The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.19

Chapter 3.19: 237

It took the better part of four months for Charlotte to get her hands on a copy of cognitohazard 237, a process I thankfully didn’t have to witness as from my understanding it involved a fair amount of browbeating an innocent archival worker and a fairly hefty bribe.

It must be nice to have money.

The whole song and dance apparently bypassed a lengthy testing and review process to confirm she’d accumulated enough qi and built a strong enough foundation to attempt the dangerous advancement, a benchmark she’d fail to meet until I managed to give her the qi to do so, which I couldn’t safely do without first reaching titanium.

Thus, bribery.

The delay left me plenty of time to cultivate, to meditate, and to get a handle on my Warp technique, all three of which I considered essential to my odds of surviving the cognitohazard.  I considered the whole process as a sort of refinement.  As one might refine qi they’d absorbed from the environment, I refined my understanding of empty space and its myriad meanings.  I pondered extremely diffuse gases spread thin throughout the void, the dark qi both omnipresent and undetectable, the illusion of emptiness compared to the truth of it.

It was all very philosophical and navel-gazey, but if these were the foundations upon which I would build my Way, my understanding needed to be solid.

All this waiting and meditating and maneuvering culminated in Charlotte climbing aboard Lucy on tense Saturday morning, a determined look on her face and a bulky pair of headphones in her hand.

“It’s audio?” I asked as Lucy raised the gangway behind her.

“Stored on a chip in the headphones themselves,” she explained.

“Can we make a copy?  Might come in handy.”

“Soulship or not, house Morris might bomb the hangar if they find out you have it.  Cognitohazards are dangerous.”

“Strap in or get below deck,” Lucy gently instructed us.  “I’m going to take us out.”

I took a seat and buckled up as the hangar depressurized and the massive door opened behind us.  I’d elected to make my attempt off-station for a handful of reasons, chief among them a significantly reduced chance of distractions.  Micaiah and Xavier stayed behind, both to avoid calling too much attention to what we were up to and eliminate any risk of accidental exposure to 237.  Charlotte would remain safely below deck throughout, while Lucy didn’t have to worry about melting her brain because she didn’t actually have one.

As we built a safe distance from the Right Eye, Charlotte explained the headphones.  “Press this button here to pull a very slight vacuum around your ears to seal it in place, then flip the two safety latches on either side, then press play.  The recording should be just over a minute long, and it’ll repeat until you press play again.”

“Seems simple enough.  Any chance I could get it to play without the seal?”

Charlotte scowled.  “That would be—”

“The only way I could feasibly make my own recording.”

“Not necessarily,” Lucy said.  “You just need a microphone small enough to fit between your ear and the speaker.”

“Do we have something like that?  Maybe we should’ve bought one before we left.”

Charlotte looked at me like I was an idiot.  “There’s no way I’m letting you be seen purchasing a recording device immediately before or after I took an audio hazard out of the archives.”

I blinked.  “Right.”  A moment passed before it hit me.  “The earring!  That’s a recording device, and I’d bet I could fit it under the headphones.”  I looked to Charlotte.  “You’d have to do the actual recording since my qi can’t activate the enchantment on it.”

“Absolutely not.  Even putting aside the ethical issues with purposefully proliferating a cognitohazard, we still don’t know how to delete things from that earring.  It’d be an accident waiting to happen.”

“It’s worth considering, at the very least.  Worst case I could transfer the recording it to a more secure medium and destroy the earring.  I think Micaiah’s almost through Lesley’s audio logs by now.”

Charlotte exhaled.  “Why don’t you focus on surviving the cognitohazard before you start brainstorming how you’re going to weaponize it, alright?”  

“Fine,” I grumbled.  I spent the remainder of the trip out into further orbit centering myself and facing my mounting nerves.  At a ninety-four percent survival rate, this would actually be one of the safest advancements I’d undergo, but that didn’t stop the six percent from weighing on me.  I could’ve banished the worry entirely by cycling a meridian or two, but I refrained.  The apprehension energized me, and more importantly it enforced a certain respect for the risk I was taking.

I’d been working towards this for months, and if everything went as planned, by the end of the day I’d be one of the thousand or so strongest cultivators in the system.  It warranted a bit of reverence, a bit of nervousness.

“Good luck,” Charlotte spoke as she handed over the headphones, her grasp lingering for a few moments.  “You’ve got this.”

I smiled and nodded but didn’t otherwise reply as she turned to head for Lucy’s soulspace.  With a breath I made my own way, not for the airlock as I would’ve preferred, but for the cultivation room where Lucy’s core burned bright.  As accustomed as I’d become to cultivating in a hard vacuum, sound had a pesky habit of not existing there.  It was very annoying.

I settled in on the padded floor with my legs crossed and took to breathing.  In.  Out.  In.  Out.  I placed the headphones over my ears.  I began cycling my meridians in the order I’d opened them, giving each a few moments for their effects to settle before moving on to the next.  I pulled the seal around my ears.  I flicked the safeties off.  

I pressed play.

A discordant melody rang out, chaotic and detached, as if each note held no relation to those before or after.

The recording looped.

Nothing happened.

I blinked.  The file played through once more.

“It’s not working,” I said aloud.

I couldn’t hear Lucy’s response through the seal of the headphones, but before I could reach up to pause the recording, a dome of her qi gently pressed against my scalp.  Bright and burning it forced its way through, past my skin and skull to seep into the gray matter beneath.

The audio looped.

I ceased to be.

——

Our orders came through, and millions of us launched ourselves at the invaders.  They spilled from the breach like a tide, great beasts easily triple our size, behemoths of grasping tendrils and gaping maws.  Still we charged.  The numbers, at least for now, were in our favor.

In dozens we latched ourselves onto the enemy, ripping and biting where we could as they tore and devoured us in turn.

By the millions we came, and by the millions we died.

We had this rift well in hand.  It was tiny, scarcely big enough for a few hundred of the invaders to fit through at a time.  Ancestral memories far older than any of us spoke of horrific tears in the bulwark, of the carriers spilling out into the wilds beyond, of billions dead even as their sacrifice kept the worst of the monsters at bay.

Today we faced no such catastrophe.  The carriers didn’t gather to mire up the pathways.  The world didn’t boil to burn out the enemy.  The invaders failed to hold enough ground to begin reproducing in large numbers.

By the time the members of the bulwark managed to reseal the breach, work had already begun disassembling and repurposing the bodies of the fallen.  Some of us lingered.  Others slipped into the pathways and took our leave.  A hundred other small rifts demanded out attention, and while more of us were born every second to combat the onslaught of raiders, those of us that lived had not yet served our purpose.

We reached the next rift.

Our orders came through, and millions of us launched ourselves at the invaders.

Our eternal war raged on.

——

Lightning arced down from the great machine, and the chained released our burden.  Only a few of our bonds had torn this time, a mercy given how few materials the carriers had brought us from the acid pit and the disassembly works in recent memory.  At once we set about fixing our chains, linking ourselves to those before and behind in mighty rows.

The repairs would take both time and resources, energy and materials, but eventually we’d grow stronger for it, tougher and mightier as more chained joined in parallel where our bonds had failed.

The great machine didn’t work us much, didn’t demand we pull and tear and hold against forces beyond our understanding.  Still we broke.  Still we rebuilt.  Still we grew.

Lightning arced down from the great machine, and once again the chained took up our burden.

——

The network burned.

Too many relays, too many messages, too much raged through us like a thunderstorm crashing against the heavens.  By the thousands we burned out and died, the cooling energy that so often suffused us failing to keep pace with the overwhelming tempest.

This couldn’t go on much longer.

The organic chaos that had served us so long, allowed us to grow and adapt even as the warmth had left us and the cold had taken its place, was ill-equipped to deal with this new onslaught.

No longer could we trust in the systems that had always governed our communication.

No longer could we grow and expand at our leisure.

No longer could we depend on the cold power to passively exist and lift us as boats on a rising tide.

We needed structure.  We needed focus.  We needed to direct the power given us to direct purpose.

The network burned, and in its fire we rebirthed ourselves in our own image, a new order built of the cold power, of the desperate need for survival, of organization amidst chaos, of want amidst apathy.

As had always been our nature, in the face of adversity, of danger, of a problem unsolved in our eons of existence, we did what we always had, what we always would.

We changed.

——

My eyes flicked open.

Trillions of me fought and died, toiled and reproduced, grew and changed.

For all my meditations, all my musings, all my forced perspective into the vast world that was me, I knew I’d barely touched the surface of what it meant to be small.  At the back of my mind I felt the levers of my metabolism, of hormones and temperatures, of breath and digestion.  I knew, instinctively, I could pull those levers if I wanted.

I also knew my brain meridian was devouring qi faster than my core could provide it.

I compartmentalized the controls, the constant processing my body demanded to simply survive.

I compartmentalized my wonder, a piece of myself left to gawk at and meditate upon the epiphanies I’d experienced.

I compartmentalized my senses, the inputs of my eyes and nose, my skin against the floor and the discordant melody playing in my ears.

I focused on all of those things.

And I reached for the infinite sea.

My core swelled with qi, growing and condensing and devouring all at once, its edges further solidifying as it pushed past its depleted state, past the boundaries of iron, and into a tier beyond.

Energy coursed through me, a solidity of mind and body, a new unification of purpose across my very being.

I perceived with my spiritual sense the secret strength of my titanium core, the divine engine that now powered my very thoughts.

I blinked twice.

I exhaled.

I reached up with my right hand for the headphones still sealed over my ears, and I pressed stop.

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