Moonmaker 94 - Oracle Bones Cast to the Nine
GraftingBuddha
Retired Pooh-Bah
94 - Oracle Bones Cast to the Nine
The gold expanded.
Taylor's mind warred between two impulses. The fire around her mind made her feel like the only thing in all the world, the most perfect, objectively correct solipsist in all existence. But as the tugging feeling around her scars faded and the field receded, she found the light starting to dim... just a little. Uncertainty entered her ego. Fears for the future, fears of the present, dread of the past... and she could perceive more. One part of her saw nothing but herself. The other part was hungry for any damn scrap of information around her. Had to take Monitor with her - that alone wasn't good. She'd be trying for a final attack at this range. Had leverage over Taylor, and... fuck, she was weak. Maybe the Flame had influenced it. Made her more... egotistical. Unwilling to give up Vicky for a slightly higher chance at victory, maybe the field of Striving forces playing over her perfect scars made her yearn for a proper conclusion to her rivalry with Monitor, a rivalry with its origins stretching all the way back to her trigger event. Either way, she'd been stupid. Vicky would chide her for this, if it turned out to injure her in the long run. If Vicky and Taylor survived to see each other ever again. But right now, at this moment... she needed Monitor dead. Maybe that wouldn't do anything, but... these creatures, they were part of the same network, the same enormous creature. What she did now might solve it. But Vicky definitely wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving if Monitor was out there and had nothing else to do with her time but tie up irritating loose ends.
Needed to take Monitor with her.
Needed to finish this properly.
She'll try and sting you around the neck or head, somewhere unscarred. Her hands will likely remain still, as will her legs, anything to keep you locked in place where you can't resist properly.
As much as I loathe the sensation, the moment this gold fades, teleport.
Precisely.
The Revolution whirled in her mind without ceasing, the itch to teleport waiting to resolve... just the second space started existing again.
They were tumbling through an immaculate golden void. A feeling of rising pressure was crushing around her ears, felt like descending deeper and deeper into a vast ocean... she heard pop after pop as the pressure changed, could feel her joints start to ache as delicate tissues expanded to keep up with the demands put on them. She'd been doubtful until now. Thought that this might just be an important site, but not the important site, the miraculous linchpin which could be attacked to solve all her worldly woes. Still didn't think that. But she was starting to imagine that this was... something old, something tied with the Grid on a deep, visceral level. Its core. And it felt like descending into nuclear core, feeling physics twitch around her erratically... and always this music kept rising around her, pulsing impossibly through an atmosphere devoid of air, and... and she was starting to interpret it. As her mind clicked into the right positions, as she braced for an ugly teleport, one thought came to her mind.
In the heart of the Grid-on-Earth, they played the Beatles.
With a rush of fire, she was gone, tumbling through a void that now became yellow and rancid, spiralling with unfulfilled possibilities and half-digested universes folded in spiralling un-shapes, devoid of volume or area or mass. The orb of fire around her head popped like a bubble, and she could see the... oh God. She saw how tiny she was. How fragile ego was as a shield. Bisha hadn't been insulated from the Flame, he'd been... been bobbing around in a life-raft so delicate it could shatter at even a slight wave, and her vessel had been even weaker... it wasn't a shield, it was a surfboard. Her one remaining eye, tinged with yellow where the Flame had begun to take hold, widened in fear...
And she clattered to the ground.
Ground.
There was a ground.
She was here.
Oh, fuck.
She scrambled her (well, her and Crystal's) feet, immediately moving to get her bearings. Chorei readied to unfurl, using venom to melt through the scars blocking her way... that was going to hurt, a lot. But worth it for the extra weapon. She stared around... flawless walls. Too flawless. White tiled floor, white walls, white ceiling... a corridor extending into the distance, illuminated only small flickering panes of light along the sides. But the material was... the regularity was such that no human could've built this. Maybe a parahuman. Maybe only the Grid. Every tile was completely identical, fitting together without even the need for mortar. Pressed so tightly that their own pressure held the structure in place. She imagined there were supports behind it all, but for the moment it seemed like she was standing in a perfect building - self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, a fractal forming part of an infinite pattern. Could extend the building into eternity and it would remain identical and completely stable. The building was entropic - the lowest state of energy, yet also the most infinitely extendable. Felt like... standard in an airport terminal, that same sense of abolished space, all things blending together. Could be anywhere from New York to Berlin to Johannesburg to Tokyo, and the basic ideas would all be the same. Rip out the signs and mute the announcements, you were in Schrödinger's buildings, fitting in both everywhere and nowhere.
The air was perfect. Not too warm. Not too cold. Not too damp. Not too dry. The lighting didn't sting her eyes - no imprint was left behind if she looked at the lamps for too long. And she felt... she felt order pulse through her like ionising radiation. The laces on her boots tightened and straightened, losing all kinks and all loose strands, merging smoothly into an arrangement that seemed like it might never loosen, not unless she wanted it to. Her hair slowly arranged itself, losing tangles and patches stained with blood, becoming... clean. Smooth. Even her skin - the parts which weren't smooth scars - seemed to cleanse itself, losing any build-up of oils or impurities, even adopting a tone which was... not flushed, not bruised, just... flat.
She felt like she was becoming a storefront mannequin. Grasped for the Flame, and ran a hand through her hair - her one remaining hand - and ruffled it up. Already felt it rearranging back to perfectly normality.
Nothing but the immaculate average could exist here.
Could feel the imperfections in her cells slowly clicking out of existence. Spellcheck running through her DNA.
...I feel sick.
Taylor did too. And yet, that sickness only manifested in the lack of sickness. She felt more healthy than she had in a... a long, long time.
This place was wrong. This place was very wrong.
And some way down the corridor - could be a few feet, could be half a mile, distance was nothing in this place - the creature was rising as well.
With a crack, her latest layer shed and she stepped free.
Wings were damp underneath, sagging down to dry around her waist like a skirt. She glittered with raw shades, moist with haemolymph that pulsed sluggishly along her unfolding tesseract flesh. Her shell fell away behind her. And a taller, glittering doppelganger of Taylor stared at her from the end of the corridor... well, if the corridor had an end. Maybe this was it. The heart-vein of the Grid was just an infinite, perfect line extending onwards into eternity until it folded around and joined itself. The line becoming the circle becoming the loop. The wheel of fortune always seemed like a line if you couldn't glimpse the curve. Taylor was... annoyed. Very annoyed. She wanted to examine this place more. Figure out what was happening, what it was. She'd heard of... Cauldron, she knew Contessa was connected to it, knew Contessa had experimented with and possibly welcomed the Grid, but the rest of the structure remained elusive. Was this Cauldron's base? Their... cult centre? Was it connected to SET, or had it emerged after the Grid had become the all-consuming force it was today? Why had the Simurgh worked so hard to rip open a gate to this place, why bother?
No time to think.
She was coming.
The Beatles were playing from invisible, distant speakers. Sounded like... Helter Skelter.
...hadn't this absolute cunt said that she'd intended to infest her dad? And Taylor had just triggered first?
"You were going for my dad."
Her voice was a barely-human growl. She'd almost lost her dad once before. Spent four years being awkward and half-distant, dealing with the fact that they... had their own lives, and didn't need the other one. But the idea that...
Monitor spoke, slowing down very slightly, cocking her head to one side in an imitation of humanity.
"Yes. Or you. It depended on who satisfied the right conditions first. In retrospect, I anticipate... the right stresses would have been evoked by his wife's death, his failure as a father towards you, or potentially broader failures towards his colleagues. If you hadn't become transmission-capable in your... inciting incident, it's conceivable he would've linked with me afterwards."
She said this clinically. Coldly. Like it didn't have... bizarre ramifications. Made her think the whole world was surrounded by squirming shards of alien lifeforms, everyone followed by an invisible ghost watching for them to break, to become 'transmission-capable', liable to accept the parasite entering their skull. Like vultures circling over the heads of people stuck in the desert. Look up, and you'd see them, with their greasy necks and black eyes, wings like priestly cassocks, watching with grim anticipation.
My previous advice stands. Hurt her.
Taylor very much wanted to follow this very, very wise advice. But the same problems remained... of course, some new advantages had emerged. Monitor was stronger, faster, had skills very optimised towards hurting Taylor in the fashion she wanted, nothing too excessive or insufficient. But her swarm was dead and gone. Looked like she'd smuggled a few bugs in with her, sandwiched between layers of her crystalline body, but not many. Not enough to scan this whole place. Which meant her omniscience had been broken. In this environment, her flight meant significantly less, all her work in Madison was irrelevant, all she had was herself. Dragged down to Taylor's level. Getting close was suicide. She scanned the walls momentarily... the glowing lights made her nervous of floating through the floor and escaping. Electricity could paralyse her. One poorly-timed twitch and she might end up strangled with cables, stuck like a butterfly in a killing bottle. The Grid was weird, for all she knew, this entire place was conductive.
Play it safe. Just for a moment.
Not exactly many other directions to run, once she took turning into smoke out of the equation.
Taylor turned on her heel and ran.
Monitor gave chase in silence. Chorei granted her near-limitless stamina, and Monitor was too inhuman to think about silly things like breathing or muscles.
They ran, both of them, without breathing once. Neither needed to. There was just the dull, oddly muffled thump-thump of boots, the scritch-scratch of clawed crystal feet, and the distant sound of Helter Skelter. The hallway immediately began to change, giving way to passages branching in multiple directions... Taylor had a head start, but Monitor was gaining, bounding down the corridors like an animal. Much faster. Needed to find a room, a stairwell, something. This place had no plans available for it, she was going in completely blind. Every corner she turned was the tiniest of delays, while Monitor just sprang smoothly from one wall to the other. Taylor barely glimpsed the score marks she left behind... and saw how the walls smoothly shifted to heal around them, rippling like living things. Not good. She hesitated...
And span on her heel, whirling into a kick just as Monitor breached a corner...
Monitor's tail was already lashing out, two clawed hands reaching...
Taylor deliberately unbalanced herself. The kick was aborted midway through - always intended to, no way Monitor would just walk into it. Instead, she tumbled, trying to slam chaotically into Monitor...
Who twisted... her tail was too close, the stinger already passing around Taylor to the point where it couldn't make proper contact. It scraped loudly against her back, not even hoping to pierce the scars... clawed hands wrapped around Taylor, jagged legs tried to wrap around her like an insect grappling with its entire body...
Taylor responded in kind.
Locking her in a death grip hug, the sort of thing crocodiles did before they thrashed. Locking Monitor's limbs in place, best as she could with one arm. Used her torso to make up for the missing other. Even with her greater strength, without leverage there wasn't much she could do. Her body was covered in small spikes, made her think of the arms of a praying mantis, and if she had flesh she imagined that Monitor would've already torn multiple blood vessels. As it was? She was a flawless silver statue. She couldn't be touched. Was she stronger? No. But she could hang on. Already she'd grafted, already she was starting to burn through more layers with rushing waves of yellow fire. Monitor's mind was vast, her consciousness alien, and it'd take time to burn through it all...
Might as well get started. Even if she took it one inch at a time, if she didn't give up she'd eventually walk a hundred miles.
Already Monitor was opening her mouth to bite at her face. Didn't even think, just started doing it. Her mouth was ringed with teeth like a lamprey, needle-thin and curved, some of them hollow and filled with venom. She'd... planned for everything. Taylor almost admired that - the relentless search for increased effectiveness. Almost admired it. She focused, concentrated on the Revolution, and snapped herself away. A quick teleport - not too far. Concentration was difficult in a situation like this, and the air... the Grid was powerful here. Not actively trying to suppress the Flame, but its existence, the unrelenting structure, opposed it viscerally. The Grid wasn't just order, it was refinement of order, the refinement of a system to the point of maximum efficiency. Its existence was based on an objective, observable, rational reality. The sort of thing the Flame, necessarily, opposed. The two couldn't be further apart if they tried. The Grid could integrate just about everything besides the Flame... and the Worms-in-the-World, apparently. It felt uncomfortable teleporting. Made her insides twist. Made Chorei shiver in discomfort...
Hadn't gained much distance.
Monitor had already adjusted to the sudden loss of her target... and her tail lashed viciously. That thing was her ace in the hole, as long as she had that venom she was going to be obscenely dangerous. Remove that from the equation, and there might be a chance of winning.
You're fighting while down one limb.
Right. Still missing an arm. That grip she'd put Monitor in had been flawed from the start - barely managed a few seconds of extended contact before breaking away. Needed a replacement, or...
...oh, and she figures it out! Who's my little genius.
Hold on.
Taylor hissed in annoyance as Chorei ripped her way out, melting the scars in her way with caustic venom. Not quite destroying the scars, simply... eroding the raw flesh beneath, then parting it until she had an opening to slip through, convolutions in space easing her passage. At no point did the scars truly break, simply... made way briefly. Taylor ran, gaining a little distance, reaching a corner, kicking off one wall and using Chorei to stabilise her movement. God, it was nice to have four limbs again. Moving faster. Felt more balanced. And the venom dripping from Chorei's maw... she had images of grappling against Monitor's tail, of melting through her crystalline flesh with acid, of hurting her. That grip from earlier would be a hell of a lot easier now she had another limb. Alright, so... no rooms around her, still in the bizarre mass of corridors. No idea where she was going. Only knew she-
Monitor screeched around the corner, and the eerily warm, still air was filled with the sound of buzzing - like a car engine whirring to life. Her wings had dried off, then. Just another speed advantage. Next priority, shred those things, put holes in them but don't rip them off, don't; give her the opportunity to shed dead weight, make her carry it around.
Taylor swerved, trying to make her path more erratic while she readied herself for a small teleport, just to gain some more distance....
And something launched from Monitor's tail.
A barb. Like a manticore's spines.
She tried to dodge...
Perfectly timed. Perfectly aimed.
It slammed into Chorei.
And Chorei howled.
Not quite in pain.
The stinger was already being pushed out, regeneration forcibly removing it from the flesh. But something else. The barb wasn't meant to kill with venom. There was something in it, something... something very ugly. Parasites. Like her worms. Fine. Like last time, harness the Flame, burn them out, much easier when doing it to herself. Much, much easier. She focused... but Chorei's howls only grew, even as the barb clattered to the immaculate floor in a shower of smoking venom, unnaturally acidic, scarring black, ugly marks into the tiles. Chorei thrashed, losing all control, and her howls resolved into words, tinged with absolute terror.
They're in my mind!
Shit. She focused harder, trying to grip the Flame around the throat and force it to burn her friend's mind clean of infestation, just...
Oh. Fuck. Oh dear.
She felt something was very, very wrong in her head. Something was... oh, God. It was like... like a weight was growing, like something was moving... the worms, the pseudo-worms, they weren't even close to her skull, they were small and weak, couldn't move far, but... they were... what was... it... there was something up there. Something that was pressing against her mind, trying to... to... not trying to invade or corrode, just to limit. A hobble placed around her consciousness. She tried to grip the Flame, stirred the Revolution into motion, encouraged it to blaze with merry frenzy, but... when she did, this... block came up. She glimpsed, for a second, eternity. She saw the billions upon billions of years of existence Monitor had behind her. Species after species. Host after host. For a second, Taylor was Taylor. Then she was... something with a name unpronounceable if you lacked five spine-tongues and a nitrogen-based atmosphere, she was scaled and wonderful, she wore a ragged cloak of her father's skin and she slithered upon the dirty ground of a world the colour of jaundice and around her whirled the young spawn of the ravening great swimming birds that inhabited the methane pools, enslaved to her will, and-
No, no, no, not her. Get out of her mind. She gritted her teeth, feeling them come close to popping from strain, trying to rouse the Flame, but...
For a second she was a thing in the deep, she swam in a... strange world, she swam in an ocean of metallic hydrogen, avoiding great floating pieces of solid diamond, deep in a gas giant in some unknown corner of existence. She pulsed with light on odd frequencies, summoned microscopic life to cluster under her fronds, she pulsed and lured something close... then her capsid jaws were opening, protein spikes deploying, the prey lured in by lights and a trail of microorganisms and she chewed her prey apart and harvested his genetic material, spilling it from her glittering diamond coat in small half-life larvae to join the swarm and mingle with other half-lives, slowly constructing genomes out of fragments and forming new, interesting life, that-
Not. Her. Chorei was still screaming, she was still running...
Monitor had asserted limited control of the shrivelled remnants of her corona pollentia, her gemma, her old home. Limited. But she was blasting her with memories, ones alien to the Totems she understood, brains not wired like humans. Stopping her from burning these things out.
Time was limited. Not sure how long she had before she could start asserting greater control.
Not...
Hold on.
A push against her cheekbone. Very faint. Very subtle. But there. Noticeable in the silence of the corridor, the windless air, the feeling of painful, unnatural neutrality.
She was here. The ghost of Madison. The one who'd come through that gate. Had she... followed Taylor? Followed Monitor, maybe? Was she immune to that field, and if so, why hadn't she done this before? No, she had an obvious answer right in front of her. The ghost was waiting for someone. Couldn't do what she needed to do alone. Needed an ally, a guide, maybe there was a barrier she couldn't surpass.
And now she was leading Taylor away.
Allies were allies.
She gritted her teeth and spat, hissing at the invisible presence as she stumbled drunkenly, trying to tune out Chorei shrieking in anger and violation.
"Electricity."
A single push against her cheekbone. One meant no. No electricity to worry about, no circuits? Avoid the lights anyway, play it safe. She turned into shadow and pushed downwards. Should've done this earlier, still getting used to a power not her own, and the alien nature of this place made her uncertain... it hurt to transform, the alien memories pulsing strongly as two alien supercomputers struggled for a seat in the same mind. She had two connections, she wasn't meant to have two connections. Even Vicky had never done this, she always had distance, used skins to mediate between herself and the powers she took. Only had Blondie as a direct connection, everything else was... an implant, foreign and consciously so. Taylor was working with a raw connection from Sophia, and living chunks of another being from Monitor. Fucking... like shoving her head into a speaker howling with feedback.
Hold on, why not do this before? Why not in...
This cheeky cunt wanted this. Wanted her to get in. Knew she could get through that field, did all she could to prevent it, but had a last few tricks to make sure she couldn't run further. Saving her last weapons for when uncertainty lay all around her, allies were (mostly) gone, and victory was in sight.
She wanted to explore this place too. Find out what the Grid was hiding under its skirts, further her own cause. Monitor was incapable of thinking only of the present, she had to engage with the distant future as well. Nothing could just be about now. Even the fight of her life had to include planning for the next million years. And she'd hidden some awful little tools for her expedition, had them as a backup. Or maybe she'd been improvising this whole time and only now thought about bombarding Taylor with memories. The crystal face revealed nothing.
In shadow, she felt the parasites accompanying her. The bodies were fragile and already dying as their host regenerated faster than they could gnaw, but the signals were already in her mind. Only fire could burn it out, and as long as they were there, fire wasn't an option. Like she was now, gaseous, permeable, she could feel the change happening in real time. No messy biological processes to distract her. She was... shit, not much time at all. Hours, at least. Long enough. But she handled this now, no long-term existed so long as this countdown existed. Some plans were generating, some ugly, some... marginally workable. The Wolf. Use the Wolf, and mutate. Change herself until the parasites had nothing to latch onto... might work, but they were billions of years old, worked with some very odd creatures, they could manage a little adaptation. And altering her brain felt... uncomfortable. Brain surgery was hard enough when you used a drill and magical fire, doing it on herself using a howling brain-wolf that had no great appreciation for sapience was...
Anyway.
She fled. The presence vanished - navigating the long way. She floated through the floor, into another identical corridor. The same pressure. The same feeling of regularity forcing itself into her. The smoke that formed her body seemed to be crackling with invisible, harmless sparks, like the air was clustered with golden static. Nothing felt right here. Rather, everything felt too right. Too normal. Too completely empty. Where were the cells? Where was the continuation of the ruin outside? Had this place healed itself like an open wound? She imagined the floors drinking up any motes of dust that time fed to them, imagined this place as a living creature. And all these corridors... she kept floating down and around, trying to put some proper distance between herself and Monitor, and she had the keenest feeling of being inside a digestive system, or a convolution of veins surrounding a heart.
She froze once she found a room.
Chorei had stopped screaming. Just whimpering slightly.
Taylor shifted back into flesh.
"Alright?"
No. Not at all. They're still in my head. I can feel them. They want to push me out. Replace me with them. Join you by another method.
Shit.
"Holding up, though?"
I can hold them off. But... hours. At most. They're going to shred my mind piece by piece. They're just learning the right method. Help me. Please. I can't... I don't want to lose myself, not again, immortality almost did it, the Flame finished the job, the Wolf tried to gnaw at my thoughts, I can't lose myself. This is all I am.
Please, Taylor, help me. Get them out of me.
Using Chorei as an infection vector. Clever. Shouldn't have let her unfurl, no matter the advantage. Needed a replacement arm.
"I'm... sorry. I'll do my best. Maybe if she dies the whole thing goes down, they're all part of the same creature, like... extensions of one body. Kill the torso and the fingers will die eventually."
I dearly hope so.
Focus. Not much time.
The room. Same material as everything else, spotless, not a hint of dust or decay. Even saw a cup of coffee on a tabletop. Must be years old, looked like it was growing into the tiles, but the liquid was still piping hot. Like everyone had just... abandoned it a second before she arrived. The lights shone without flickering, heedless of whether there was a human or not. She'd felt no cables as she descended. This place just glowed because it was meant to, not because it made sense, not because this structure worked. Hadn't even felt insulation as she went, just solid stone. This place felt grown. Didn't feel like a human or maybe even a parahuman could or would build this. There was a pointlessness to it which spoke to a love of structure for structure's sake. The room seemed to be a laboratory. Long benches, microscopes, empty test tubes, everything gleaming like new. Looked... generic. An odd machine stood in a corner, one she vaguely recognised as an outdated Torsten DNA sequencer. She'd been on her own for four years, she took correspondence courses and she knew what those things looked like.
You... absolute book-burrower, I can feel your thoughts, I know what you're thinking right now...
Shut up.
Fine. Old laboratory. All deformities scrubbed, old experiments packed away. Hadn't been used in a while, coffee might've been left here when... things ended. Sound of Beatles music was still faintly audible... now it was Get Back. Was this a Grid thing? Play the most popular band ever, because they were the most popular, and thus the most, on average, listenable?
Felt fitting.
Nothing she could find, though. No convenient weapons. The entire thing looked like a stock photo. But... no, there was a metal case lying next to the DNA sequencer, and when she had a quick look... a symbol on the side. Something like an omega symbol, slightly tilted. An omega, a horseshoe, the hiragana symbol ひ, or... maybe a stylised cauldron. Maybe nothing. But possible confirmation - this base was connected to Cauldron, then. Contessa too. Nothing inside the case, just a foam lining that was clearly meant to hold something delicate. No idea what. Maybe one of those vials Clarissa had sipped on before she blew up Dubai, that Tizona had been tricked into drinking before entering Madison. She abandoned it, abandoned the lab. Moved on. Floated easily through walls, and...
Already she could feel the slightest disturbances in her smoke.
She was here. The ghost had apparently emerged when this place was opened to the world - was this her old home? Was that why she knew how to navigate it, knew how it operated?
She was trying to lead Taylor somewhere.
The itching of the gnawing in her brain grew louder and louder. The tiniest sound of chewing. Monitor was clawing her way back inside - the parasites, the avatar fighting her, the worms left behind in Vicky, the greater being, they were all one cohesive entity. For all she knew, these parasites would eat and eat... and then the avatar would simply collapse into dust as connections to the central operator were re-established in Taylor's mind. Not so much a trigger event as a renegotiation of a contract. One where she was integrated... differently into the pattern. No longer a temporary acquisition, but a permanent asset. Temporary conflict generation replaced by perpetual large-scale planning. Plugged in and burned out many thousands of years from now... maybe millions. Billions. Maybe never.
Focus. Get them out. Move.
She moved, and allowed the ghost to guide her. Felt eerie - she could very faintly feel innumerable hands and fingers intruding into her smoky form, brushing through the places where her organs ought to be. If she manifested now... she'd be in a hell of a lot of trouble. She felt... hm. The structure, in this deeper level, seemed to glitter. The air was filled with things like snowflakes, but golden, constructed entirely of lines as regular and straight as those on a circuit board. They only formed for a moment, aligning, clicking into place... then vanishing just as quickly. Like the programming of the Grid was emerging into the world physically, unreality no longer capable of bearing its weight. Maybe one day the world would be covered in golden, shivering snow. Felt like she was standing inside a reactor. An active reactor, and this gold was the equivalent of Cherenkov radiation. Light no human was meant to see.
Felt it flowing through her smoke. Could taste it, somehow. Tasted like... nothing and everything.
She collapsed back into reality suddenly, gasping involuntarily.
Shit. Just... something... the pressure on her cheek increased for a second, moving very slightly, like the ghost was patting her. Reassuring her.
This place made her feel sick. The Grid was too powerful here. This place would be identical a thousand years from now. A million years. She could feel time compressed, not into a single point, but into a perpetual loop. Self-sustaining and absolute. There was an engine all around her. Wherever she looked she could feel it. The corridors seemed to be curving in around her, all flowing backwards like the convolutions of a heart. The glowing lights had no circuits - the world was the circuit, as long as the lights in this base were on then the world-engine was still going, the economy still pulsed with golden value, culture still emanated in understandable fractals, and society in general was harmonious. This was the lantern hung at the door of the world, and it was illuminated. The forces in her head, they were... not weaker, but they felt like they were aligning too well. They could feel their places. Even the Wolf was a little gentler.
She could hear whispering.
Why could she hear whispering?
Was it the gnawing? The parasites eating her brain?
...was it something else?
No answers met her. Nothing but the very faintest whispers at the edge of her mind, the gentle chewing of parasites infiltrating the tumours they'd planted years and years ago, the light playing of the Beatles in the directionless distance... even the lights didn't hum. They just glowed. Soft and constant as stars. Chorei coiled loosely around her shoulders, shivering like a leaf. Terrified out of her mind, but... trying to help. Taylor patted her head, twined her fingers into the antennae. Needed the company. Already hard to tell where her body ended and the structure began. When she lifted her boots from the ground, she thought she saw the tiles shift slightly, clinging for a moment longer than they should. Eager to welcome her into the building.
She floated downwards. Put more distance between herself and Monitor. No insects had pursued her, no insects could. She'd have to find the longest way. No wonder she'd planted this parasite, she knew Taylor could easily evade her here. More identical corridors, devoid of humanity, both in feeling and in life. More rooms, too. Most were empty, just desks and chairs. Meeting rooms. The occasional lab containing slightly outdated equipment and nothing else, all experiments long-since cleared away. She tried to imagine living here normally, and found it difficult - everything was far apart, it felt like she was missing some vital component of organisation. Maybe the inhabitants had some other way of moving around, or maybe the Grid had changed the place over time. Maybe this had once been a single, normal structure... and over time it had expanded outwards, the rooms sliding away from one another. Like a universe expanding, ripping galaxies apart as it did so.
...hm. One room had computers. Ignoring the gnawing for a second, ignoring the caresses of the ghost, she poked her head inside. Again, outdated. But some of them were on - left on for years and years without a hint of screen burn or a mote of dust. Still somehow functional. The ghost began to tug at her smoke more and more, almost stepping inside her once or twice... very eerie, having an invisible human body inside her own, incorporeal one. Especially when the invisible body kept multiplying. Was that how the ghost worked? A human, invisible and untouchable, that replicated to fill the spaces she was allowed to? Or... anyway. She wanted her to move. Taylor wanted to look. Being told not to look was a pretty damn powerful invitation to do the opposite, in her opinion.
Never change.
She hoped not to.
Of the functional computers, two were just empty login screens, no idea of the passwords. One was a spreadsheet containing a massive array of numbers. Interesting that they required so many computers in the first place... she had a brief, peculiar image. The Simurgh had breached this place in 2009, a full nine years after the Grid had asserted control. Maybe this had been an old command centre, used by agents before it was compromised. Explained the size, at least. The numbers were meaningless, and the few dates she saw were from... well, again, 2009 or just before it. Probably accounts or something. No idea. More inactive computers, and... ah. One with a map. The ghost was being insistent now, and Taylor consciously ignored her. Needed to see. A 3D globe, spinning gently in a hazy void. A few tools scattered around it for zooming in, out, searching for certain sites... a dim sense of suspicion went through her. The Grid would know she was here. Maybe it was showing her this deliberately. Why it wasn't sending all its forces to defend it, she didn't know... maybe the Simurgh had helped. The breach had cleared this place out by necessity, denying her any assets to manipulate, but some things couldn't be moved. And that was what remained vulnerable. But she had the distinct feeling of being led along...
Maybe the ghost had a point, or...
Fuck it. Have a peek.
The globe was covered in blotches. Markers of varying size... sized by severity, possibly. She remained smoky and intangible, refused to touch the computer. Let the rotation show everything to her - more indication of this being a calculated show. Marker after marker, Europe, Africa, Asia, America... even a handful of scattered dots, usually small, out in the Arctic Circle and the very fringes of Antarctica... the biggest ones seemed to be around civilised areas, was this because of population? Were these parahuman population centres, or... no, if she stared closely... ah ha. She started to get an idea, just as the tugging became rougher. A very, very large pin in the middle of a lake in America, one she remembered trying and failing to cross. Another pin of slightly smaller size in a town she recognised, even if it was unlabelled. Fair-sized one in Japan. A tiny, tiny marker in a village in Russia she was intimately acquainted with - technically, she'd destroyed that one.
The Worms-in-the-World. They're charting them.
Interesting. And... Jesus, that was a lot. How many were there? If that fair-sized pin was the Great Worm of Senpou Temple, and that tiny pin was the miniscule infestation in the dacha outside Lomonosov... then... she was seeing a lot of fair-sized ones. Even saw one in Istanbul, wondered if that was connected to the collapse of the Hagia Sophia, maybe feeding on the results, maybe responsible for it, maybe so dangerous it demanded the collapse... no idea. No further information. But there were hundreds. Thousands. And each one... these things weren't ordinary lifeforms, they could split, wriggle away in multiple pieces. Each large pin could become a hundred more tiny pins, and then they could grow up in term.
The infestation looked dire from up here. She'd never quite realised.
She returned to reality after a second of hesitation, tapping a few keys, trying to navigate. Her curiosity had overpowered her better sense. And... oh, ho. She knew that acronym. ASPO. Aberrant Strain of Paranatural Occurrences. Acronym SET made up for their operations, referring to what she called forces or Totems or the Lattice. Spooky stuff, in short. If she clicked through a few menus, ignoring the ghost pulling her hair, she could... this was a whole damn database, charting incidents from years ago. Right at the start. A few more, and she could... hm. Could narrow it down to 'strains', referring to individual forces. Widen it, show all of them. Severity... a little clicking, and she saw what ratings Bisha's emergence had, used that as a baseline. Current status. What was going on now? What was-
Oh my goodness.
...what the fuck was happening out there.
America was dead. Nothing but tiny pins, scattered like a dusting of snow. The Grid was very good at suppressing activity on its home front. Mostly.
But the rest. The rest was something else entirely. Europe was worse than America, significantly so, but... Africa, whole swathes of Asia, good chunks of South America, and the bloody Arctic...
Fields and fields of red. Like a field of deadly poppies.
She couldn't have missed all of this. There was too much. How had she missed it. But... no, she could imagine. So much was under the surface. Plotted for years before emerging. The world had billions of people. A cult might consume a dozen, a few dozen, up to a hundred... less than a drop in the bucket, less than a drop clinging to a droplet. Easy to consume without being noticed by anything large. And if they weren't in Russia, she'd have no bloody chance of hearing of the small places. How many cults were out there, how many areas were succumbing to these forces? How many were on the verge of going full Bisha, going completely mad? The Grid must be attacking those, but the bulk... those had to be left alone, simply too many to handle, too dug in. Hurt them and they scatter or escalate. Often both.
The world was... it was...
She felt a dim sense of despair creeping in her gut.
No-one could stop all this. No-one. Not her, definitely. Even if she gathered her whole team, brought the dead back to life, did everything in her power to fight this tide... there was nothing. Bisha had almost killed her, Chorei had, so had Angrboda. And this field of red... how many Angrbodas lived in those poppies? How many Bishas crouched behind the hedgerows? How many adepts ready to get lucky? The Grid couldn't even integrate the things causing this change in the human subconscious, it was trying to fight a wildfire by sweeping up the ash. Always dealing with the symptoms and never the root cause. Taylor would be doing the same. The Grid was fighting a battle on one front while forbidden to fight on any other, of course it was losing, but... America was clean. America was still, somehow, enduring, and it'd been extending protection to Europe. She saw little pools of sanity where its overseer blocks had been established, regulating the surrounding area, sending out agents to handle the cults that tried to grow up.
Cults were like cells. Usually they were harmless. Did their job, replicated, died.
And sometimes they went cancerous. And one cancerous cell made all the benign cells, in all their multitudes, seem like air. Or baggage.
The world's... not doing very well, is it?
"No."
One almost feels sorry for the Grid. Trying to keep up with it all.
"Almost."
...were these the answers you were looking for? That the Grid can't even hold back the tide? That you couldn't, and it was all pointless in the end?
"Not really. Hoping for more."
Then let's keep going. I know you. You're not giving up here. And if you do...
Well, maybe those parasites have already won.
A pause.
...what on earth is that noise?
A faint buzzing.
Ah.
Taylor could see the problem.
Despair lingered in her gut like a lead weight as she moved. She was coming. Tracking her. Probably had backup methods now her swarm was dispersed... maybe she could track the parasites. Probably could. Somehow she received that information with dull resignation rather than mounting fear. She wasn't going to give up, not now, not now she'd come so far, but... there was low note of dread in her. And it wondered, maybe, if this was all she'd learn. If everything would just be an elaboration on the basic axiom that 'things are fucked, and you can't stop it'. The Worms would win, the Grid would lose, the forces would drown the world in madness and grind it up for the Worms to happily digest, and the Earth would be left barren and lifeless while they fucked off. She...
Not after all of this. She was twenty years old, given almost a quarter of her life to fighting this stuff, to doing things of importance.
Ahab had died for this life of hers. Patience had died barely a few hours ago. And more besides.
Couldn't give up. But couldn't accept that this was all there was.
Had to keep moving.
The ghost latched onto her again, tugging her in one direction as she turned back into smoke and flowed easily through the floors and walls, avoiding the rising sound of buzzing wings. She was coming, and navigating quickly. Could hear faint thumps, too... was she bulldozing through the floors? Seemed to be taking a moment to do it, making sure her wings wouldn't be damaged, but... still. Explained her speed. Taylor was faster right now, but Monitor was giving the pursuit a damn good go. The ghost led her along, down corridors, through coiling staircases, along rows and rows of... cells? Empty cells, with no signs of their former inhabitants. Not even an ominous stain. The ghost didn't want her to stop and stare, was being downright aggressive. Taylor strategised as she was led along - Monitor needed to die, but Monitor was also too tough to fight head-on, her venom was too much to deal with. Taylor could soak up hits from her damn well right now, could use smoke, but the issue was scale and time. Monitor was the avatar of an enormous alien cell, she could soak up damage for hours and hours, which Taylor no longer had. Monitor just had to keep the pressure up, stop her doing anything stupid, and let the parasites win.
Needed a way of turning the tables quickly.
And the ghost...
...oh.
Oh.
The ghost was showing her how to.
This place was a Cauldron facility.
And the ghost slammed a door open, rattling on gleaming hinges, letting her into a room that seemed to be for... meetings. Looked glossy, more like a corporate office. A smooth table, chairs set around it, all very comfortable, the floor carpeted with bland grey fabric that she imagined being luxuriously soft. It was tastefully nondescript, everything unremarkable yet of impeccable quality. And the air was glittering with more Grid-trails, stronger than before, churning her stomach up more than it already was. Somehow. On the table, though...
A metal case.
The ghost slammed into it, cracking the locks at the side, flinging it open with a distinct air of impatience. Wanted her to be here minutes ago. Taylor stared as the presence swelled to consume the room, brushing against her smoky form, passing in and out of it, leaving her with the faintest impression of a woman standing and gesturing imperiously. Go on. Have a look. Have fun, you ingrate.
Taylor turned back to flesh...
And stared into the box.
Vials.
Marked with that same omega symbol. All six of them.
Papers set tastefully beneath them like they were at a showroom.
'Deus' (85%)
'Jaunt' (70%)
'Prince' (55%)
'Vestige' (75%)
'Division' (80%)
'Robin' (60%)
Risk of contamination: Minimal. Strain safety: Assured by all relevant metrics.
Congratulations on your newly purchased superpowers.
Oh.
Oh ho.
Chorei twisted.
Time to do some science.
The gold expanded.
Taylor's mind warred between two impulses. The fire around her mind made her feel like the only thing in all the world, the most perfect, objectively correct solipsist in all existence. But as the tugging feeling around her scars faded and the field receded, she found the light starting to dim... just a little. Uncertainty entered her ego. Fears for the future, fears of the present, dread of the past... and she could perceive more. One part of her saw nothing but herself. The other part was hungry for any damn scrap of information around her. Had to take Monitor with her - that alone wasn't good. She'd be trying for a final attack at this range. Had leverage over Taylor, and... fuck, she was weak. Maybe the Flame had influenced it. Made her more... egotistical. Unwilling to give up Vicky for a slightly higher chance at victory, maybe the field of Striving forces playing over her perfect scars made her yearn for a proper conclusion to her rivalry with Monitor, a rivalry with its origins stretching all the way back to her trigger event. Either way, she'd been stupid. Vicky would chide her for this, if it turned out to injure her in the long run. If Vicky and Taylor survived to see each other ever again. But right now, at this moment... she needed Monitor dead. Maybe that wouldn't do anything, but... these creatures, they were part of the same network, the same enormous creature. What she did now might solve it. But Vicky definitely wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving if Monitor was out there and had nothing else to do with her time but tie up irritating loose ends.
Needed to take Monitor with her.
Needed to finish this properly.
She'll try and sting you around the neck or head, somewhere unscarred. Her hands will likely remain still, as will her legs, anything to keep you locked in place where you can't resist properly.
As much as I loathe the sensation, the moment this gold fades, teleport.
Precisely.
The Revolution whirled in her mind without ceasing, the itch to teleport waiting to resolve... just the second space started existing again.
They were tumbling through an immaculate golden void. A feeling of rising pressure was crushing around her ears, felt like descending deeper and deeper into a vast ocean... she heard pop after pop as the pressure changed, could feel her joints start to ache as delicate tissues expanded to keep up with the demands put on them. She'd been doubtful until now. Thought that this might just be an important site, but not the important site, the miraculous linchpin which could be attacked to solve all her worldly woes. Still didn't think that. But she was starting to imagine that this was... something old, something tied with the Grid on a deep, visceral level. Its core. And it felt like descending into nuclear core, feeling physics twitch around her erratically... and always this music kept rising around her, pulsing impossibly through an atmosphere devoid of air, and... and she was starting to interpret it. As her mind clicked into the right positions, as she braced for an ugly teleport, one thought came to her mind.
In the heart of the Grid-on-Earth, they played the Beatles.
With a rush of fire, she was gone, tumbling through a void that now became yellow and rancid, spiralling with unfulfilled possibilities and half-digested universes folded in spiralling un-shapes, devoid of volume or area or mass. The orb of fire around her head popped like a bubble, and she could see the... oh God. She saw how tiny she was. How fragile ego was as a shield. Bisha hadn't been insulated from the Flame, he'd been... been bobbing around in a life-raft so delicate it could shatter at even a slight wave, and her vessel had been even weaker... it wasn't a shield, it was a surfboard. Her one remaining eye, tinged with yellow where the Flame had begun to take hold, widened in fear...
And she clattered to the ground.
Ground.
There was a ground.
She was here.
Oh, fuck.
She scrambled her (well, her and Crystal's) feet, immediately moving to get her bearings. Chorei readied to unfurl, using venom to melt through the scars blocking her way... that was going to hurt, a lot. But worth it for the extra weapon. She stared around... flawless walls. Too flawless. White tiled floor, white walls, white ceiling... a corridor extending into the distance, illuminated only small flickering panes of light along the sides. But the material was... the regularity was such that no human could've built this. Maybe a parahuman. Maybe only the Grid. Every tile was completely identical, fitting together without even the need for mortar. Pressed so tightly that their own pressure held the structure in place. She imagined there were supports behind it all, but for the moment it seemed like she was standing in a perfect building - self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, a fractal forming part of an infinite pattern. Could extend the building into eternity and it would remain identical and completely stable. The building was entropic - the lowest state of energy, yet also the most infinitely extendable. Felt like... standard in an airport terminal, that same sense of abolished space, all things blending together. Could be anywhere from New York to Berlin to Johannesburg to Tokyo, and the basic ideas would all be the same. Rip out the signs and mute the announcements, you were in Schrödinger's buildings, fitting in both everywhere and nowhere.
The air was perfect. Not too warm. Not too cold. Not too damp. Not too dry. The lighting didn't sting her eyes - no imprint was left behind if she looked at the lamps for too long. And she felt... she felt order pulse through her like ionising radiation. The laces on her boots tightened and straightened, losing all kinks and all loose strands, merging smoothly into an arrangement that seemed like it might never loosen, not unless she wanted it to. Her hair slowly arranged itself, losing tangles and patches stained with blood, becoming... clean. Smooth. Even her skin - the parts which weren't smooth scars - seemed to cleanse itself, losing any build-up of oils or impurities, even adopting a tone which was... not flushed, not bruised, just... flat.
She felt like she was becoming a storefront mannequin. Grasped for the Flame, and ran a hand through her hair - her one remaining hand - and ruffled it up. Already felt it rearranging back to perfectly normality.
Nothing but the immaculate average could exist here.
Could feel the imperfections in her cells slowly clicking out of existence. Spellcheck running through her DNA.
...I feel sick.
Taylor did too. And yet, that sickness only manifested in the lack of sickness. She felt more healthy than she had in a... a long, long time.
This place was wrong. This place was very wrong.
And some way down the corridor - could be a few feet, could be half a mile, distance was nothing in this place - the creature was rising as well.
With a crack, her latest layer shed and she stepped free.
Wings were damp underneath, sagging down to dry around her waist like a skirt. She glittered with raw shades, moist with haemolymph that pulsed sluggishly along her unfolding tesseract flesh. Her shell fell away behind her. And a taller, glittering doppelganger of Taylor stared at her from the end of the corridor... well, if the corridor had an end. Maybe this was it. The heart-vein of the Grid was just an infinite, perfect line extending onwards into eternity until it folded around and joined itself. The line becoming the circle becoming the loop. The wheel of fortune always seemed like a line if you couldn't glimpse the curve. Taylor was... annoyed. Very annoyed. She wanted to examine this place more. Figure out what was happening, what it was. She'd heard of... Cauldron, she knew Contessa was connected to it, knew Contessa had experimented with and possibly welcomed the Grid, but the rest of the structure remained elusive. Was this Cauldron's base? Their... cult centre? Was it connected to SET, or had it emerged after the Grid had become the all-consuming force it was today? Why had the Simurgh worked so hard to rip open a gate to this place, why bother?
No time to think.
She was coming.
The Beatles were playing from invisible, distant speakers. Sounded like... Helter Skelter.
...hadn't this absolute cunt said that she'd intended to infest her dad? And Taylor had just triggered first?
"You were going for my dad."
Her voice was a barely-human growl. She'd almost lost her dad once before. Spent four years being awkward and half-distant, dealing with the fact that they... had their own lives, and didn't need the other one. But the idea that...
Monitor spoke, slowing down very slightly, cocking her head to one side in an imitation of humanity.
"Yes. Or you. It depended on who satisfied the right conditions first. In retrospect, I anticipate... the right stresses would have been evoked by his wife's death, his failure as a father towards you, or potentially broader failures towards his colleagues. If you hadn't become transmission-capable in your... inciting incident, it's conceivable he would've linked with me afterwards."
She said this clinically. Coldly. Like it didn't have... bizarre ramifications. Made her think the whole world was surrounded by squirming shards of alien lifeforms, everyone followed by an invisible ghost watching for them to break, to become 'transmission-capable', liable to accept the parasite entering their skull. Like vultures circling over the heads of people stuck in the desert. Look up, and you'd see them, with their greasy necks and black eyes, wings like priestly cassocks, watching with grim anticipation.
My previous advice stands. Hurt her.
Taylor very much wanted to follow this very, very wise advice. But the same problems remained... of course, some new advantages had emerged. Monitor was stronger, faster, had skills very optimised towards hurting Taylor in the fashion she wanted, nothing too excessive or insufficient. But her swarm was dead and gone. Looked like she'd smuggled a few bugs in with her, sandwiched between layers of her crystalline body, but not many. Not enough to scan this whole place. Which meant her omniscience had been broken. In this environment, her flight meant significantly less, all her work in Madison was irrelevant, all she had was herself. Dragged down to Taylor's level. Getting close was suicide. She scanned the walls momentarily... the glowing lights made her nervous of floating through the floor and escaping. Electricity could paralyse her. One poorly-timed twitch and she might end up strangled with cables, stuck like a butterfly in a killing bottle. The Grid was weird, for all she knew, this entire place was conductive.
Play it safe. Just for a moment.
Not exactly many other directions to run, once she took turning into smoke out of the equation.
Taylor turned on her heel and ran.
Monitor gave chase in silence. Chorei granted her near-limitless stamina, and Monitor was too inhuman to think about silly things like breathing or muscles.
They ran, both of them, without breathing once. Neither needed to. There was just the dull, oddly muffled thump-thump of boots, the scritch-scratch of clawed crystal feet, and the distant sound of Helter Skelter. The hallway immediately began to change, giving way to passages branching in multiple directions... Taylor had a head start, but Monitor was gaining, bounding down the corridors like an animal. Much faster. Needed to find a room, a stairwell, something. This place had no plans available for it, she was going in completely blind. Every corner she turned was the tiniest of delays, while Monitor just sprang smoothly from one wall to the other. Taylor barely glimpsed the score marks she left behind... and saw how the walls smoothly shifted to heal around them, rippling like living things. Not good. She hesitated...
And span on her heel, whirling into a kick just as Monitor breached a corner...
Monitor's tail was already lashing out, two clawed hands reaching...
Taylor deliberately unbalanced herself. The kick was aborted midway through - always intended to, no way Monitor would just walk into it. Instead, she tumbled, trying to slam chaotically into Monitor...
Who twisted... her tail was too close, the stinger already passing around Taylor to the point where it couldn't make proper contact. It scraped loudly against her back, not even hoping to pierce the scars... clawed hands wrapped around Taylor, jagged legs tried to wrap around her like an insect grappling with its entire body...
Taylor responded in kind.
Locking her in a death grip hug, the sort of thing crocodiles did before they thrashed. Locking Monitor's limbs in place, best as she could with one arm. Used her torso to make up for the missing other. Even with her greater strength, without leverage there wasn't much she could do. Her body was covered in small spikes, made her think of the arms of a praying mantis, and if she had flesh she imagined that Monitor would've already torn multiple blood vessels. As it was? She was a flawless silver statue. She couldn't be touched. Was she stronger? No. But she could hang on. Already she'd grafted, already she was starting to burn through more layers with rushing waves of yellow fire. Monitor's mind was vast, her consciousness alien, and it'd take time to burn through it all...
Might as well get started. Even if she took it one inch at a time, if she didn't give up she'd eventually walk a hundred miles.
Already Monitor was opening her mouth to bite at her face. Didn't even think, just started doing it. Her mouth was ringed with teeth like a lamprey, needle-thin and curved, some of them hollow and filled with venom. She'd... planned for everything. Taylor almost admired that - the relentless search for increased effectiveness. Almost admired it. She focused, concentrated on the Revolution, and snapped herself away. A quick teleport - not too far. Concentration was difficult in a situation like this, and the air... the Grid was powerful here. Not actively trying to suppress the Flame, but its existence, the unrelenting structure, opposed it viscerally. The Grid wasn't just order, it was refinement of order, the refinement of a system to the point of maximum efficiency. Its existence was based on an objective, observable, rational reality. The sort of thing the Flame, necessarily, opposed. The two couldn't be further apart if they tried. The Grid could integrate just about everything besides the Flame... and the Worms-in-the-World, apparently. It felt uncomfortable teleporting. Made her insides twist. Made Chorei shiver in discomfort...
Hadn't gained much distance.
Monitor had already adjusted to the sudden loss of her target... and her tail lashed viciously. That thing was her ace in the hole, as long as she had that venom she was going to be obscenely dangerous. Remove that from the equation, and there might be a chance of winning.
You're fighting while down one limb.
Right. Still missing an arm. That grip she'd put Monitor in had been flawed from the start - barely managed a few seconds of extended contact before breaking away. Needed a replacement, or...
...oh, and she figures it out! Who's my little genius.
Hold on.
Taylor hissed in annoyance as Chorei ripped her way out, melting the scars in her way with caustic venom. Not quite destroying the scars, simply... eroding the raw flesh beneath, then parting it until she had an opening to slip through, convolutions in space easing her passage. At no point did the scars truly break, simply... made way briefly. Taylor ran, gaining a little distance, reaching a corner, kicking off one wall and using Chorei to stabilise her movement. God, it was nice to have four limbs again. Moving faster. Felt more balanced. And the venom dripping from Chorei's maw... she had images of grappling against Monitor's tail, of melting through her crystalline flesh with acid, of hurting her. That grip from earlier would be a hell of a lot easier now she had another limb. Alright, so... no rooms around her, still in the bizarre mass of corridors. No idea where she was going. Only knew she-
Monitor screeched around the corner, and the eerily warm, still air was filled with the sound of buzzing - like a car engine whirring to life. Her wings had dried off, then. Just another speed advantage. Next priority, shred those things, put holes in them but don't rip them off, don't; give her the opportunity to shed dead weight, make her carry it around.
Taylor swerved, trying to make her path more erratic while she readied herself for a small teleport, just to gain some more distance....
And something launched from Monitor's tail.
A barb. Like a manticore's spines.
She tried to dodge...
Perfectly timed. Perfectly aimed.
It slammed into Chorei.
And Chorei howled.
Not quite in pain.
The stinger was already being pushed out, regeneration forcibly removing it from the flesh. But something else. The barb wasn't meant to kill with venom. There was something in it, something... something very ugly. Parasites. Like her worms. Fine. Like last time, harness the Flame, burn them out, much easier when doing it to herself. Much, much easier. She focused... but Chorei's howls only grew, even as the barb clattered to the immaculate floor in a shower of smoking venom, unnaturally acidic, scarring black, ugly marks into the tiles. Chorei thrashed, losing all control, and her howls resolved into words, tinged with absolute terror.
They're in my mind!
Shit. She focused harder, trying to grip the Flame around the throat and force it to burn her friend's mind clean of infestation, just...
Oh. Fuck. Oh dear.
She felt something was very, very wrong in her head. Something was... oh, God. It was like... like a weight was growing, like something was moving... the worms, the pseudo-worms, they weren't even close to her skull, they were small and weak, couldn't move far, but... they were... what was... it... there was something up there. Something that was pressing against her mind, trying to... to... not trying to invade or corrode, just to limit. A hobble placed around her consciousness. She tried to grip the Flame, stirred the Revolution into motion, encouraged it to blaze with merry frenzy, but... when she did, this... block came up. She glimpsed, for a second, eternity. She saw the billions upon billions of years of existence Monitor had behind her. Species after species. Host after host. For a second, Taylor was Taylor. Then she was... something with a name unpronounceable if you lacked five spine-tongues and a nitrogen-based atmosphere, she was scaled and wonderful, she wore a ragged cloak of her father's skin and she slithered upon the dirty ground of a world the colour of jaundice and around her whirled the young spawn of the ravening great swimming birds that inhabited the methane pools, enslaved to her will, and-
No, no, no, not her. Get out of her mind. She gritted her teeth, feeling them come close to popping from strain, trying to rouse the Flame, but...
For a second she was a thing in the deep, she swam in a... strange world, she swam in an ocean of metallic hydrogen, avoiding great floating pieces of solid diamond, deep in a gas giant in some unknown corner of existence. She pulsed with light on odd frequencies, summoned microscopic life to cluster under her fronds, she pulsed and lured something close... then her capsid jaws were opening, protein spikes deploying, the prey lured in by lights and a trail of microorganisms and she chewed her prey apart and harvested his genetic material, spilling it from her glittering diamond coat in small half-life larvae to join the swarm and mingle with other half-lives, slowly constructing genomes out of fragments and forming new, interesting life, that-
Not. Her. Chorei was still screaming, she was still running...
Monitor had asserted limited control of the shrivelled remnants of her corona pollentia, her gemma, her old home. Limited. But she was blasting her with memories, ones alien to the Totems she understood, brains not wired like humans. Stopping her from burning these things out.
Time was limited. Not sure how long she had before she could start asserting greater control.
Not...
Hold on.
A push against her cheekbone. Very faint. Very subtle. But there. Noticeable in the silence of the corridor, the windless air, the feeling of painful, unnatural neutrality.
She was here. The ghost of Madison. The one who'd come through that gate. Had she... followed Taylor? Followed Monitor, maybe? Was she immune to that field, and if so, why hadn't she done this before? No, she had an obvious answer right in front of her. The ghost was waiting for someone. Couldn't do what she needed to do alone. Needed an ally, a guide, maybe there was a barrier she couldn't surpass.
And now she was leading Taylor away.
Allies were allies.
She gritted her teeth and spat, hissing at the invisible presence as she stumbled drunkenly, trying to tune out Chorei shrieking in anger and violation.
"Electricity."
A single push against her cheekbone. One meant no. No electricity to worry about, no circuits? Avoid the lights anyway, play it safe. She turned into shadow and pushed downwards. Should've done this earlier, still getting used to a power not her own, and the alien nature of this place made her uncertain... it hurt to transform, the alien memories pulsing strongly as two alien supercomputers struggled for a seat in the same mind. She had two connections, she wasn't meant to have two connections. Even Vicky had never done this, she always had distance, used skins to mediate between herself and the powers she took. Only had Blondie as a direct connection, everything else was... an implant, foreign and consciously so. Taylor was working with a raw connection from Sophia, and living chunks of another being from Monitor. Fucking... like shoving her head into a speaker howling with feedback.
Hold on, why not do this before? Why not in...
This cheeky cunt wanted this. Wanted her to get in. Knew she could get through that field, did all she could to prevent it, but had a last few tricks to make sure she couldn't run further. Saving her last weapons for when uncertainty lay all around her, allies were (mostly) gone, and victory was in sight.
She wanted to explore this place too. Find out what the Grid was hiding under its skirts, further her own cause. Monitor was incapable of thinking only of the present, she had to engage with the distant future as well. Nothing could just be about now. Even the fight of her life had to include planning for the next million years. And she'd hidden some awful little tools for her expedition, had them as a backup. Or maybe she'd been improvising this whole time and only now thought about bombarding Taylor with memories. The crystal face revealed nothing.
In shadow, she felt the parasites accompanying her. The bodies were fragile and already dying as their host regenerated faster than they could gnaw, but the signals were already in her mind. Only fire could burn it out, and as long as they were there, fire wasn't an option. Like she was now, gaseous, permeable, she could feel the change happening in real time. No messy biological processes to distract her. She was... shit, not much time at all. Hours, at least. Long enough. But she handled this now, no long-term existed so long as this countdown existed. Some plans were generating, some ugly, some... marginally workable. The Wolf. Use the Wolf, and mutate. Change herself until the parasites had nothing to latch onto... might work, but they were billions of years old, worked with some very odd creatures, they could manage a little adaptation. And altering her brain felt... uncomfortable. Brain surgery was hard enough when you used a drill and magical fire, doing it on herself using a howling brain-wolf that had no great appreciation for sapience was...
Anyway.
She fled. The presence vanished - navigating the long way. She floated through the floor, into another identical corridor. The same pressure. The same feeling of regularity forcing itself into her. The smoke that formed her body seemed to be crackling with invisible, harmless sparks, like the air was clustered with golden static. Nothing felt right here. Rather, everything felt too right. Too normal. Too completely empty. Where were the cells? Where was the continuation of the ruin outside? Had this place healed itself like an open wound? She imagined the floors drinking up any motes of dust that time fed to them, imagined this place as a living creature. And all these corridors... she kept floating down and around, trying to put some proper distance between herself and Monitor, and she had the keenest feeling of being inside a digestive system, or a convolution of veins surrounding a heart.
She froze once she found a room.
Chorei had stopped screaming. Just whimpering slightly.
Taylor shifted back into flesh.
"Alright?"
No. Not at all. They're still in my head. I can feel them. They want to push me out. Replace me with them. Join you by another method.
Shit.
"Holding up, though?"
I can hold them off. But... hours. At most. They're going to shred my mind piece by piece. They're just learning the right method. Help me. Please. I can't... I don't want to lose myself, not again, immortality almost did it, the Flame finished the job, the Wolf tried to gnaw at my thoughts, I can't lose myself. This is all I am.
Please, Taylor, help me. Get them out of me.
Using Chorei as an infection vector. Clever. Shouldn't have let her unfurl, no matter the advantage. Needed a replacement arm.
"I'm... sorry. I'll do my best. Maybe if she dies the whole thing goes down, they're all part of the same creature, like... extensions of one body. Kill the torso and the fingers will die eventually."
I dearly hope so.
Focus. Not much time.
The room. Same material as everything else, spotless, not a hint of dust or decay. Even saw a cup of coffee on a tabletop. Must be years old, looked like it was growing into the tiles, but the liquid was still piping hot. Like everyone had just... abandoned it a second before she arrived. The lights shone without flickering, heedless of whether there was a human or not. She'd felt no cables as she descended. This place just glowed because it was meant to, not because it made sense, not because this structure worked. Hadn't even felt insulation as she went, just solid stone. This place felt grown. Didn't feel like a human or maybe even a parahuman could or would build this. There was a pointlessness to it which spoke to a love of structure for structure's sake. The room seemed to be a laboratory. Long benches, microscopes, empty test tubes, everything gleaming like new. Looked... generic. An odd machine stood in a corner, one she vaguely recognised as an outdated Torsten DNA sequencer. She'd been on her own for four years, she took correspondence courses and she knew what those things looked like.
You... absolute book-burrower, I can feel your thoughts, I know what you're thinking right now...
Shut up.
Fine. Old laboratory. All deformities scrubbed, old experiments packed away. Hadn't been used in a while, coffee might've been left here when... things ended. Sound of Beatles music was still faintly audible... now it was Get Back. Was this a Grid thing? Play the most popular band ever, because they were the most popular, and thus the most, on average, listenable?
Felt fitting.
Nothing she could find, though. No convenient weapons. The entire thing looked like a stock photo. But... no, there was a metal case lying next to the DNA sequencer, and when she had a quick look... a symbol on the side. Something like an omega symbol, slightly tilted. An omega, a horseshoe, the hiragana symbol ひ, or... maybe a stylised cauldron. Maybe nothing. But possible confirmation - this base was connected to Cauldron, then. Contessa too. Nothing inside the case, just a foam lining that was clearly meant to hold something delicate. No idea what. Maybe one of those vials Clarissa had sipped on before she blew up Dubai, that Tizona had been tricked into drinking before entering Madison. She abandoned it, abandoned the lab. Moved on. Floated easily through walls, and...
Already she could feel the slightest disturbances in her smoke.
She was here. The ghost had apparently emerged when this place was opened to the world - was this her old home? Was that why she knew how to navigate it, knew how it operated?
She was trying to lead Taylor somewhere.
The itching of the gnawing in her brain grew louder and louder. The tiniest sound of chewing. Monitor was clawing her way back inside - the parasites, the avatar fighting her, the worms left behind in Vicky, the greater being, they were all one cohesive entity. For all she knew, these parasites would eat and eat... and then the avatar would simply collapse into dust as connections to the central operator were re-established in Taylor's mind. Not so much a trigger event as a renegotiation of a contract. One where she was integrated... differently into the pattern. No longer a temporary acquisition, but a permanent asset. Temporary conflict generation replaced by perpetual large-scale planning. Plugged in and burned out many thousands of years from now... maybe millions. Billions. Maybe never.
Focus. Get them out. Move.
She moved, and allowed the ghost to guide her. Felt eerie - she could very faintly feel innumerable hands and fingers intruding into her smoky form, brushing through the places where her organs ought to be. If she manifested now... she'd be in a hell of a lot of trouble. She felt... hm. The structure, in this deeper level, seemed to glitter. The air was filled with things like snowflakes, but golden, constructed entirely of lines as regular and straight as those on a circuit board. They only formed for a moment, aligning, clicking into place... then vanishing just as quickly. Like the programming of the Grid was emerging into the world physically, unreality no longer capable of bearing its weight. Maybe one day the world would be covered in golden, shivering snow. Felt like she was standing inside a reactor. An active reactor, and this gold was the equivalent of Cherenkov radiation. Light no human was meant to see.
Felt it flowing through her smoke. Could taste it, somehow. Tasted like... nothing and everything.
She collapsed back into reality suddenly, gasping involuntarily.
Shit. Just... something... the pressure on her cheek increased for a second, moving very slightly, like the ghost was patting her. Reassuring her.
This place made her feel sick. The Grid was too powerful here. This place would be identical a thousand years from now. A million years. She could feel time compressed, not into a single point, but into a perpetual loop. Self-sustaining and absolute. There was an engine all around her. Wherever she looked she could feel it. The corridors seemed to be curving in around her, all flowing backwards like the convolutions of a heart. The glowing lights had no circuits - the world was the circuit, as long as the lights in this base were on then the world-engine was still going, the economy still pulsed with golden value, culture still emanated in understandable fractals, and society in general was harmonious. This was the lantern hung at the door of the world, and it was illuminated. The forces in her head, they were... not weaker, but they felt like they were aligning too well. They could feel their places. Even the Wolf was a little gentler.
She could hear whispering.
Why could she hear whispering?
Was it the gnawing? The parasites eating her brain?
...was it something else?
No answers met her. Nothing but the very faintest whispers at the edge of her mind, the gentle chewing of parasites infiltrating the tumours they'd planted years and years ago, the light playing of the Beatles in the directionless distance... even the lights didn't hum. They just glowed. Soft and constant as stars. Chorei coiled loosely around her shoulders, shivering like a leaf. Terrified out of her mind, but... trying to help. Taylor patted her head, twined her fingers into the antennae. Needed the company. Already hard to tell where her body ended and the structure began. When she lifted her boots from the ground, she thought she saw the tiles shift slightly, clinging for a moment longer than they should. Eager to welcome her into the building.
She floated downwards. Put more distance between herself and Monitor. No insects had pursued her, no insects could. She'd have to find the longest way. No wonder she'd planted this parasite, she knew Taylor could easily evade her here. More identical corridors, devoid of humanity, both in feeling and in life. More rooms, too. Most were empty, just desks and chairs. Meeting rooms. The occasional lab containing slightly outdated equipment and nothing else, all experiments long-since cleared away. She tried to imagine living here normally, and found it difficult - everything was far apart, it felt like she was missing some vital component of organisation. Maybe the inhabitants had some other way of moving around, or maybe the Grid had changed the place over time. Maybe this had once been a single, normal structure... and over time it had expanded outwards, the rooms sliding away from one another. Like a universe expanding, ripping galaxies apart as it did so.
...hm. One room had computers. Ignoring the gnawing for a second, ignoring the caresses of the ghost, she poked her head inside. Again, outdated. But some of them were on - left on for years and years without a hint of screen burn or a mote of dust. Still somehow functional. The ghost began to tug at her smoke more and more, almost stepping inside her once or twice... very eerie, having an invisible human body inside her own, incorporeal one. Especially when the invisible body kept multiplying. Was that how the ghost worked? A human, invisible and untouchable, that replicated to fill the spaces she was allowed to? Or... anyway. She wanted her to move. Taylor wanted to look. Being told not to look was a pretty damn powerful invitation to do the opposite, in her opinion.
Never change.
She hoped not to.
Of the functional computers, two were just empty login screens, no idea of the passwords. One was a spreadsheet containing a massive array of numbers. Interesting that they required so many computers in the first place... she had a brief, peculiar image. The Simurgh had breached this place in 2009, a full nine years after the Grid had asserted control. Maybe this had been an old command centre, used by agents before it was compromised. Explained the size, at least. The numbers were meaningless, and the few dates she saw were from... well, again, 2009 or just before it. Probably accounts or something. No idea. More inactive computers, and... ah. One with a map. The ghost was being insistent now, and Taylor consciously ignored her. Needed to see. A 3D globe, spinning gently in a hazy void. A few tools scattered around it for zooming in, out, searching for certain sites... a dim sense of suspicion went through her. The Grid would know she was here. Maybe it was showing her this deliberately. Why it wasn't sending all its forces to defend it, she didn't know... maybe the Simurgh had helped. The breach had cleared this place out by necessity, denying her any assets to manipulate, but some things couldn't be moved. And that was what remained vulnerable. But she had the distinct feeling of being led along...
Maybe the ghost had a point, or...
Fuck it. Have a peek.
The globe was covered in blotches. Markers of varying size... sized by severity, possibly. She remained smoky and intangible, refused to touch the computer. Let the rotation show everything to her - more indication of this being a calculated show. Marker after marker, Europe, Africa, Asia, America... even a handful of scattered dots, usually small, out in the Arctic Circle and the very fringes of Antarctica... the biggest ones seemed to be around civilised areas, was this because of population? Were these parahuman population centres, or... no, if she stared closely... ah ha. She started to get an idea, just as the tugging became rougher. A very, very large pin in the middle of a lake in America, one she remembered trying and failing to cross. Another pin of slightly smaller size in a town she recognised, even if it was unlabelled. Fair-sized one in Japan. A tiny, tiny marker in a village in Russia she was intimately acquainted with - technically, she'd destroyed that one.
The Worms-in-the-World. They're charting them.
Interesting. And... Jesus, that was a lot. How many were there? If that fair-sized pin was the Great Worm of Senpou Temple, and that tiny pin was the miniscule infestation in the dacha outside Lomonosov... then... she was seeing a lot of fair-sized ones. Even saw one in Istanbul, wondered if that was connected to the collapse of the Hagia Sophia, maybe feeding on the results, maybe responsible for it, maybe so dangerous it demanded the collapse... no idea. No further information. But there were hundreds. Thousands. And each one... these things weren't ordinary lifeforms, they could split, wriggle away in multiple pieces. Each large pin could become a hundred more tiny pins, and then they could grow up in term.
The infestation looked dire from up here. She'd never quite realised.
She returned to reality after a second of hesitation, tapping a few keys, trying to navigate. Her curiosity had overpowered her better sense. And... oh, ho. She knew that acronym. ASPO. Aberrant Strain of Paranatural Occurrences. Acronym SET made up for their operations, referring to what she called forces or Totems or the Lattice. Spooky stuff, in short. If she clicked through a few menus, ignoring the ghost pulling her hair, she could... this was a whole damn database, charting incidents from years ago. Right at the start. A few more, and she could... hm. Could narrow it down to 'strains', referring to individual forces. Widen it, show all of them. Severity... a little clicking, and she saw what ratings Bisha's emergence had, used that as a baseline. Current status. What was going on now? What was-
Oh my goodness.
...what the fuck was happening out there.
America was dead. Nothing but tiny pins, scattered like a dusting of snow. The Grid was very good at suppressing activity on its home front. Mostly.
But the rest. The rest was something else entirely. Europe was worse than America, significantly so, but... Africa, whole swathes of Asia, good chunks of South America, and the bloody Arctic...
Fields and fields of red. Like a field of deadly poppies.
She couldn't have missed all of this. There was too much. How had she missed it. But... no, she could imagine. So much was under the surface. Plotted for years before emerging. The world had billions of people. A cult might consume a dozen, a few dozen, up to a hundred... less than a drop in the bucket, less than a drop clinging to a droplet. Easy to consume without being noticed by anything large. And if they weren't in Russia, she'd have no bloody chance of hearing of the small places. How many cults were out there, how many areas were succumbing to these forces? How many were on the verge of going full Bisha, going completely mad? The Grid must be attacking those, but the bulk... those had to be left alone, simply too many to handle, too dug in. Hurt them and they scatter or escalate. Often both.
The world was... it was...
She felt a dim sense of despair creeping in her gut.
No-one could stop all this. No-one. Not her, definitely. Even if she gathered her whole team, brought the dead back to life, did everything in her power to fight this tide... there was nothing. Bisha had almost killed her, Chorei had, so had Angrboda. And this field of red... how many Angrbodas lived in those poppies? How many Bishas crouched behind the hedgerows? How many adepts ready to get lucky? The Grid couldn't even integrate the things causing this change in the human subconscious, it was trying to fight a wildfire by sweeping up the ash. Always dealing with the symptoms and never the root cause. Taylor would be doing the same. The Grid was fighting a battle on one front while forbidden to fight on any other, of course it was losing, but... America was clean. America was still, somehow, enduring, and it'd been extending protection to Europe. She saw little pools of sanity where its overseer blocks had been established, regulating the surrounding area, sending out agents to handle the cults that tried to grow up.
Cults were like cells. Usually they were harmless. Did their job, replicated, died.
And sometimes they went cancerous. And one cancerous cell made all the benign cells, in all their multitudes, seem like air. Or baggage.
The world's... not doing very well, is it?
"No."
One almost feels sorry for the Grid. Trying to keep up with it all.
"Almost."
...were these the answers you were looking for? That the Grid can't even hold back the tide? That you couldn't, and it was all pointless in the end?
"Not really. Hoping for more."
Then let's keep going. I know you. You're not giving up here. And if you do...
Well, maybe those parasites have already won.
A pause.
...what on earth is that noise?
A faint buzzing.
Ah.
Taylor could see the problem.
Despair lingered in her gut like a lead weight as she moved. She was coming. Tracking her. Probably had backup methods now her swarm was dispersed... maybe she could track the parasites. Probably could. Somehow she received that information with dull resignation rather than mounting fear. She wasn't going to give up, not now, not now she'd come so far, but... there was low note of dread in her. And it wondered, maybe, if this was all she'd learn. If everything would just be an elaboration on the basic axiom that 'things are fucked, and you can't stop it'. The Worms would win, the Grid would lose, the forces would drown the world in madness and grind it up for the Worms to happily digest, and the Earth would be left barren and lifeless while they fucked off. She...
Not after all of this. She was twenty years old, given almost a quarter of her life to fighting this stuff, to doing things of importance.
Ahab had died for this life of hers. Patience had died barely a few hours ago. And more besides.
Couldn't give up. But couldn't accept that this was all there was.
Had to keep moving.
The ghost latched onto her again, tugging her in one direction as she turned back into smoke and flowed easily through the floors and walls, avoiding the rising sound of buzzing wings. She was coming, and navigating quickly. Could hear faint thumps, too... was she bulldozing through the floors? Seemed to be taking a moment to do it, making sure her wings wouldn't be damaged, but... still. Explained her speed. Taylor was faster right now, but Monitor was giving the pursuit a damn good go. The ghost led her along, down corridors, through coiling staircases, along rows and rows of... cells? Empty cells, with no signs of their former inhabitants. Not even an ominous stain. The ghost didn't want her to stop and stare, was being downright aggressive. Taylor strategised as she was led along - Monitor needed to die, but Monitor was also too tough to fight head-on, her venom was too much to deal with. Taylor could soak up hits from her damn well right now, could use smoke, but the issue was scale and time. Monitor was the avatar of an enormous alien cell, she could soak up damage for hours and hours, which Taylor no longer had. Monitor just had to keep the pressure up, stop her doing anything stupid, and let the parasites win.
Needed a way of turning the tables quickly.
And the ghost...
...oh.
Oh.
The ghost was showing her how to.
This place was a Cauldron facility.
And the ghost slammed a door open, rattling on gleaming hinges, letting her into a room that seemed to be for... meetings. Looked glossy, more like a corporate office. A smooth table, chairs set around it, all very comfortable, the floor carpeted with bland grey fabric that she imagined being luxuriously soft. It was tastefully nondescript, everything unremarkable yet of impeccable quality. And the air was glittering with more Grid-trails, stronger than before, churning her stomach up more than it already was. Somehow. On the table, though...
A metal case.
The ghost slammed into it, cracking the locks at the side, flinging it open with a distinct air of impatience. Wanted her to be here minutes ago. Taylor stared as the presence swelled to consume the room, brushing against her smoky form, passing in and out of it, leaving her with the faintest impression of a woman standing and gesturing imperiously. Go on. Have a look. Have fun, you ingrate.
Taylor turned back to flesh...
And stared into the box.
Vials.
Marked with that same omega symbol. All six of them.
Papers set tastefully beneath them like they were at a showroom.
'Deus' (85%)
'Jaunt' (70%)
'Prince' (55%)
'Vestige' (75%)
'Division' (80%)
'Robin' (60%)
Risk of contamination: Minimal. Strain safety: Assured by all relevant metrics.
Congratulations on your newly purchased superpowers.
Oh.
Oh ho.
Chorei twisted.
Time to do some science.
AN: I lied, two chapters today, but likely just one tomorrow.
