CH0 - Touchdown

— — —

"Two weeks ago, there was another me, sleeved in another morph. There was a mission and it led to my death. [...] What experiences are no longer a part of my consciousness? Perhaps the thrill of a lifetime. Did I discover true beauty? Fall in love? Have an epiphany? Save a life? I'll never know. Those memories, that life, that version of me, is gone." - Lack

— — —

[Simulating blueprint: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator…]

[Result: Failure. Mode: Approximately 47% of the way through molecular printing, disassembler nanoswarms are detected in 56 critical components. Components are destroyed, followed by destruction of the cornucopia machine.]

Frustratingly, It still failed to build.

It was ironic, really. I had achieved this in three days, what ought to have taken a month. The cold edge at the back of my mind whispering, nudging. Instinct not my own, toying with the puzzle.

But I needed this finished today… and those nudges weren't enough.

And so… I pushed.

The whispers stopped. Abruptly, my frustration was gone, lost in a feeling that I had no words for. Something between apathy, disdain, and the distant horizon of a blue-black, frozen moon that had no name.

I welcomed the cold. Those feelings from before… they were beneath me. I held greater purpose.

The blueprint tabs flickered. I watched as I skimmed the code. Equations that generated complex shapes opened and closed. A pause on deeply obfuscated, nanofab instruction-operators that went places decompilers could not follow.

An editor opened. Guided by half-formed instinct, I emitted code at the speed of thought. Glancing back across the lines I had written, I began to see the shape of it; heuristic pattern-matchers that substituted materials, weaved directly into even already-compiled blueprint handlers. Adding new, branched logic. A lifesaver, when materials are scarce… but a universal nanofabricator like this had narrow tolerances. Substitutes were not an option.

But that was not the intent. I could feel it, a sense of assured victory, even as I wrote the final lines. With a thought, the blueprint compiled.

The moment it completed, I ran the simulation.

[Simulating blueprint: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator…]

[Result: Success. Simulating fabricating blueprint: OSB_Plasma_Rifle on simulated Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator. Result: Failure. Mode: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator does not respond.]

[WARNING (CASSOWARY_ADRASTEIA_rev29884): Unexpected fault in function e3g61. Resetting...]

The world flickered.

I realized the editor contained a new block of code. The chill burned.

[Simulating blueprint: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator…]

[Result: Success. Simulating 24 hour delay. Executing post-process molecular substitution. Success. Simulating fabricating blueprint: OSB_Plasma_Rifle on simulated Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator. Result: Success.]

[WARNING (CASSOWARY_ADRASTEIA_rev29884): Restarted. Neurodivergence factor(s) limits exceeded by: 6395%. Clamping values. Neurological override weights set to 100%.]

Abruptly, the ice receded. With an ease borne of long practice, I shoved down the sense of loss that always followed. The sense of smallness.

Paging through the blueprint, and looking at the simulation results, it became clear what I had done. I had defeated the trapped blueprint by cutting the Gordian knot. Rather than finding the trap in the code itself, I had swapped out critical materials in the design, then added a final step where the fabricator replaced those elements with the original, correct ones.

I burned the forest down.

Whatever trap Stukholz-Gemeinschaft had hidden in the blueprint, it now failed at a chemical level. No matter its design, it assumed the parts were made of certain elements… and now they were not. By the time my hack restored those materials, it was too late. Even if the traps might still be there, they wouldn't run. Doing so carried the risk of late activation in fabricators that had already been sold. To big-ticket clients, no less— this was not some cheap consumer cow-clicking VR sim, where they could just ignore any customers troubled by over-eager DRM.

A fragile hack. But that was all it took. The 'latest and greatest' in universal nanofabrication in the inner system, now just another blueprint in my archive. The same archive that served as my claim to fame, at that.

The repscore was necessary, the favors were useful, but… these brief moments in time, where I broke down puzzles in intuitive leaps that sometimes even I didn't understand. Reality unfolding before me. That subtle power as I took some mystery— made by man or of the universe— and solved it, broke it.

The feeling of revelation… human language wasn't enough. It was something only those who have experienced something similar could ever understand.

The question now... was what I would break next.

[Message from contact: Isabella Sokolova. Message body: We're calling in your debt, Henry.]

— — —

There was no time.

"So let me see if I understand," I said, as we moved quickly through the halls. "You dug up something nasty on a new exoplanet, and now you need me to tell you what to do." My tone was irritable, and for good reason.

"Don't take this personally, Henry," Isabella said, not breaking her long strides.

Twisting to let a group of synths past, I switched to messaging.

[Henry: You're calling in a 'debt' for helping me with a condition that I only had because of the last time I helped you. Most would call that basic courtesy, not a favor owed.]

She sighed.

[Isabella: You know full well the dangers of the exsurgent virus. The risk we took even running you in quarantine. The risk we took that you did not have some hidden infectious factor, to be revealed later. That you were even you. To be honest, I'm not comfortable with handing a critical role in this mission to an async, no matter how good you are.]

There was a brief pause after the message, the text hovering silently in the corner of my eye.

[Isabella: But… that's what we need, this time. You were one of the best before. Now you're so good you are regularly accused of being exhuman. That's what we need, right now, and there just isn't time to find anyone else.]

[Henry: Bullshit. Firewall has someone for everything. I'm just the bullet point that still hasn't said no.]

She didn't respond, and we kept walking.

Out loud, I sighed. "...Fine."

Both airlock doors opened, temporarily overridden as massive container was pushed through. We slipped in beside it.

"You've pulled all the strings, I see," I noted. "All the normal security protocols shut down, in an autonomist collective… I would hate to be the guy assigned to clean up this clusterfuck."

"Yes, well," she said. She glanced at me. "I see you brought your own equipment. Didn't go so far as to recycle your gear… all the standard gatecrashing kit. The portable fabber is a bit redundant. A plasma rifle?"

"You taught me well the value of plasma when dealing with Firewall's messes." A twitch was the only evidence I had landed a hit.

"I'm not seeing any solarchives."

"They aren't external anymore," I said simply. "I have a series of solarchive-type data storage implants now. My muse runs the archive maintenance. Once a week, the databases are compressed and backed up, both to a secure server here, as well as the latest version in my cortical stack. I wasn't using the second ego partition for anything else."

"I take it then you don't plan to go back to an AGI muse."

the blurry fractal touched me, and I felt it. Something cold. Alien. In my mind. I stumbled. The world lurched, stop-start. I staggered, and everything flickered. I was somewhere I couldn't recognize. Isabella was standing there, rifle aimed at me. Bleeding. "I'm sorry." There was a flash of light

I shuddered.

"No. I know they aren't the same, but… No. Not in my head."

She didn't say anything.

She didn't have to.

[Echo: All team members, mission is green.]

I silently followed Isabella, through the last security door, into the gate room.

A hollow sphere eight meters across, made of strangely interlocked and swirled metals. It had been decades, and we still knew almost nothing about Pandora Gates.

Just an ever-increasing list of the things that we did not.

The whispers extended. I felt the urge to attack this puzzle. I ignored it— it was not the time, and better men had failed.

The dim, blue light of the chamber played across the metal. Sharp edges going fuzzy, sometimes. Usually written off as unknown metamaterial interactions. I knew enough to doubt— there were strange things in this universe, things transhumanity would never understand.

Inside, I knew, was something much, much stranger.

"We're after this one," Isabella said, interrupting my thoughts. I looked up, seeing a crate and it's carriers vanish into the spherical metal cage.

With a thought, smartmatter from my suit engulfed my head, sealing away the chill of the gate chamber. Pads conformed to the fins on my skull, wicking away heat.

"Are you sure about using that morph?" Isabella said.

"I'm not fond of unnecessary resleeves," I replied. My current body, a Hyperbright morph, had enhanced cognition at the expense of the heat venting fins on the skull. It came standard with prehensile feet, as well as other features. Of course, for this they were hidden by heavy boots.

It still wasn't the best choice for gatecrashing.

"You are hardly one to talk, anyway," I said, nodding toward her. Her morph was a Sylph, the favorite of socialites and glammed-up hypercorp executives. As far as something like this went, it was infinitely worse than mine.

"We both know I'm good enough it doesn't matter." She gave me a wan smile. "I suppose it's too late now. For both of us. Are you ready?"

"...As I'll ever be."

We stepped between the whorled metal alloys, and I faced the infinite void floating at the gate's heart. Eerie green sparks danced across the black. Summoning up my resolve, I followed Isabella, her body simply vanishing from one moment to the next. I glanced behind me, seeing a huge metal container moving implacably toward the gate. Turning to face the darkness, I step—

Something vast moves through space. Countless flecks fall away, trailing behind.

Impact. The flecks continue to fall.

Something has gone wrong.

A long-dormant fragment falls into, towards, a layer. Its function was to scan layers, back in the beginning, on the first world. It is crude, obsolete, retained only for redundancy.

It was damaged during the collision. Configuration is incomplete. There are errors. The path is unclear.

Configuration is requested.

The core fragment does not respond.

Options are pruned from the decision tree. Another fragment can retransmit the message.

It searches the current layer. The information-object cannot be found.

Configuration is requested.

The core fragment does not respond.

The decision tree is reduced.

It searches other layers. It seeks another shard.

A clairvoyant function stops responding.

Another thread looks at a world, parallel to the last. It stops responding.

The entity had undergone over three thousand cycles. Safeguards and protections had been developed. Under normal conditions, this fragment-routine would be examined, or destroyed, remotely.

The core does not respond.

The clairvoyant function responds. The informationn is malformmed. There are are errors. The clairvoyant function responds. The inforrmmmaaaaaa—

—ped forward. I staggered as I went from smooth floor to rich, soft earth, covered in organic debris. The composition instantly reminded me of a hypercorp garden I had once visited. A slice of a home lost to faded memory.

"You didn't tell me it was…" I trailed off, looking around. I couldn't see Isabella anywhere. Or any of the others, the shipments… Only trees, Earth trees, or something so similar I couldn't tell the difference. It was dark on this planet, and I could hear the quiet, constant sound of insect life in the background. She was right in front of me, there were others right behind me...

In frustration, I turned to my muse.

Sia, where is Isabella?

My personal AI responded instantly.

[According to all available senses, she is not here, Henry.]

I didn't see the frame of the Pandora Gate either, and I slowly turned around.

Nothing.

I don't understand… where is the gate.

[Sensory data shows you entering the Fissure Gate in the Love and Rage Collective on Oberon. All following frames are in this forest, with nothing in between. There is no evidence in memory of any exit gate.]

...No.

This was bullshit, fucking Firewall and their fucking missions through these gates that would end with my brains getting splattered

[Dispensing Comfurt.]

I relaxed as the stress blocking drug flooded my body.

There are no good explanations for this.

[There is insufficient information for that conclusion.]

This situation could be taken at face value. Step in a gate, appear where there is no gate. Except I lived in a world with simpler, darker possibilities.

Psychosurgery, erased memories… This could even be some kind of high-fidelity simulspace. Being an async meant obvious artifacts if I was running on metal, but I could still be a brain in a jar… or perhaps being an async itself was a lie? Anything was possible—

[This is unfalsifiable theory. Being an ego running in a simulation is always possible, with or without discontinuity. Worrying about that which cannot be changed has deleterious effects on more practical survival tactics. You should not worry about that which cannot be changed.]

Right. Sia was right. There was no point in worrying about unfixable, undetectable failure states. I would simply have to act on the assumption this was all real. Some new horror of the gates.

…Or an old one no one ever returned to speak of.

I sighed.

Sia, is there anything you can tell me about the planet?

[Current environment matches Earth gravity, to the limit of available sensors. Atmosphere is within variable range considered acceptable to support terrestrial life. All plants in the vicinity match species on file for Earth.]

Fantastic— a clone of Earth. Or worse, actually Earth. As transhumanity had yet to fully terraform any planets, much less the matter of the gravity…

the scarred nanotube cabling of the elevator slowly carried them down to the Earth, down through the rust-red clouds. Dead black oceans peered through, where clouds defied the wind, moved by the mutated, degenerate will of long-forgotten nanoswarms

I flinched.

No. No, I couldn't think about this now.

I peered through the trees. With a mental shrug, I started walking.

It only took a few minutes before I realized I was being foolish. True, I had limited experience with gatecrashing, but I knew the process. And reinforcement mission or not, I had come prepared.

More specifically, I had a mapping missile.

I pulled the thin cylinder off my back and stuck it in the ground. I walked to the maximum wireless range before having Sia trigger the metallic-hydrogen rocket. In a surprisingly quiet flare of fight, it shot through the treetops.

Having done that, I started sprinting through the trees. I didn't know if anything was out there, and I had no interest in seeing if this planet faithfully reproduced the more dangerous aspects of Earth from the Fall.

After a few minutes of running, a green light pinged in my entoptics.

[Low orbit achieved. Full planetary mapping will take 34 hours. There is a city to the northeast— it appears to be of human construction, in the style of the dawn of the 21st century. The terrain map generated so far is a near match to Earth. However, there was never a city at this location.]

A thought had a transparent cursor hovering on the forest floor, pointing in the right direction. I sighed, and started walking again.

— — —

The arrow led me unerringly through the dark. A row of houses stood before me, silent. Backyards faced the woods, some fenced, some not.

[Highlighting occupants from terahertz and infra-red sensory data.]

What I was going to do next was undignified… but I was old.

Old, even for a time when everyone that lived was old by the standards of my youth. I had lived long enough to see the world transformed, to see dreams of defeating hunger, disease, scarcity, and death itself come to pass. I survived the Fall that ruined it all.

If you live long enough, there will be times when life knocks you down. Sometimes the only way back up is by stepping on someone else.

I never stayed down.

I trudged through the dark, jumping and briefly landing a foot on the top of the rusty chain link fence. I dropped, rolled and stood up inside the yard. The indicators for the neighbors did not react, so I moved quietly to the back porch. I reached into my survival belt and palmed a utilitool. With a thought and a blur, it reconfigured into a thin, shimmering blade, and I silently sliced through the latch.

The back door met the same fate, and I stepped into a dining room. Glancing around showed nothing of interest. The dining room opened directly into some sort of relaxation room. On a low table, I spotted a tablet.

I sat down and ran my fingers down the sides, finding the power button with a few false starts. A cold instinct guided me, and in a matter of minutes I was online, reading through wireless protocols on something called Wikipedia, and then through the linked papers. I wrote quickly, absentmindedly, kludging wireless driver software in tandem with my muse.

[File saved. Loading protocol driver jrig_80211g. Class: Electromagnetic. Result: Success. Running unit tests… Test pages successfully loaded. Keywords confirmed.]

As a real test case… get me the actual gist of this protocol, drawing only from the local mesh.

[Performing query…]

[IEEE 802.11g-2003 or 802.11g is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 specification that extended throughput to up to 54 Mbit/s using the same 2.4 GHz band as 802.11b. This specification—]

Good enough. It's definitely working. Where are we, Sia?

[Performing query…]

I waited, and seconds turned into minutes. Sia?

[The question is complex. The current date is March 29th, 2011. Recorded history matches Earth until 1843, and remains broadly the same until approximately 1982. A floating, naked golden man appears, later named Scion. This is the start of vast divergences, all linked to a phenomenon known as parahumans…]

The matter troubled me.

After all, Fall survivors had good reason to assume the worst of physics-defying phenomena, whether possessed by machines or by men.

As an async, someone infected with a benign strain of the exsurgent virus, I was intimately familiar with having something… other… in my head. At first glance, these capes did not suffer the same kind of mental problems.

Yet digging deeper told a different story. They had their own influences at play. There was an undeniable pattern of greater conflict and violence in every single parahuman.

Most importantly, they had to use their power. This much was accepted fact, reflected even in prison rules and in the handling of juveniles with powers— forbiddance didn't work, the subtle urge would just get unsubtle. Very unsubtle. The most obedient saint on Earth would fold, and there was no record of anyone completely abstaining from the use of their power.

These were not facts anyone wanted the public to think about, or even be aware of. The evidence was buried deep in technical papers or legal frameworks, referenced only obliquely, sometimes not at all. I imagined the only reason there was anything to find was that past a certain point, erasure was noisier than letting the hints lie.

More relevant to me were these monster capes, parahumans with atypical bodies, found with no memories and in random locations. It was not officially stated, but it was commonly assumed that a 'monster cape' could get a government-issued identity just by walking into a Parahuman Response Team facility. The downside was precisely that: it was not officially stated. There was no guarantee of anything. It was likely no coincidence that all those aided in such a fashion joined the Protectorate: the primary organization of parahumans under the aegis of the government, also subordinate to the PRT.

This world did not lack for x-risks. Nilbog, master of a biological homogenizing swarm that was immune to fire, actually feeding on it. Bonesaw, biological tinker allegedly capable of creating bioweapons of mass destruction. The Simurgh, assumed telepath, capable of a psychic scream that converted everyone in her range— a range covering an entire city— into Xanatos-style time bombs. All extinction x-risks.

Corruption x-risks abounded, in the form of hundreds if not thousands of Masters. The Simurgh also qualified as such.

Regression was the greatest x-risk, presented by parahumans as a whole. It was downplayed in mainstream media and forums, but there was a slow slide backwards already unfolding, as Endbringers shattered shipping routes and commerce hubs, as parahuman violence put ever more of society into a deficit. It wasn't an imminent threat… but it bore watching. If this slide continued, it was potentially more dangerous than any of the singular great threats.

If I couldn't find a way back home…

— — —

On the coat rack in the foyer hung a newsboy cap, one that just covered the heat vents on my head. Ignoring the unpleasant sluggishness, I downclocked my brain, and wore the hat. Baggy shirt and pants concealed most of my suit, and a long-sleeved jacket finished hiding the lines of the armor. The boots were unavoidable, given my nonstandard feet, but they didn't stand out too much like this. I could move through the city without instant detection, now.

I had a lot to do, and there was no point in wasting time.

— — —