power, connections and information should we seek to secure and how? What is our most critical challenge?"
Silence.
Then…
" Archeium," Arcis began.
" Arche―" Nikos choked. " Archeium?"
" Element zero…elemental symbol ash," she cast the chemical notation in light. " Also known as Ergon, according to the data dump I pulled."
" Really? Not Aethium? Aethereum? " Nikos asked dubiously. " No conformation to chemical nomenclature?"
" Too obvious?" Arcis snorted.
"Why am I now hearing about this? It would have hit the scientific publications back home?" He sighed, rubbing the nape of his neck exasperatedly. Nikos didn't recall the entirety of the periodic table, but he knew there was a precursor with a hypothetical element consisting only of neutrons, which never caught on.
" I should probably point out that your phablet's quantum battery is made of Ae-Li polymer," she grinned. " As did my quantum core's ."
" Wow…it both makes sense and doesn't ," Nikos tousled his hair, muttering 'archeium' under his breath. He'd been prepared to have his world view flipped but that took the cake.
" Somehow I'm not surprised. I thought it was too overengineered for a blackboxed quantum processor, which I remembered leaving it back at home, " he trailed off.
Nikos couldn't shake the feeling it was the one innocuous variable likely to be a catalyst for a cosmic mishap. It was an assumption he didn't voice when the how and why of it raised more questions than it answered.
" It is not unlikely that it is responsible for the phenomenon that brought us here," Arcis nonetheless said. " After was rather instrumental in providing zero point energy for the chrysalis droid for the equivalence of quantum tunneling; otherwise, I would not be here." Arcis asserted.
Nikos gulped thickly. Zero point energy, no, limitless energy was the stuff of every science fiction dream and post scarcity society. On the flipside, being spirited away by the quintessential unobtanium of zero point energy was shocking enough but seeing thinking of it's applications was something else.
" Coming around, eh?" She grinned, clapping her hands with glee like she'd found enlightenment.
"Archeium, or Ergon in this world, is our key to resources, power and connections," she chimed, flicking her palm in the space between their table. The Ash symbol sprouted dendritic branches that linked into topical headings of new terms seen for the first time, their meanings right there at the tip of his tongue.
'Semantic memory again?' he'd mused. Evidently, Arcis had been watching for his reaction.
Then there were others. One mathematical formula that looked like the lovechild of quantum mechanics and greek. It was eldritch, eerie in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on; the god equation.
" With exotic energy, we have new technology." More lumencasts popped open, including a three dimensional silhouette of their ship, his own body. " New paradigms, ways of conceptualising reality and novel use cases," followed by models of weapons, armour and esoteric gadgetry.
" What the hell," Nikos cursed, throwing his hands in disbelief. " I know you know I don't know much about quantum mechanics this is for real right? And those hol-oprojections ?"
" Learnt how to do that last night, tehee, " Arcis giggled." You almost sound like you wanted to be wrong,"
" Touche ," Nikos groaned. " I should have known what I was sowing when I quoted the maxim of eliminating the improbable."
" Then welcome to metaphysics one-o-one," Arcis smiled, her gesture encapsulating the galaxy of lumencasts floating around them.
Ch.005: Sufficiently Advanced!
New
" Before the beginning, there was protomatter," she said. "A infinitesimally hyperdense corpuscle of it with an unquantifiable weight," she made a pinching motion, " you could call it an infinite singularity…" A point of unlight, a quantum singularity wobbled, growing in resolution until it was visible to the naked eye.
" In a moment, it expanded―" she clapped, smashing the eldritch globule. It burst into a star field of spiralling shapes and pinwheeling clusters as it consumed a nebulous darkness. " Giving rise to the quarks, atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies. Matter became energy and time…moved. Thus the adage that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. "
"So the Big Bang hmm?" Nikos mulled.
"Oui. Fast forward some billions of years and change, came theories on the behaviour of the universe, the theories of quantizing energy, probabilistic behaviour of energy, wave-particle nature, and so forth ," Arcis hummed, a lumencast populating with formulas and notes which she then banished from the foreground with a flourish.
Nikos wanted to grasp the ease with which she could manipulate light. It was almost magical, which was saying something for all that it came from the expy of a synth.
" None of the theories are conclusive," she stated. " Some were untestable, almost in the realm of pseudoscience, while others suffered what Einstein described as non-locality. One of his famous quotes was that all of physics could not fit into one neat little box―" she shook her head, feigning disappointment.
" And what do you think?" Nikos queried.
" Without the box, of course," Arcis smirked. Nikos groaned.
" The problem modern humanity faced was explaining everything with tangible and mundane techniques based on prevailing experimental methods and measuring instruments," she huffed.
"Just because it was unexplainable does not mean it does not exist. Like the grail of quantum physicists everywhere, dark matter and recently, archeium!" She threw up her hands, sending her neatly stacked lumencasts spiralling every which way.
One of them beaned him on the head and burst into motes of light. Nikos quirked a brow.
" See, modern theories explain matter and energy, ergo matter in motion. What they can't verify is how consciousness neatly ties up the theories together. For what could dictate whether something exists as matter or energy and in what form and spectra but a being with knowledge of their state?"
" Where have I heard that before?" Nikos muttered, then snapped his fingers in realisation. "Laplace's demon?"
" Ding, ding, ding! " Arcis gestured, her finger guns shooting sparks of light. " And that brings us back to metaphysics one-o-one. Before science became ink on parchment, the origin of everything was already quoted verbatim in John chapter one, verses one to four―"
It was the quintessential chronicle of creation, after which myths would paint themselves in various styles and prose. Though he'd been agnostic before he even knew what the word meant, he thought a being with such venerated power couldn't be anything but a deity. It left him reeling.
Without first-hand experience, or the obscure and hypothetical applications of monist physics and trivia of various science-fantasy genres, the minutiae of the god equation could only be understood in the abstract. But seeing the god equation had a significance at par to man's first discovery of fire, or this case, dare he say the promethean flame?
" I have to say I did not see that coming," he remarked, massaging his thighs, legs gone numb from inactivity.
" What? A synth quoting religion? Creation stories are a worthy discourse for existentialist philosophers," Arcis quipped.
" Science and religion—who'd have known? Though I suppose in a hypothetical future science could've become a religion," Nikos said brow furrowed in consternation." How does that tie into this? " He helplessly gesticulated.
" Right, apologies," Arcis chimed, clapping her hands ." In summary, it is the theory of the quantum mind and the quantum field that ties consciousness with matter and energy into a phenomenon called the Noosphere.
In the conventional description of metaphysics, the noosphere is a manifestation of the collective consciousness in the quantum field. And taking Earth for example, with archeium sustaining the energy needs of infrastructure for quantum computations, the cybersphere could have reached critical mass.
Consequently, advancements in information technology EM activity would inevitably intersect with the quantum field thus beginning the first milestone of a technological singularity. First to come about would have been full-dive immersion in which―"
Nikos felt his mouth go dry.
"―the creation of virtual worlds and consciousnesses would be feasible, followed another tier in human evolution through psionics. Uh, we're divagating," Arcis caught herself. " In our context, the existence of the quantum mind provides a basis through which a chaotic universe is predictable and consequently the power to rewrite reality in a fundamental way."
" Are you saying that the mind being a quantum superposition of electrical activity in the brain is a proven theory?" Nikos couldn't help but croak. Of all the revelations, it was the one he understood most vividly through his perusal of papers on theoretical man-machine interfaces.
To think Earth had been a couple of years from full dive immersion and then to miss it through no fault of his twinged a sore spot something fierce. It was irrational and couldn't be helped that he was once again, missing out.
" Oui, a rather elementary explanation but close enough," Arcis added, unaware of Nikos' predicament. "In full, sensory and motor input is driven by deterministic electromagnetic interactions, while the quantum field is perceived as the source of cognition. Thusly, inferred quantum superposition and entanglement are responsible for consciousness."
'Oh,' Nikos found even that hard to wrap his mind around. "The amount of information."
"If you think of the mind as unbound by hardware…sorry, wetware limits anything is possible. Imagine a computer made of quantum-mechanical logic gates," she clarified.
" So everything is possible if you put your mind to it, literally," Nikos murmured.
"Correct! Based on David Bohm's mind over matter and the inverse principle of localism―" Arcis reiterated. "If the quantum mind is a literal superior imposition of grey matter, local reality is the definition of object properties and interactions within the limits of perception dependent on the observer."
Mind churning, Nikos remembered a certain ubiquitous feeling of potential at his fingertips like the ionic buidup before a lightning strike. He recalled seeing with a sight beyond his eyes, flashes in his peripheral vision that wisped away whenever he brought attention to bear.
At first he'd thought it some manner of lingering mental trauma and therefore paranoid about coming from the presumed dead, unknowing of what price the cosmic whims had exacted for his second life. Having it confirmed otherwise was a weight off his mind.
" Mon sieur?" Arcis called him out.
" Extrasensory perception," Nikos startled. "I kept getting these 'blink and you will miss it' kind of sensations after we landed."
" Hmm, a limited form of pericognition?" Arcis shook her head, eyes darting to something unseen before they settled on him once again. "While your biofield has been stable since yesterday, your PSy-QE field remains in flux."
" Psyche field?" Nikos murmured, unsure whether he meant to be rhetorical.
" Perhaps subsconcious repression?" she muttered, tapping away on a floating keyboard. It was superfluous action borne of politeness, a facet of her EVIE programming meant to naturalise her social interactions.
" Huh?" She'd lost him.
" I'll need more data to be sure," she said, but Nikos was in a daze.
"Wait, wait, wait!" Nikos interjected, jolting out of his stupor. " I think we're talking past each other. What do you mean by psyche field?"
" Ah, " Arcis came back to herself, cheeks pinking with embarrassment.
'How is that supposed to happen?' Nikos gawped. 'No! Focus…'
" Apologies," Arcis coughed behind a palm," I meant the Paraconscious Sympathetic Quantum Emissions field. I thought it only logical you'd understand following the earlier description of David Bohm's axiom and localism. "
" Whoa, I am not that smart," Nikos laughed self-deprecatingly.
Having reality distilled into mutable concepts was as mind-boggling as playing table tennis with a shuttlecock of radioactive isotopes.
No metaphor could translate well to the profoundness of such a thing. If Arcis hadn't told him that reality was self-correcting and not so easily destabilised, he would've had kittens.
Conversely, the ability to manipulate the fundamental forces of physics stacked the odds of survival for outsiders like themselves. That he was in the body of a native yet exceptional transhuman specimen with such implied advantages was rather fortunate. To what extent remained to be known.
"Extrasensory perception and the PSy-QE field.So I'm a Meta huh?" Nikos mused out loud. Calling it magic did not gel with current sensibilities, not in the manner of chanting dead languages and waving sticks.
" And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There's not a single term to encapsulate the entirety of the subject matter, not for all the possibilities it avails ―" Arcis smiled as if tickled by some inside joke. " Even I cannot plumb its reaches nor grasp all the phenoms it is truly capable of."
Nikos could not discern what kind of expression he was making on his face.
" Phenoms," Nikos mumbled." Why is that familiar even…Greek? Latin?"
Frankly speaking, it itched his semantic memory.
" Ah, phenom; its the closest translation from Aldrmyric meaning an experienced occurrence whose essence reflects the order and conceptual structure imposed upon observable reality by the mind." Arcis stated, eyes alit with noetic processes.
" Elder mythic," Nikos commented, knocking his palm in realisation. " So thats what the snippets rattling inside my skull are called."
" Oui!" Arcis said excitedly. " The language is so primogenial it might have sired Proto-germanic, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had its origins been on Earth," Arcis sighed. " I've found the aforementioned selection of languages to be rather on point for the translation algorithm as well
For example, from the word neuma; a place where the spirit, breath or wind of god blows. Spirit, breath or wind might have different declensions but in the same way we derive the nervous system―" she airquoted, "―we have neumat-ous, to refer to a vascular system that transduces the impulse to effect phenoms.
Furthermore, in the context of transforming esoteric knowledge and energies into phenoms, hmm if we refer to the etymology of mechanics with regards to hard physics, we beget arcanima, thus arcanics. It is a rather evocative description don't you think?"
" Phenomena, Arcanima, Arcana and Anima. Hngh, there's a pattern thereabouts " Nikos reiterated, scratching at his head. " It sounds technical like psionics. Even ring the same way you'd thermodynamics and just understand what it means."
"That said," Arcis said, her serious tone tempering Nikos' wayward tangents making him pause and pay attention.
" Much as I'd like to prioritise the pursuit of arcanics, I am afraid the most pressing utilisation of current resources is elsewhere."
Nikos was dreading what that would be.
" As you've noticed, we're grounded…our transport is long overdue for maintenance," Arcis said with the solemnity of a death knell. " We need resources."
' A journey of a thousand leagues, capped at the knees,' Nikos rocked in his seat as the revelation paralysed him dumb.
"What are we looking at? Scuttling and salvage?" He rallied, unclenching his jaw as he looked at the red and orange prevalent on the lumencast model of the ship.
Arcis paused, blinking as though in incomprehension.
"Non!" Arcis refuted. " It's not too far gone. I should have prefaced this with information I pulled up from the phren―"
"Phren?" Nikos felt like the glut of new terms and colloquialisms was coming at him too fast and too hard.
" The ship's autonomous consciousness, a sentient adaptive neural network. It has structural and morphological similarities to a mycelial colony," Arcis explained. "With the commensurate pathological fickleness of a potted plant," she tucked under her breath.
"Ah," Nikos pretended not to hear the last part of it.
" Yes. I pulled the schematics and diagnostic logs from some sort of optronic memory core before the ship went into hibernation―" she expanded the lifelike projection of the gyrelifter. Excepting the parts that were outright absences, the translucent wireframe model displayed every singular component, each distinct from another through deeper or lighter hues.
Nikos needed no further evidence that the ship was borderline biotech. However, with no welds or rivets that would indicate seams and service panels, the hull did not lend itself to ease of repair without specialised equipment.
"Now while I can't fix it, not without research, tools, and lead time measured in months we don't have, I marked the most important subsystems," Arcis pointed out. " Most pertinent is self-repair."
"And?" Nikos enquired, held in suspense. "If that was all, it would've kicked in, no?"
"Oui. With some troubleshooting, it would have. Only, it seems as though the vitastasis cradle seemed to have drained the auxiliary power clusters. Of course then I realised that affected the emergency beacon and ansible too, but I digress," she said, highlighting in three different colours a series of nodes laid equidistantly along the airframe's spine and two others.
" Hmm, the cradle was not originally part of the ship?" Nikos said half enquiringly. " Without it, the load on the power conduits would be within tolerances, and maintenance would have gone unimpeded." He did a double take," Wait…you didn't mention the primary power plant?"
" An ergwell or so the schematics say. That's part of what I could not recover" she grimaced. " Based on the power conduits it must be some sort of exotic―"
" No chance of a jump start using the drone? Material replication for patch repairs?" Nikos cut in.
"―reactor," Arcis pouted at the interruption.
Nikos winced, arms raised in placation.
" As I was saying… the ergwell is an exotic powerplant, and I infer it ran out of reactant," she said. " And since you asked, no, I cannot use dynamolecular replication without knowing how exotic materials interact. Most of it seems to require organocrystals with uniquely encoded macromolecular structure. Its almost as if―"
She showed a complex molecular formula and unknown chemical notations represented by algebraic expressions.
" As it was grown, not made," Nikos swallowed thickly, feeling like a chasm had swallowed the pit of his stomach. " I knew the ship was biomorphic in design, but this is something else."
" Oui," she reiterated. " Which is why jump starting is a bad idea. Power transduction or not, the conduits are liquid superconductors heavily skewed towards variable transmission, which adds complexity on top of an already complex problem."
" Merde," Nikos floundered, palms massaging his temples. " All this specialised technology is so out of left field. Who made this thing?"
"Hard to say, even discounting design philosophy and materials, I have not seen their metaphorical fingerprints anywhere unless I take the ship apart," Arcis frowned. The slit-eyed expression sent a shiver down Nikos spine.
" Right, right, which we could you know, not," Nikos muttered.
" As I was saying, while the biomorphic architecture has its drawbacks, the bioreactor more than makes up for it," she stated, " All it needs is ample raw materials to refine reactants and feedstock for the self-repair systems. Favorable odds are, both the materials and processes might be naturally occurring."
" So, material prospecting," Nikos groaned, already weary of long term stranding.
" We'll need some specialised equipment," Arcis affirmed, her eyes glazing over as she sent blueprints to the chrysalis droid.
" Wonder what we'll find out there," he thought out loud, his gaze faraway past Arcis' shoulder. The shadows were long and dusk was already encroaching.
Nikos paced, absently browsing the array of hardlight free-floating about his vision. Live readouts played alongside a feed of telemetry while digital dials and bars displayed process percentages of various miscellaneous tasks.
Design prototypes cluttered the space like the strung up models he'd had in his garage; a surveillance satellite, large drone with a military chassis and a biomorphic design of a blimp. The sudden inundation with memories of home made his chest throb with hollowness as if someone had taken a scoop to it.
Hastily snipping the wandering thoughts, he glimpsed a scanner with a holographic display looking ready to roll off the assembly line. It was a testament to Arcis' intellect that she'd cracked the operation behind her lumencasts to replicate display technology via first principles.
The notation attached to the tool delineated molecular analysis, identifying toxic or edible food as well as valuable resources and life signs. Addendum stated possibilities for multi-functionality by means of programming dynamolecules and references to the latter bookmarked for further perusal. Included were also, interestingly, suggestions for its name.
Nonetheless, one model remained a centrepiece of the holoprojector. He recalled how it came together, its parts fabricated by the chrysalis and assembled piece by piece.
" You really are a whole other species of bird eh?" Nikos murmured, letting his eyes focus on the current subject of its output. The contruct had a texture as though made of sand, fragile with the illusion of cohesion. As he palmed its lifelike model of the ship, turning it this way and that, he couldn't help but wince at the patches of red and orange marring the lifter's fuselage.
Nose to tail, it was about as large as a medium-lift utility helicopter. The oblique nose was taken up by the entirety of the helmpit was reminiscent of a honeycombed astronaut's visor with gold polarisation when viewed from the inside. It had no visible windows, making it so nobody would discern a point of vulnerability.
The exterior body of olive green had hexagonal panels with smooth vertices, giving it the appearance of scales while accents the colour of burnished brass, demarcated trimmings, outlines, and nonexistent seams. Hidden beneath the metallic skin were weapon emplacements of gimballed spherical energy projectors, verdict on what type unknown as of yet.
Instead of wings, the ship had retractable pylons and nacelles. Flight surfaces seamlessly melded into the gyrelifter's profile while swallow-tailing stabilisers brought up the rear. If Arcis' notes were to be believed, the nacelles housed reactionless engines whose capability to ignore gravity worked on principles different from those of her chrysalis drone.
Though he could not discern the rationale behind its organic design, the gyrelifter came off as aesthetically pleasing. Nikos supposed that for something subverting the laws of physics, shape was merely an accessory when exotic fields were involved.
Sighing, Nikos swapped to another more pertinent project. Five days of back-to-back tedium had passed in a mind-numbing fugue to get them to this point. The Terrarium was a suite of simulations, emulators, and programming environment rolled into one. Aptly monikered, it was a virtual environment running on accelerated time.
It was something Nikos had been humbled and enlightened to watch Arcis create from scratch. Thereafter he'd shadowed her as poked and prodded program shells in her facsimile of programming, adding and deleting clusters rather than strings of code as though editing genome in a petri dish. In a way, it hadn't been further from the truth even if the paradigm made Nikos second-guess his own abilities.
In it, Arcis used several sequences of Quantum Cybernic Algorithm as foundation for a virtual intelligence, shaping it's development according to predetermined stimuli until it could not evolve any further.
There was no fear that it would escape it's leash because there was no leash to be found. Nor a risk it would evolve beyond it's programming except for what it's adaptive neural network allowed. And even if it did, editing it's QCA, would most likely introduce cascading failures, in the same way botched DNA gave rise to cancerous growths.
Granted, it was rather over the top but this way was quicker and more stable. Besides, creating a VI instead of a virtual environment from scratch was deemed to take longer than they were comfortable with.
It spoke to the significance of the task ahead that Arcis' plan went above and beyond what could comfortably amount to extraterrestrial base building. Treating their current habitations as a mobile base, she designed with a view to forming the backbone of exploration, resource acquisition, and refinement, and subsequently assembly and maintenance of supporting infrastructure for quality of life and security.
Given the remote location, lack of manpower, limited material reserves, and nonexistent information on native flora and fauna, it was evident why she was so invested. The solution to their problem had to be force a force multiplier that could break the vicious cycle of expending limited resources just to eke an additional unit of utility.
Doubtless it was a conundrum that would stump any middling economist, a challenge which Arcis been too excited to contend with. She even managed to make it look good while finding that sweet spot between efficacy, sunk costs, limited time, and resources.
" Aaaand done!" Arcis chimed, all but announcing the culmination of that effort. Even though he'd had a hand in the design phase, Nikos still couldn't help whistle in appreciation.
" Formally introducing the Kumochis, " Arcis cooed as she unfurled the cover on her desktop.
'Little spider, ugh,' Nikos mused as he shuddered wryly. Now, while he was not as conversant with Japanese as his sister through no fault of his, there was enough of it swimming in his grey matter to make himself cringe. It harkened back to Resa's obsessions with all things Japanese kawaii and her manner of naming things.
And if there was someone who would find spiders cute or make them so, it was Resa.
'And Arcis too, it seems,' Nikos sighed, looking on with morbid amusement and fascination.
Each unit was based on an archetypical jumping spider and about as large as a conventional camera drone. The oblong cephalothorax and diamond shaped abdomen were an exoskeleton and chassis molded from composites of carbon and silicon, thus the ceramic appearance.
The checkerboard finish of their carapace was rather iridescent and was in actuality composed of miniature electrochromic cells that could switch between camouflage or holoprojection.
Though jumping spiders were considerably cute compared to their brethren, Arcis had reworked their arachnoid visage with a glossy faceplate whose silhouette resembled the upper part of a human skull sans orbits and nasal cavity. Housed behind the tinted glass were was an extensive sensor array and networking transceivers for near field communications.
" Now diagnostics , "she said, tapping away at the projected keyboard. " First, hardware checks…"
A chorus of warbling trills rejoindered in response, monophonic tones being the extent of their audio capabilities. Thin slits of lights pulsed before expanding into four rings, a pair larger than the smaller on the sides. They were EMOLEDs, supplementing communication in a way every tech-savvy Earther could not mistake—emotes.
Nikos thought they rather resembled the electric version of a Mini.
Doubtless, the most captivating occurence, however, was the electrochromic cell patterns cycling from the mottled greens and browns of vegetation to the drab grey of rock, eye watering fractals and the miscellaneous sigils Arcis sported on her gear. Bionic limbs actuated with tool attachments while miniature cutting implements inside false pedipalps extruded and retracted like fangs.
" Now initiatise Autonomous Resource Aquisition and Communications Heuristics Network handshake protocols," Arcis finallised.
The cluster of spideroids chirped, flickering of luminous eyes and navigation lights accompanied with a dozen anthromorphic picture perfect salutes.
"Great, web is live―" Arcis smiled. "and now, your mission should you chose to accept it―"
Nikos snorted, wordlessly spectating Arcis' antics. It was all sock-puppetry. The onboard systems were mere machine intelligences based on an shared adaptive neural network. They could develop capacity for deductive logic but truly lacked initiative.
"―is to reconnoiter the neighbourhood within a boundary of five hundred metres taking note of any hostile fauna and flora, marking territories with legends on the main map, assisting in deployment of networking and surveillance aerial buoys―"
They lacked the spark for sapience and thus could be considered shells with instincts, apropos of which Arcis could jump into them for the equivalent of peering over their shoulders. She could effectively multitask using her Parallel Subordinate Intelligences to plug the gaps in material prospecting, retrieval, mapping and security overwatch in one go.
"― scanning for the whereabouts of exotic resources, logging each according to the designation of Alternative Chemical Elements. Please prioritise anything indicative of organic alloys, organosilicates and organolumines like rubrene for immediate retrieval and likewise base metals. In case of extraordinary encounters, escalate the issue based on the severity of the alert status provided. I shall be over watch. Dismissed."
With that, they had a force multiplier worth twelve times their effort freeing up the use of his mental faculties and hands for personal pursuits. They were only the first batch, and could self-replicate commensurate with the numbers of blimps available to canvas the aerie land.
'A net-web, heh. But woe betide those with arachnophobia,' Nikos mulled in schadenfreude.
" In a moment, it expanded―" she clapped, smashing the eldritch globule. It burst into a star field of spiralling shapes and pinwheeling clusters as it consumed a nebulous darkness. " Giving rise to the quarks, atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies. Matter became energy and time…moved. Thus the adage that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. "
"So the Big Bang hmm?" Nikos mulled.
"Oui. Fast forward some billions of years and change, came theories on the behaviour of the universe, the theories of quantizing energy, probabilistic behaviour of energy, wave-particle nature, and so forth ," Arcis hummed, a lumencast populating with formulas and notes which she then banished from the foreground with a flourish.
Nikos wanted to grasp the ease with which she could manipulate light. It was almost magical, which was saying something for all that it came from the expy of a synth.
" None of the theories are conclusive," she stated. " Some were untestable, almost in the realm of pseudoscience, while others suffered what Einstein described as non-locality. One of his famous quotes was that all of physics could not fit into one neat little box―" she shook her head, feigning disappointment.
" And what do you think?" Nikos queried.
" Without the box, of course," Arcis smirked. Nikos groaned.
" The problem modern humanity faced was explaining everything with tangible and mundane techniques based on prevailing experimental methods and measuring instruments," she huffed.
"Just because it was unexplainable does not mean it does not exist. Like the grail of quantum physicists everywhere, dark matter and recently, archeium!" She threw up her hands, sending her neatly stacked lumencasts spiralling every which way.
One of them beaned him on the head and burst into motes of light. Nikos quirked a brow.
" See, modern theories explain matter and energy, ergo matter in motion. What they can't verify is how consciousness neatly ties up the theories together. For what could dictate whether something exists as matter or energy and in what form and spectra but a being with knowledge of their state?"
" Where have I heard that before?" Nikos muttered, then snapped his fingers in realisation. "Laplace's demon?"
" Ding, ding, ding! " Arcis gestured, her finger guns shooting sparks of light. " And that brings us back to metaphysics one-o-one. Before science became ink on parchment, the origin of everything was already quoted verbatim in John chapter one, verses one to four―"
It was the quintessential chronicle of creation, after which myths would paint themselves in various styles and prose. Though he'd been agnostic before he even knew what the word meant, he thought a being with such venerated power couldn't be anything but a deity. It left him reeling.
Without first-hand experience, or the obscure and hypothetical applications of monist physics and trivia of various science-fantasy genres, the minutiae of the god equation could only be understood in the abstract. But seeing the god equation had a significance at par to man's first discovery of fire, or this case, dare he say the promethean flame?
" I have to say I did not see that coming," he remarked, massaging his thighs, legs gone numb from inactivity.
" What? A synth quoting religion? Creation stories are a worthy discourse for existentialist philosophers," Arcis quipped.
" Science and religion—who'd have known? Though I suppose in a hypothetical future science could've become a religion," Nikos said brow furrowed in consternation." How does that tie into this? " He helplessly gesticulated.
" Right, apologies," Arcis chimed, clapping her hands ." In summary, it is the theory of the quantum mind and the quantum field that ties consciousness with matter and energy into a phenomenon called the Noosphere.
In the conventional description of metaphysics, the noosphere is a manifestation of the collective consciousness in the quantum field. And taking Earth for example, with archeium sustaining the energy needs of infrastructure for quantum computations, the cybersphere could have reached critical mass.
Consequently, advancements in information technology EM activity would inevitably intersect with the quantum field thus beginning the first milestone of a technological singularity. First to come about would have been full-dive immersion in which―"
Nikos felt his mouth go dry.
"―the creation of virtual worlds and consciousnesses would be feasible, followed another tier in human evolution through psionics. Uh, we're divagating," Arcis caught herself. " In our context, the existence of the quantum mind provides a basis through which a chaotic universe is predictable and consequently the power to rewrite reality in a fundamental way."
" Are you saying that the mind being a quantum superposition of electrical activity in the brain is a proven theory?" Nikos couldn't help but croak. Of all the revelations, it was the one he understood most vividly through his perusal of papers on theoretical man-machine interfaces.
To think Earth had been a couple of years from full dive immersion and then to miss it through no fault of his twinged a sore spot something fierce. It was irrational and couldn't be helped that he was once again, missing out.
" Oui, a rather elementary explanation but close enough," Arcis added, unaware of Nikos' predicament. "In full, sensory and motor input is driven by deterministic electromagnetic interactions, while the quantum field is perceived as the source of cognition. Thusly, inferred quantum superposition and entanglement are responsible for consciousness."
'Oh,' Nikos found even that hard to wrap his mind around. "The amount of information."
"If you think of the mind as unbound by hardware…sorry, wetware limits anything is possible. Imagine a computer made of quantum-mechanical logic gates," she clarified.
" So everything is possible if you put your mind to it, literally," Nikos murmured.
"Correct! Based on David Bohm's mind over matter and the inverse principle of localism―" Arcis reiterated. "If the quantum mind is a literal superior imposition of grey matter, local reality is the definition of object properties and interactions within the limits of perception dependent on the observer."
Mind churning, Nikos remembered a certain ubiquitous feeling of potential at his fingertips like the ionic buidup before a lightning strike. He recalled seeing with a sight beyond his eyes, flashes in his peripheral vision that wisped away whenever he brought attention to bear.
At first he'd thought it some manner of lingering mental trauma and therefore paranoid about coming from the presumed dead, unknowing of what price the cosmic whims had exacted for his second life. Having it confirmed otherwise was a weight off his mind.
" Mon sieur?" Arcis called him out.
" Extrasensory perception," Nikos startled. "I kept getting these 'blink and you will miss it' kind of sensations after we landed."
" Hmm, a limited form of pericognition?" Arcis shook her head, eyes darting to something unseen before they settled on him once again. "While your biofield has been stable since yesterday, your PSy-QE field remains in flux."
" Psyche field?" Nikos murmured, unsure whether he meant to be rhetorical.
" Perhaps subsconcious repression?" she muttered, tapping away on a floating keyboard. It was superfluous action borne of politeness, a facet of her EVIE programming meant to naturalise her social interactions.
" Huh?" She'd lost him.
" I'll need more data to be sure," she said, but Nikos was in a daze.
"Wait, wait, wait!" Nikos interjected, jolting out of his stupor. " I think we're talking past each other. What do you mean by psyche field?"
" Ah, " Arcis came back to herself, cheeks pinking with embarrassment.
'How is that supposed to happen?' Nikos gawped. 'No! Focus…'
" Apologies," Arcis coughed behind a palm," I meant the Paraconscious Sympathetic Quantum Emissions field. I thought it only logical you'd understand following the earlier description of David Bohm's axiom and localism. "
" Whoa, I am not that smart," Nikos laughed self-deprecatingly.
Having reality distilled into mutable concepts was as mind-boggling as playing table tennis with a shuttlecock of radioactive isotopes.
No metaphor could translate well to the profoundness of such a thing. If Arcis hadn't told him that reality was self-correcting and not so easily destabilised, he would've had kittens.
Conversely, the ability to manipulate the fundamental forces of physics stacked the odds of survival for outsiders like themselves. That he was in the body of a native yet exceptional transhuman specimen with such implied advantages was rather fortunate. To what extent remained to be known.
"Extrasensory perception and the PSy-QE field.So I'm a Meta huh?" Nikos mused out loud. Calling it magic did not gel with current sensibilities, not in the manner of chanting dead languages and waving sticks.
" And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There's not a single term to encapsulate the entirety of the subject matter, not for all the possibilities it avails ―" Arcis smiled as if tickled by some inside joke. " Even I cannot plumb its reaches nor grasp all the phenoms it is truly capable of."
Nikos could not discern what kind of expression he was making on his face.
" Phenoms," Nikos mumbled." Why is that familiar even…Greek? Latin?"
Frankly speaking, it itched his semantic memory.
" Ah, phenom; its the closest translation from Aldrmyric meaning an experienced occurrence whose essence reflects the order and conceptual structure imposed upon observable reality by the mind." Arcis stated, eyes alit with noetic processes.
" Elder mythic," Nikos commented, knocking his palm in realisation. " So thats what the snippets rattling inside my skull are called."
" Oui!" Arcis said excitedly. " The language is so primogenial it might have sired Proto-germanic, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had its origins been on Earth," Arcis sighed. " I've found the aforementioned selection of languages to be rather on point for the translation algorithm as well
For example, from the word neuma; a place where the spirit, breath or wind of god blows. Spirit, breath or wind might have different declensions but in the same way we derive the nervous system―" she airquoted, "―we have neumat-ous, to refer to a vascular system that transduces the impulse to effect phenoms.
Furthermore, in the context of transforming esoteric knowledge and energies into phenoms, hmm if we refer to the etymology of mechanics with regards to hard physics, we beget arcanima, thus arcanics. It is a rather evocative description don't you think?"
" Phenomena, Arcanima, Arcana and Anima. Hngh, there's a pattern thereabouts " Nikos reiterated, scratching at his head. " It sounds technical like psionics. Even ring the same way you'd thermodynamics and just understand what it means."
"That said," Arcis said, her serious tone tempering Nikos' wayward tangents making him pause and pay attention.
" Much as I'd like to prioritise the pursuit of arcanics, I am afraid the most pressing utilisation of current resources is elsewhere."
Nikos was dreading what that would be.
" As you've noticed, we're grounded…our transport is long overdue for maintenance," Arcis said with the solemnity of a death knell. " We need resources."
' A journey of a thousand leagues, capped at the knees,' Nikos rocked in his seat as the revelation paralysed him dumb.
"What are we looking at? Scuttling and salvage?" He rallied, unclenching his jaw as he looked at the red and orange prevalent on the lumencast model of the ship.
Arcis paused, blinking as though in incomprehension.
"Non!" Arcis refuted. " It's not too far gone. I should have prefaced this with information I pulled up from the phren―"
"Phren?" Nikos felt like the glut of new terms and colloquialisms was coming at him too fast and too hard.
" The ship's autonomous consciousness, a sentient adaptive neural network. It has structural and morphological similarities to a mycelial colony," Arcis explained. "With the commensurate pathological fickleness of a potted plant," she tucked under her breath.
"Ah," Nikos pretended not to hear the last part of it.
" Yes. I pulled the schematics and diagnostic logs from some sort of optronic memory core before the ship went into hibernation―" she expanded the lifelike projection of the gyrelifter. Excepting the parts that were outright absences, the translucent wireframe model displayed every singular component, each distinct from another through deeper or lighter hues.
Nikos needed no further evidence that the ship was borderline biotech. However, with no welds or rivets that would indicate seams and service panels, the hull did not lend itself to ease of repair without specialised equipment.
"Now while I can't fix it, not without research, tools, and lead time measured in months we don't have, I marked the most important subsystems," Arcis pointed out. " Most pertinent is self-repair."
"And?" Nikos enquired, held in suspense. "If that was all, it would've kicked in, no?"
"Oui. With some troubleshooting, it would have. Only, it seems as though the vitastasis cradle seemed to have drained the auxiliary power clusters. Of course then I realised that affected the emergency beacon and ansible too, but I digress," she said, highlighting in three different colours a series of nodes laid equidistantly along the airframe's spine and two others.
" Hmm, the cradle was not originally part of the ship?" Nikos said half enquiringly. " Without it, the load on the power conduits would be within tolerances, and maintenance would have gone unimpeded." He did a double take," Wait…you didn't mention the primary power plant?"
" An ergwell or so the schematics say. That's part of what I could not recover" she grimaced. " Based on the power conduits it must be some sort of exotic―"
" No chance of a jump start using the drone? Material replication for patch repairs?" Nikos cut in.
"―reactor," Arcis pouted at the interruption.
Nikos winced, arms raised in placation.
" As I was saying… the ergwell is an exotic powerplant, and I infer it ran out of reactant," she said. " And since you asked, no, I cannot use dynamolecular replication without knowing how exotic materials interact. Most of it seems to require organocrystals with uniquely encoded macromolecular structure. Its almost as if―"
She showed a complex molecular formula and unknown chemical notations represented by algebraic expressions.
" As it was grown, not made," Nikos swallowed thickly, feeling like a chasm had swallowed the pit of his stomach. " I knew the ship was biomorphic in design, but this is something else."
" Oui," she reiterated. " Which is why jump starting is a bad idea. Power transduction or not, the conduits are liquid superconductors heavily skewed towards variable transmission, which adds complexity on top of an already complex problem."
" Merde," Nikos floundered, palms massaging his temples. " All this specialised technology is so out of left field. Who made this thing?"
"Hard to say, even discounting design philosophy and materials, I have not seen their metaphorical fingerprints anywhere unless I take the ship apart," Arcis frowned. The slit-eyed expression sent a shiver down Nikos spine.
" Right, right, which we could you know, not," Nikos muttered.
" As I was saying, while the biomorphic architecture has its drawbacks, the bioreactor more than makes up for it," she stated, " All it needs is ample raw materials to refine reactants and feedstock for the self-repair systems. Favorable odds are, both the materials and processes might be naturally occurring."
" So, material prospecting," Nikos groaned, already weary of long term stranding.
" We'll need some specialised equipment," Arcis affirmed, her eyes glazing over as she sent blueprints to the chrysalis droid.
" Wonder what we'll find out there," he thought out loud, his gaze faraway past Arcis' shoulder. The shadows were long and dusk was already encroaching.
Nikos paced, absently browsing the array of hardlight free-floating about his vision. Live readouts played alongside a feed of telemetry while digital dials and bars displayed process percentages of various miscellaneous tasks.
Design prototypes cluttered the space like the strung up models he'd had in his garage; a surveillance satellite, large drone with a military chassis and a biomorphic design of a blimp. The sudden inundation with memories of home made his chest throb with hollowness as if someone had taken a scoop to it.
Hastily snipping the wandering thoughts, he glimpsed a scanner with a holographic display looking ready to roll off the assembly line. It was a testament to Arcis' intellect that she'd cracked the operation behind her lumencasts to replicate display technology via first principles.
The notation attached to the tool delineated molecular analysis, identifying toxic or edible food as well as valuable resources and life signs. Addendum stated possibilities for multi-functionality by means of programming dynamolecules and references to the latter bookmarked for further perusal. Included were also, interestingly, suggestions for its name.
Nonetheless, one model remained a centrepiece of the holoprojector. He recalled how it came together, its parts fabricated by the chrysalis and assembled piece by piece.
" You really are a whole other species of bird eh?" Nikos murmured, letting his eyes focus on the current subject of its output. The contruct had a texture as though made of sand, fragile with the illusion of cohesion. As he palmed its lifelike model of the ship, turning it this way and that, he couldn't help but wince at the patches of red and orange marring the lifter's fuselage.
Nose to tail, it was about as large as a medium-lift utility helicopter. The oblique nose was taken up by the entirety of the helmpit was reminiscent of a honeycombed astronaut's visor with gold polarisation when viewed from the inside. It had no visible windows, making it so nobody would discern a point of vulnerability.
The exterior body of olive green had hexagonal panels with smooth vertices, giving it the appearance of scales while accents the colour of burnished brass, demarcated trimmings, outlines, and nonexistent seams. Hidden beneath the metallic skin were weapon emplacements of gimballed spherical energy projectors, verdict on what type unknown as of yet.
Instead of wings, the ship had retractable pylons and nacelles. Flight surfaces seamlessly melded into the gyrelifter's profile while swallow-tailing stabilisers brought up the rear. If Arcis' notes were to be believed, the nacelles housed reactionless engines whose capability to ignore gravity worked on principles different from those of her chrysalis drone.
Though he could not discern the rationale behind its organic design, the gyrelifter came off as aesthetically pleasing. Nikos supposed that for something subverting the laws of physics, shape was merely an accessory when exotic fields were involved.
Sighing, Nikos swapped to another more pertinent project. Five days of back-to-back tedium had passed in a mind-numbing fugue to get them to this point. The Terrarium was a suite of simulations, emulators, and programming environment rolled into one. Aptly monikered, it was a virtual environment running on accelerated time.
It was something Nikos had been humbled and enlightened to watch Arcis create from scratch. Thereafter he'd shadowed her as poked and prodded program shells in her facsimile of programming, adding and deleting clusters rather than strings of code as though editing genome in a petri dish. In a way, it hadn't been further from the truth even if the paradigm made Nikos second-guess his own abilities.
In it, Arcis used several sequences of Quantum Cybernic Algorithm as foundation for a virtual intelligence, shaping it's development according to predetermined stimuli until it could not evolve any further.
There was no fear that it would escape it's leash because there was no leash to be found. Nor a risk it would evolve beyond it's programming except for what it's adaptive neural network allowed. And even if it did, editing it's QCA, would most likely introduce cascading failures, in the same way botched DNA gave rise to cancerous growths.
Granted, it was rather over the top but this way was quicker and more stable. Besides, creating a VI instead of a virtual environment from scratch was deemed to take longer than they were comfortable with.
It spoke to the significance of the task ahead that Arcis' plan went above and beyond what could comfortably amount to extraterrestrial base building. Treating their current habitations as a mobile base, she designed with a view to forming the backbone of exploration, resource acquisition, and refinement, and subsequently assembly and maintenance of supporting infrastructure for quality of life and security.
Given the remote location, lack of manpower, limited material reserves, and nonexistent information on native flora and fauna, it was evident why she was so invested. The solution to their problem had to be force a force multiplier that could break the vicious cycle of expending limited resources just to eke an additional unit of utility.
Doubtless it was a conundrum that would stump any middling economist, a challenge which Arcis been too excited to contend with. She even managed to make it look good while finding that sweet spot between efficacy, sunk costs, limited time, and resources.
" Aaaand done!" Arcis chimed, all but announcing the culmination of that effort. Even though he'd had a hand in the design phase, Nikos still couldn't help whistle in appreciation.
" Formally introducing the Kumochis, " Arcis cooed as she unfurled the cover on her desktop.
'Little spider, ugh,' Nikos mused as he shuddered wryly. Now, while he was not as conversant with Japanese as his sister through no fault of his, there was enough of it swimming in his grey matter to make himself cringe. It harkened back to Resa's obsessions with all things Japanese kawaii and her manner of naming things.
And if there was someone who would find spiders cute or make them so, it was Resa.
'And Arcis too, it seems,' Nikos sighed, looking on with morbid amusement and fascination.
Each unit was based on an archetypical jumping spider and about as large as a conventional camera drone. The oblong cephalothorax and diamond shaped abdomen were an exoskeleton and chassis molded from composites of carbon and silicon, thus the ceramic appearance.
The checkerboard finish of their carapace was rather iridescent and was in actuality composed of miniature electrochromic cells that could switch between camouflage or holoprojection.
Though jumping spiders were considerably cute compared to their brethren, Arcis had reworked their arachnoid visage with a glossy faceplate whose silhouette resembled the upper part of a human skull sans orbits and nasal cavity. Housed behind the tinted glass were was an extensive sensor array and networking transceivers for near field communications.
" Now diagnostics , "she said, tapping away at the projected keyboard. " First, hardware checks…"
A chorus of warbling trills rejoindered in response, monophonic tones being the extent of their audio capabilities. Thin slits of lights pulsed before expanding into four rings, a pair larger than the smaller on the sides. They were EMOLEDs, supplementing communication in a way every tech-savvy Earther could not mistake—emotes.
Nikos thought they rather resembled the electric version of a Mini.
Doubtless, the most captivating occurence, however, was the electrochromic cell patterns cycling from the mottled greens and browns of vegetation to the drab grey of rock, eye watering fractals and the miscellaneous sigils Arcis sported on her gear. Bionic limbs actuated with tool attachments while miniature cutting implements inside false pedipalps extruded and retracted like fangs.
" Now initiatise Autonomous Resource Aquisition and Communications Heuristics Network handshake protocols," Arcis finallised.
The cluster of spideroids chirped, flickering of luminous eyes and navigation lights accompanied with a dozen anthromorphic picture perfect salutes.
"Great, web is live―" Arcis smiled. "and now, your mission should you chose to accept it―"
Nikos snorted, wordlessly spectating Arcis' antics. It was all sock-puppetry. The onboard systems were mere machine intelligences based on an shared adaptive neural network. They could develop capacity for deductive logic but truly lacked initiative.
"―is to reconnoiter the neighbourhood within a boundary of five hundred metres taking note of any hostile fauna and flora, marking territories with legends on the main map, assisting in deployment of networking and surveillance aerial buoys―"
They lacked the spark for sapience and thus could be considered shells with instincts, apropos of which Arcis could jump into them for the equivalent of peering over their shoulders. She could effectively multitask using her Parallel Subordinate Intelligences to plug the gaps in material prospecting, retrieval, mapping and security overwatch in one go.
"― scanning for the whereabouts of exotic resources, logging each according to the designation of Alternative Chemical Elements. Please prioritise anything indicative of organic alloys, organosilicates and organolumines like rubrene for immediate retrieval and likewise base metals. In case of extraordinary encounters, escalate the issue based on the severity of the alert status provided. I shall be over watch. Dismissed."
With that, they had a force multiplier worth twelve times their effort freeing up the use of his mental faculties and hands for personal pursuits. They were only the first batch, and could self-replicate commensurate with the numbers of blimps available to canvas the aerie land.
'A net-web, heh. But woe betide those with arachnophobia,' Nikos mulled in schadenfreude.
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