Chaos fluttered and swirled, watching the Maker pull the dispersed fragments of its essence together. There had to be something it could do! Chaos had tried before to get in the way of the universe's Guardians, and that had not gone well, not well at all.
The avalanche of biped deaths had faded to a steady trickle of minds blinking out as their bodies ceased to function. The activity of the automata had spread as well, picking over the soon to be dead at a million locations. Chaos chose one, a cluster of minds, most likely genetically similar individuals, trapped in the rubble of their dwelling. Circulatory fluid was leaking out from broken bodies, despite the pressure from jagged rubble piled on top of them.
The automata swirled around and through them, conducting whatever method they were using to extract the Maker-fragments. It was a relatively slow process; neural networks were copied into the quantum foam and run through a complex series of careful processes and distilled down to some essential speck. The amount of time taken for each mind was an integer number of seconds, orders of magnitude longer than the abbreviated, crude routines they'd used to beat the onrushing nuclear blast wave. There were things it could do to them -- automata didn't have the protective mechanisms of the Guardians -- so it did, reaching out with the barest tendril of being to mangle the data flow.
There was a reaction, the automata seeming to turn inside out, and Chaos recoiled as a siren call propagated through the quantum foam and the sharp shapes of Guardians converged on the site. There were more than Chaos had ever seen in one place, far too many to be avoided or duped. It fled, coiling and writhing through an unlikely set of directions, until it was alone again.
Now, in the quiet spaces in the depths of the planetary mantle, it could feel other things taking place. The constant sparkle of the 'Creation Stones' and the denied volumes around them, thick with Guardians and forever out of reach, had converged on two points. The two servitors, the ones it had tampered with, had all the Stones and were in the same physical location.
Tight bunches of gravity waves rippled out from them, and an achingly-long time later others came in from other locations around the world. There was no real pattern, except-- Chaos froze, mapping the times and locations. Everything, the patterns, the timings, suddenly made sense. The servitors were opening multiple, simultaneous wormholes to remote locations, managing to control the momentum of the objects transferred, with a finesse that even it wouldn't have been able to manage.
The Stones were a key part of the universe, integrated at the lowest of levels, they had to be, the way they were protected. That meant... they were somehow part of the Maker's plan. It cursed its lack of focus, if only it had spent more time on the Stones, if only--
Chaos thought about the multiple gravitational manipulations that had ripped the minor moon apart, and about the twisting of the Flaw that turned it into a laser intense enough to skewer a world. It was painfully obvious that the Stones were exceptionally powerful, powerful enough to change fundamental properties of the universe. They could do things that Chaos could not. If it was to win, it needed the power of the Stones.
What if the servitors could be convinced to join the fight?
===
The servitors had moved away from the others -- why did organics have to take so long to do anything?! Chaos couldn't manipulate them directly, not like it could at the start of this project, but that didn't mean there wasn't a way to get the message across. It thought, turning compact loops in the higher-dimensional spaces, focusing on the problem for a whole second. There were proxies it could use, individuals the servitors trusted, or perhaps something in the electronic systems they used to communicate.
They knew it existed, or at least must suspect, from the memories it had placed in the first servitor. What did they think Chaos was? It seemed likely that they might interpret it as the Maker itself. Could it use that? The religion ran deep within the mechanisms used to coerce the servitors, so...
Chaos cut off the line of reasoning. Stupid! Obviously no being would welcome an instrument of its own entrapment. Can't get to the magically active servitors themselves, so what about their kin or higher commensals? There were hundreds of the soldier-gryphons and thousands of the neutralised servitors, but most of these could be discounted as communication proxies. It swept through the local environment once more, mind alighting on the solitary biped working a communications nexus. It had an antagonistic relationship with the flaw-linked servitor, but had known the creature the longest.
You.
It sampled the biped's memories, spawning a hundred neural copies within the quantum foam and modelling their reactions to certain revelations. Each copy split into dozens more, and on and on, forming a probabilistic response tree.
Chaos picked a set of branches with the most hopeful pathways, then wiped the copies and reached out for the original, organic, mind. This was not going to be quick, even at the glacial scale of organics.
Such a bizarre conclusion to reach. In all the vast stretches of time it had been manipulating and coercing these creatures, never had telling the truth been a viable strategy. Mostly the truth, anyway.
===
Korn's paws danced over the input fields of the logistics console, following the whispered orders from the gryphon, Olvir. His back hurt from the poorly adjusted couch, but the job was nearly done. The best part of five thousand ponies had been dispersed to the surrounding web of valleys and glacial meadows, and medical support and security detachments shared out where needed. Only another... five hundred and seventy two to go. That's a hundred and fifty per cargo transport, four transports...
Transport Alpha was signalling low charge on its primary superconductor accumulators, so he directed it to settle next to the stack of boron-proton reactor pods while shifting the gunship squadron currently using the facility further away. Nearly done. He smiled slightly, nodding to the gryphon. Despite being forced into the role, helping this many beings, even if they were not his kind, had its own kind of satisfaction.
Vanca was only half right to describe the Maker as a machine.
His paws froze. Where did that come from? He shook his head and yawned. Too tired and not enough food. And where is the Academician, anyway? He eyed the pile of gryphon ration packs, reaching out with one paw to shake out a stick of some preserved 'meat', although from which species was impossible to tell. Korn squinted at the label, written in black on an olive drab background, brow furrowing at the low level of animal protein it claimed, then shrugged and tore open the wrapper and took a bite.
What is left in the universe, the automata that grant the power you call magic, is a machine, but that is not the Maker.
He bit down on the chewy bar, worrying at it and trying to ignore the intrusive thoughts. This one must be going mad from lack of sleep. The ration had an unexpectedly intense flavour and was actually nice, so good that all other thoughts left his head.
No, you are not mad, but you are in grave danger.
Korn breathed in sharply, then coughed as he inhaled some of the ration bar, spraying the rest across the console. He threw the thing away, gripping the edge of the desk with both paws. At his side, Olvir stood and said something, but he couldn't hear it past the roaring in his ears. "No," he muttered, "schizophrenia has a primarily genetic basis; a Person doesn't just develop it."
Correct. Korn also lacks any of the other symptoms.
"Stop it--" he shouted, heart thundering, paws coming up to cover his ears. Olvir backed away, turning his head to mutter something into his command collar. Something reached in and dropped his arms to his sides, making his features relax and controlling his frantic breathing and heartbeat.
Panic is not a useful survival trait.
Korn's mouth opened. "Sorry, this one has been under a lot of stress," his body said to the gryphon in a flat, calm monotone.
"Right," Olvir said, eyeing him suspiciously. "I think you need to take a break."
The laugh bubbled up, dying before it became more than a thought. What is happening to this one?! There should have been panic, but there wasn't, just like a medical servitor had taken a firm thaumic grip on his fight-flight-freeze response.
No words this time, just an image: gloved paws holding a petri dish covered with bacterial colonies. The same paws picked up a bottle of something toxic, pouring it over the dish. Your world is an experiment, a construct. The evidence has been obvious to your kind for many seasonal cycles, yet you do nothing and do not believe. Think before you answer.
It must be magic, one of the ponies is getting inside this one's head. It even sounds like a pony! The thought spun and dissolved, vanished before it could even take hold. Korn felt sick. No, everypony has been struck down by that weapon, they are as helpless as newborn foals. Some of the panic started to return, and he looked out of the open hatch and over the herds he'd been shepherding from valley to pasture. They can't even fly.
There was silence in his head, then Olvir tapped him on the shoulder with one paw-length talon. "It is telling the truth," he said, nodding, "there is a worse threat than this physical conflict." With a synchronicity that made the fur along his spine stand up, the other gryphons in the compartment all turned their heads, eyes fixing on him like the laying of turreted guns, and nodded.
What is this voice?
I am-- There was a cascade of images, too fast to really follow, but all perfectly clear despite that. A shifting ball of gas pierced by networks of lightning. An insane, fractal pattern that extended along directions orthogonal to the normal, physical three. Equations, half recognised by their derivations, detailing twists in space-time and complex, mobile vacuum topologies. Korn's confusion mounted, and the visions were replaced by a sense of annoyance. The feeling of claws running through his mind, pulling up concepts and disparate memories. --a free-roving magical entity. I have inhabited the spaces between the atoms since before the People existed.
Why does this being speak now? What should this one even be called?
Many millions of your kind have died in this war. A flicker-flash show of memories, not his own, settled in Korn's head: endless rooms and corridors filled with motionless People, not dead but somehow vacant. This revealed a hidden truth, that the Maker had placed a part of itself into each of you. Every death kills a part of the Maker. There was a mechanism placed in the workings of the universe, an emergency system designed to restore the Maker in event of a disaster.
But the Maker is good, these ones are the chosen people! How can this be a bad--
The image of gloved hands came back, along with the sudden smell of disinfectant. It has a mind far vaster than you can imagine. It will not care for you, any more than you care for the fate of a single cell in your body. Its experiment has failed and it will wipe the slate clean. An armourcrete-solid conviction lay behind the thoughts, settling on Korn like the weight of the world.
Korn is only one Person, what could he possibly--?
A sense of immense impatience flooded him, and the internal voice became angry and strident. You are too slow. I cannot approach the Stones. You will give Fusion and Gravity a message. You will be the message. More images and concepts followed, incomprehensible things, filling his mind with crystal and leaving a powerful compulsion to find the two ponies.
Under the onslaught the dull colours, the inside of the command carrier became bright and discordant, blaring with the sounds of insectile chittering and smelling intensely blue and purple. The ceiling panels warped and shifted, crawling over one another as his vision swam and faded, pulsing in time with his heart. There was too much coming in, too much being forced into the narrow confines of his skull, filling it to bursting and beyond.
Tentacles lined with toothed sucker-mouths wove through Korn's mind, touching and probing, pulling at the deep recesses of his lizard brain and sparking alternate feelings of dread and numinous joy. No, wait, this one will-- The words wouldn't come, trapped behind a jaw held shut by grindingly tight muscles. The feeling of violation increased, fibres growing from the tentacles like thorny branches, impaling and piercing all parts of his being.
A strange sense of duality, like he was flying above a strip of road that extended from an unknowable future to the vanishing-point of his personal deep past, simultaneously limited to the tortured now and able to perceive the whole sweep at once. It was lined with dioramas, full-size models of people, places and times, packed in as densely as legs on a millipede and just as mobile. All of them moved, a trillion media streams showing some aspect of his life.
They were not evenly sized; some towered over the rest, events that held great meaning. Packed between them were countless minutiae of daily life, like ants within the vertiginous spaces of an arcology core. Korn's attention focused on the largest, a sprawling rendition of the inside of an aircar, huge like a giant forest tree, as seen from a rear seat.
--an airtruck plummeting out of its assigned tunnel lane, cutting across his parent's aircar's path in a stream of smoke and flame. A started yell from his mother, hidden behind the smash and screech of tearing metal. The bangs from the seat restraint pretensioners firing and pulling him back into the infant seat. Biting pain at shoulders and waist, paws flailing and striking--
The memory dissolved into splinters and flew apart, the visual details fading first, then sounds and scents. The final, basic structure of the scene collapsed inwards, subsumed by a growing edifice of fractal crystal, all soaring buttresses and spindly towers. The replacement had such weight that it held his attention, and he picked at it like a fresh scar until he was dragged onwards, despite his efforts to resist.
"--the Student wrote this dissertation, surely he has considered this question already?" The voice was acerbic, rich with contempt. Korn stood in the office, one paw half raised, a claw extended to draw on the interactive display. His whiskers drooped, shame raising tears in his eyes. "Eigenfunctions were covered in the first dozen megaseconds of the Student's course, surely he has not forgotten?" The disapproving silence deepened, matching the singing emptiness where basic quantum thaumophysics should have been--
Gone in a flash, replaced with another foreign structure that glimmered and glowed, throwing out fine, hooked threads to join with the original. They thickened, threads turning to cables, then soaring sky-bridges covered with dense, shining nodes. The pony will know what this is, the pony must help Korn! He reached out, straining, muscles of his neck bulging with the effort, but all that came out was a mournful croak. His liaison, the gryphon Olvir, stared back, looking confused, his beak hanging open.
--curled in the dim sleeping nook with Ithra, post-coital drowsiness making his movements languid as he stroked at the soft fur of her belly and breasts, his muzzle resting in the cleft between her head and shoulder. She moved, snuggling closer in the warm darkness--
Burned in a flash, an Ithra-shaped hole appearing all through his mind. Korn cried out in wordless distress, knowing he'd lost something important but having no idea what it was. Crystal sprouted in a dozen, in a hundred, in a thousand places. Gravity, please-- More destruction, the wholesale demolition of entire districts of memory, then a roaring, levitation-train rush that blew him along the road of recollection, shattering everything in its wake.
A rising wail filled Korn, forever trapped, as whatever was left of him drowned under the flood of alien information.
===
Something pinged, a sound so unexpected and artificial that for the moment she couldn't place it. There was another noise, the quiet whisper-whine of a mosquito, coming from somewhere behind her left ear. Gravity reached up and pulled away her communicator, already partially dislodged, and stared at it. "Forgot I even had the thing," she muttered. "No use for it now." She made to throw it away to join the countless other bits of technological detritus that spun around the world, then paused. Why is it even working?
The voice became insistent, repeating the same indistinct phrase over and over, and she hooked the device back in its proper position. "--avity, can you hear me? This is Ellisif, I need to--"
"What do you want?" she whispered harshly. "And how did you get to me, anyway?" Are there some orbital assets I've not found? She closed her eyes, reaching inwards and started to hunt for any likely bit of hardware.
"Working thaumic sensors; you're the brightest thing in the sky. I've got, ah... " Ellisif's voice trailed off, and Gravity could picture the gryphoness staring speculatively at something. "That pet dog of yours appears to have gone mad." In the background, only barely audible, she could hear the sounds of a struggle and raised voices.
"Korn? What do you mean, 'mad'?" Gravity said quietly into the comms, forgetting about her search.
"He's raving about how he has to talk to you two, and that the Maker is going to kill us all. Says he's got a voice in his head."
"What do you expect me to do about it? Don't you have a battlefield medic who can see him?" Gravity reached out, feelling for Fusion's mind. Her sister was flying slowly, not even breaking the sound barrier, in some random direction, thinking slow, heavy thoughts. She reached out, scratching at the barrier until Fusion let her in.
"We don't have much in the way of combat psychologists! PTSD isn't something we suffer from." There was more shouting, one voice filled with a pleading tone. "All right!" Ellisif snarled, obviously not talking to her. "He says: 'Tell Fusion this one knows how she got the magic to escape from the accelerator the first time. Tell her he knows about the extra memories' "
What is it? Fusion thought, starting to circle the updraughts above some nameless crater. Gravity widened the connection, giving Fusion access to her senses. Is that Ellisif?
Gravity opened her eyes and stared down at where Fusion was, thousands of kilolengths away, near the limb of the world, and suddenly felt cold. "Hold on, Ellisif." She muted the communicator and frowned. Fusion, remember when you said you had memories that were not yours? Information that came from nowhere?
Right at the start. Something told me how to improve my magic and showed me the teleport spell. We’ve shared those memories, I'm not hiding anything from you. There was the ghost-feeling of Fusion's ears folding back, leaking through the sharing.
Didn't say you were. Gravity fanned her wings, then closed them again. Korn is hearing voices, and they are telling him that the Maker wants us dead.
There was something else, something I felt when connecting with the Stone for the first time. Something that seemed out of place...
Show me later. Come back to Ellisif... I think this might be important. Gravity changed her trajectory, matching vector with her destination. Somewhere down there was a collection of aircraft in the bottom of a valley... "There's always something," she said, sighing deeply, then pushed--
~~~discontinuity~~~
--landing with a thump next to the command aircraft. Korn, fighting against the grip of a pair of gryphons, immediately stopped struggling. "The pony must listen, the Maker is rebuilding itself, stealing back the fragments it left in the People's minds and--"
There was more, but Gravity ignored the babble, feeling her sharing with Fusion reconnect then drop out as the mare teleported. "Shut up." Violet magic encased Korn's head in a vice, forcing his mouth shut. Hs eyes bulged and his throat worked, still trying to talk. Gravity closed her eyes, her horn glow brightening slightly.
The Stone, whatever it was, made this as easy as all the other magics she'd used recently. Korn's mind was an unnatural mass of crystal, an ordered lattice of dense information that encased and penetrated the more normal fuzzy cloud of his original intellect. This was as expected, twisted and strained by the stress of his recent experiences, but caged by the crystal and constrained somehow.
Needles of the alien mentality were spread deep within the fundamental functions of Korn's mind, extending like frozen lightning through the deep knots of personality and memory. Whatever it was had integrated itself very closely, fungal threads of jagged glass lacing through Korn's gigasecond or so of life experience. How much of you is even left? She traced the pathways, trying to determine where Korn ended and the crystal started.
There were distortions in the regular lattice of the crystal, patches of synthetic memory that were slightly wrong, or perhaps just not from a sensorium bounded by three normal dimensions. Gravity reached inwards, then hesitated. Something was reacting to her presence, a coiling motion within the rigid crystal. What is this? There was a faint sonic boom and she felt a rush of air across her back and heard the quiet, distant flutter of wings. There was a sense of another at the borders of her mind, a familiar, comfortable presence made to feel immense by the five Stones bolstering its power--
What is it, Grav? Fusion's mental tone sounded confused and Gravity widened the connection, opening her sister to deeper layers of her understanding. What has been done to him?
I'm not sure how much of 'him' there is left. See here and here-- She gestured, highlighting various sections of memory. Where there should have been continuity, or at least the mind's illusion of continuity, made up from imagination and memory-of-memory, were the alien experiences. There was more to them than the simple collection of sensory data and emotional overtones of a pony, dog or gryphon. It was almost like--
It's another mind! Fusion sounded astonished. Who has the power to do such a thing? How would you even start?
I suppose you could argue a mind is the sum of its experiences, shaped and moulded by the passage of time and continuous selective editing, Gravity thought.
You can't just shove memories into a box and expect them to live!
No, but if you change enough of a mind's memories, you change the person with it. Perhaps enough that they are now someone else. She studied the shapes of the crystal; there was nothing remotely normal or familiar about it. Or something.
Could it be a trap?
I... I don't think so. I think it's just a way to hold this semblance of a mind together for... Gravity paused, thoughts whirling. It's for us, isn't it?
If this is the thing that gave me our new magic and manipulated you back in the Institute, why isn't it talking directly? Fusion was fully engaged with Gravity's senses, with only a flicker of her own body bleeding through the sharing link. Something must have changed. The Stones?
Gravity opened one eye, watching the points of light orbit Fusion's head. Must be. You're the expert in this. Now what?
All this could be manufactured for our benefit... do you think you can get anything by sampling the memories directly, without the controlling intellect being able to adapt to us?
Gravity gathered her power, surrounding the crystal-organic hybrid with a shell of her own mind. I need you to watch me, just in case it... Gravity felt Fusion ready her own magic, her thoughts Dopplering up the registers to a wasp-like buzz. Complex energies, horribly powerful, swirled around the three of them, focussed on Korn.
Gravity nodded. Good. Don't hesitate to turn him to plasma. Right, let's see what happens if I...
The crystal expanded around her, a confused mass of sensations that had no direct correlation to a pony's vision, smell or hearing. She fiddled with the memory, filtering and translating the strangeness to something more understandable. A herd of brains, billion and billions of them, stacked and thinking in parallel tracks. Patterns of flow in a substrate that felt like a forest. Swarms of jellyfish-shapes, packed and swarming like a living jelly, with sharp-edged shark-things that smelled of danger swimming through the gel.
Gravity refined her translation models, worrying that everything she did might remove whatever meaning there was in the mess. Suddenly, it was there, a vast sweep of history, laid out from the time the dogs were living in small burrows under wide grasslands and hunting creatures that looked a little like ponies, all the way to the present day. This was in broad strokes only, but there were plenty of details.
It had watched Fusion from the first time in the Institute. It had pushed her into rescuing Fusion from the dissection suite, but after that it only watched. Gravity followed the many strands of history through the last few megaseconds, the things she'd directly experienced and the things she'd shared or been told about, and on to things that could never be known on this side of the world.
She watched and understood the firing of the Strix magic and saw the death of Baur Hive's Monarch, and many, many more things. How everything they did just pushed deeper and deeper towards catastrophe, until the nuking of arcologies seemed to be a perfectly logical option. The unexpected responses of the jelly-like automata and the effects on the dogs. The continuous -- death? mind-draining? -- of dogs by their thousands.
The sensation of something stirring under the skin of the world.
Gravity shivered, all of her fur standing on end. Did you see that?
Fusion babbled something back, then her thoughts slowed. Yes... I've seen something like that before, back when I found that first Stone. The shell of her defensive magic collapsed and she relaxed a little. "So some of what this thing has shown matches what we know," she muttered, staring at Korn, still held immobile in Gravity's telekinetic grip.
Gravity opened her own eyes. "Some of it is certainly true, and you saw that mind-draining magic operating, didn't you?"
"Every second we delay kills more dogs, most of them innocent, we should--" Fusion's voice was high and strained.
"Do what?" Gravity snorted, then laughed. "It looks like the universe itself wants the dogs dead. Who are we to stop it?"
Fusion flinched, her ears folding back. "They have paid enough."
The laugh turned harsh. "Have they?" she hissed. "I don't care what happens to the dogs."
"And what if we're next? Or it's the gryphons? Or perhaps everything will go away. If we believe the Maker built this universe, perhaps it can unmake it. What do we do when chemistry stops working or the fundamental constants change so protons decay, or--" Fusion was shouting now, pawing at the ground in agitation.
"Stop!" Gravity held up a wing, shaking her head. Did you get more from this than me?
Fusion stood there, nostrils flaring and sides heaving, then stepped forwards and wrapped her wings around Gravity. "I was in that Church when the Maker started to take the dogs. It didn't look like they went to paradise, they looked like drooling idiots." I think we have to do something to stop this.
Gravity shrugged off Fusion's embrace, stepping back to stare at her. You really do, don't you? The other mare, trembling, her sides damp with sweat, nodded. "Okay, but if we're going to try and kill the creator of all things, we should get some distance from our friends."
"Going to meet our Maker, huh?" Fusion asked with a tentative smile. She passed two of her five Stones to Gravity.
"Oh, yes." Gravity narrowed her eyes, watching the objects change from lit crystal globes to mottled, opaque balls. "I have a complaint to make."