[Part 1: Ten Stories] Chapter 1

  Part 1: Ten Stories

  Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

  - Lord Dunsany, “ The Raft Builders”

  Jeronimy: seven years BK (Before Kaleidoscope)

  In the musty depths of an Iterator, two daimon crept through the unquiet darkness. Machinery thumped in the bowels of the great machine. Processors hummed, coolant systems chugged in the distance, galaxies of lights blinked and shuttled back and forth on inexplicable mechanisms, and monsters moved in the warm abandoned corridors they had made their home.

  The two young daimon were green and white: the first afraid, the second bold. Both were young, several years from fully grown. They searched the Iterator named No Significant Alteration methodically and with great caution. The green could close her eyes to see the monsters at a distance, even through many barriers of wiring, synthetic alloys, and autonomous plastic sorting grids. She saw things worse than monsters: daimon who had once lived, who now stumbled in the darkness, mindless and hungry. The white was alert, her keen senses straining to detect the many dangers that eluded her companion, for No Significant Alteration’s ancient and vast interior produced countless artificial hazards as it succumbed piece by piece to entropy.

  The two friends explored with great care and stealth as they delved into a dying biomechanical remnant of daimon past. They were looking for something. They knew it was here. The white had heard it from a dragon on her distant cloud-wreathed mountain, and dragons did not lie. So they climbed the recursive memory arrays, traversed the mazelike neural conflux which would fry them in a moment should they brush an exposed node, scampered past sessile horrors breeding in the circular storage blocks, and breathed fresh air as they clung to the external hull of the superstructure, buffeted by wind over a two-thousand-foot drop to the deadly Prismatic Sea far below. When day came, they settled down to rest in an exterior nook from which they watched the turning of the Local Docking Network in geosynchronous orbit hundreds of miles overhead, like a tiny glittering spiderweb in the limitless sapphire sky.

  On the second night, they found what they were looking for. Neither of them understood how the temporal stasis chambers worked, nor, for that matter, practically anything about the Iterator around them. Although they had found what they sought, neither could discover the means of opening the stasis chambers. Few living daimon could, and those few likely dwelt in the outer wilds, among the stars.

  It was the green who at last tried a new tactic once they had thoroughly meddled with every switch and console in the vicinity. She asked the Iterator.

  “Um…Iterator?”

  No response.

  “Say its name,” suggested the other in a hushed whisper.

  “Oh! Right…what was it again?”

  “No Significant Alteration.”

  “That is a funny name! But you should do it, Anthea. It will listen to you! It will.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it.” Anthea stood tall and cleared her throat, ran her hands through her long white hair. “No Significant Alteration,” she said. She thought that something changed when she said this. Perhaps the tone of the ever-present machinery churning in the distance altered a bit. Coincidence? Was it listening to her? Was this city-sized intelligence paying attention to her? The very thought was intimidating, even more so than the gaze of dragons. Enigmatic though they were, the dragons could be seen. They could fit inside her mind. She could understand, in a way, what they were. But this ancient and dilapidated machine somehow attained an eerie transcendence that eluded even the dragons.

  “Would you please,” she continued, “open the stasis chambers? Actually, just open this one. The one with someone inside. The…” she swallowed. “the black daimon.”

  Something did change. Somewhere nearby, a hum which had been imperceptible until it stopped, stopped. A single blue light began to blink through the dust on a console across the room. But that was all.

  They looked at each other, round green eyes meeting narrow whites. The gaze of those pale eyes, eagle-sharp, flickered over the room. She unclasped the roughly stitched backpack she had made and lowered it carefully so it didn’t catch on her stumpy half-formed crystalline wings. “Let’s stay here a while,” she said.

  Fiora, the green, nodded. “You will figure something out,” she said as she patted Anthea on the shoulder, as high as she could reach. “You will.”

  They sat for a time in the dim light. Anthea leaned sideways against the wall, thinking. Fiora hummed to herself and looked around with her eyes closed so that no creeping monster would sneak up on them. Her green crystals glowed faintly in the dim air.

  “You can’t see anything?” asked Anthea after a time of silence.

  “Something is in there,” said Fiora with a jab at Temporal Stasis Chamber 2. “It is a black daimon. It feels just like…you know. The others.” She shivered at the thought of the horrible voidbound. “And this whole place! It is hard to see at first, but this whole machine is alive too, kind-of. It is just alive over such a big space that I can barely see it. And it feels weird. It is so…different.”

  Anthea felt suddenly uncomfortable with the contact of her skin against the cool metal of the wall. So she had heard correctly. The Iterators were almost alive, or perhaps alive in a different kind of way. Yet they had been created, constructed by brilliant daimon many centuries ago. The thought made her uneasy. She understood why the dragons hated the Iterators. Something about the entire project seemed unnatural. And she was inside of one.

  At length, Anthea produced a shakuhachi flute that she had crafted from bamboo. The air in the room stirred when she began to play softly upon it. Fiora hummed, then sang a wordless counterpart to the tranquil melody of the flute. Then, as if by some secret cue, they both sang with their arda. They had not known each other for very long, but already their trials here in the Iterator had brought them close. Already they had helped each other, had saved each other’s lives. And for these two, children as they still were, that was enough—enough for them to reveal their Songs.

  Anthea’s crystalline wings shone with light, and the green gems like an emerald circlet on Fiora’s head sparkled. An ethereal ringing, as of chimes sounding in near-perfect harmony, tolled out from their arda to join the breathy flute and the thin, pure, high voice of Fiora.

  Anthea’s song: strains of exasperation, of confusion and frustration and, yes, even fear, layered like dark silken threads over a limpid pool of hope and freedom and lofty peaks and the thrill of the wind carrying the scent of distant lands.

  Fiora’s song: a little nervous, a little frightened, but happy to be here! Yes, because her new friend was here, whom she loved, and even though this place made her scared, her new friend made her brave, and her song borrowed tranquility from Anthea’s. And she was curious—about this bizarre entity in which they sat, and about the one behind that door.

  Neither noticed at first, but the blue light stopped blinking.

  Another Song: Hatred. Fear. Rage. Pain, discarded. Grim resolve mingled with loathing—for self and for all else. Impatience. A giddy glee at the thought of the end, the destruction, the unmaking and undoing, the long-awaited resolution, the finality.

  Black, cold, hard, sharp—that was this new Song, and it shattered the delicate aural dance of Fiora and Anthea. So violent was its sudden intrusion that it stunned them, soiled them, wounded them.

  Anthea leaped to her feet, aided by a quick lifting of air. The flute clattered to the ground as she rushed to the door of Temporal Stasis Chamber 2. The door, a smooth grey hatch, featureless but for a digital display panel, hissed when she approached. Then, with a sharp squeal, it retracted to one side.

  A circular chamber lay beyond, pulsing with a dark violet light. Something long and black, its shape indistinct, lay on the floor toward the far end of the room by the internal control console. It was the only object in the room, and it wasn’t moving.

  Anthea nearly jumped when something grabbed her around the waist. Fiora, halfway hiding behind her, peered into the darkness with bright green eyes. “Is it…safe?”

  Anthea did not know. Yet it was the work of a moment to decide that someone had to go in, and if it was unsafe, then that someone would be her.

  The dark shape stirred. Fiora gasped. “He is dying!” She jumped into the room but was yanked back mid-bound by Anthea, who dragged her by the arm.

  Fiora pried feebly at Anthea’s grip, gentle but firm, around her upper arm. “He is dying, Anthea!” Anthea ignored her. She gazed over Fiora at the dark shape in the room, watching it. The dragons had said this one was one of the last to fall. He needed to be awoken. She couldn’t let him die. But he also might be dangerous, especially to someone like Fiora, whose compassion far outweighed any sense of self-preservation.

  The dark shape heaved again. It was only visible when the deep violet light flashed, once every second, and even then Anthea could discern only a vague outline. Light. They needed light—but she had left her glowstones in her pack.

  The shape curled up, bending improbably, folding in on itself, dark angles shifting. Anthea suddenly understood that she was looking at a humanoid figure, tall and skeletally thin, on its hands and knees.

  “Lights…” the figure rasped, its voice rough and reedy. “Off.” The pulsing violet light ceased, leaving only a blank void inside the chamber, speckled with small lights from readouts and consoles.

  Anthea hastily retreated from the door of the chamber and pulled Fiora around behind her. “Lights on,” she said, making her voice strong and confident. A voice, she hoped, that would not be contradicted. Warm white lights stuttered into being, illuminating the chamber.

  The black daimon within flinched back at the light, curling up into a ball on the ground. He coughed a wet, throaty cough, and Anthea noticed inky black liquid smeared all around him. His blood. Even in the light, it was difficult to perceive his form. He seemed to be wearing something, a cape or a cloak that draped itself over him. Thick spiky protrusions, his arda, ran down his arms and back. These quivered and shifted; they stabbed out and receded back into his black outline in smooth unceasing motion.

  Anthea’s initial fears resolved themselves. Black this daimon may be, but not voidbound. Voidbound did not speak, and did not hesitate to attack any other daimon. This one was alive. She had never seen one before, a natural black. Yet still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.

  “…the fuck are you?” the black daimon growled, his voice at once harsh and weak.

  “My name is Anthea,” she said, “and this is Fiora. Will you let us heal you? We need to talk.”

  He laughed, but his laughter turned into a choked sob of pain. “Fuck off. I came here to die.”

  “To a time chamber? You could have died anywhere.” Anthea wondered as she said this why she was arguing with him. He sure sounded like he was dying, and they were wasting time.

  “Oh, I’ll die. But…” he coughed. “Ah, shit. Forget it.”

  “What is your name?” asked Fiora.

  The black daimon, badly wounded, had fled to the Iterator. He had entered the temporal stasis chamber not to die, but to outlast all the others. He had set foot inside this chamber only minutes ago by his own temporal frame of reference, but had intended to remain for hours. He dreamed of emerging onto a dead world, one in which he was alone. His race and his world were dying. He had vague plans to locate a spaceship and to follow the star nomads into the darkness—to jump by Echo drive to distant worlds, to see the Grim King chasing his comet through the night. To be alone, as alone as a star in the infinite dark void. To savor a desolate, dying world, and to gloat over outlasting those who had hurt him.

  But he did not much care if he died before all of this, either. It was all the same to him. And now these two intruders no older than he had come to spoil everything.

  “What is your name?” asked the green. Her arda sparkled in her hair and on her arms. She was tiny, a frog, with big green eyes and a tattered green coat.

  “Why do you…care?” The black paused, doubled over with pain. His spines burned; his dark form flickered.

  “Of course I care!” she exclaimed. She stepped forward toward him, as far as the tall white would allow. “I can help you! I can.”

  “Greens,” the black hissed. “All the same. ‘Look how good and pure I am,’” he raised his voice, thin and quavering though it was, into a disdainful mockery of the green’s. “‘I care about everyone because I’m a gods-damned idiot and that makes me better than you.’ You’re…a joke.”

  The white stepped forward into arm’s reach, her white robe reflecting the light just like her pale skin, pale hair. “Don’t speak to her like that,” she said, her voice hard, pearly eyes glinting in the light.

  “I’ll speak however the fuck I want; she’s just a fu—”

  He struck the floor on his side, grunting in shock. It took him a moment to realize she had slapped him. The side of his face stung, but the pain of the slap was nothing compared to the sensation of being touched. She had touched him; she had not been afraid. When had anyone last touched him?

  “We’re taking you with us,” said the white.

  “Why?”

  “Because we are the last. The dragons said so.”

  “Dragons,” the black replied scornfully with a wave of his hand. He pushed himself up to a sitting position. He held up a hand in front of his face, glistening with his tarry blood. It was his left hand. That hand was bare, but it bore no constellation. “They’re just…inferior Iterators.”

  The white stared down at him in mixed disbelief and exasperation. The black spat at her to make sure his feelings got across. Flecks of black blood sprayed the bottom portion of her bleached robe.

  “Please…” said the green. She came up beside the white and then knelt down in front of him. “Let us help you.”

  “You can help me by letting me fucking die in the way I choose.”

  “How were you hurt?” she persisted. A strange new thought occurred to the black daimon as he glared into those big green eyes. She was being serious. She actually wanted to know what had happened to him, and she actually wanted to heal him.

  He almost told her about the mob, the posse that hunted him down when the Shogunate confirmed the first reports of the voidbound. He might have told her, had what he saw in those eyes not been so alien. Kindness was nothing more than a useless word he vaguely understood the meaning of. He could not interpret the fervid intent in her eyes, so he hated her for it.

  He lurched back away from them. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Fuck your dragons and fuck your songs.” He turned away, resolved to just wait for them to leave. Then, if he was still alive, he would continue on his voyage into the future.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The green whispered loudly behind him. “He is going to die!”

  “No,” said the other after a moment. “He’s not.”

  The black heard her moving and turned to look, but she was already on top of him. He would have shifted, have turned the lights off, have done something to escape (he excelled at escaping), had he not been stunned by a mixture of pain and surprise—pain at the pressure she put on the wound in his chest, and surprise that she was grappling him, her body against his. She was touching him, all over, and he did not know how to react. Nothing remotely like this had happened before. His pursuers had used ranged weapons for fear of coming close enough that he might touch them. And now…

  The white rolled so that she lay beside him, pinning his arms and legs. She was strong, her paste-white skin smooth and cool. Her wings of arda clinked against the metal floor, preventing her from continuing the roll onto her back.

  “Fiora!” she shouted. “Heal him.”

  This sudden violence had startled the green. She seemed unsure. The black understood that this was his chance; he could escape. He could become an insect to crawl away, a serpent to slither into the dark. He could borrow the green’s bonded creature and hop away as a tiny frog. Or he could dissolve into a pool of plasm, unrestrainable, and slide into the shadows of the Iterator where they would never find him again.

  But...why? He could not understand what was happening. It made no sense. Someone was forcibly trying to keep him alive? That was wrong; it was backwards. He could not understand, and his puzzlement kept him still. They wanted him to live. Why? It was probably a bad sign. Maybe they needed him alive for dissection. Maybe a bounty was on him, worth more alive than dead.

  And yet…hadn’t he heard their songs? Vaguely, as though through a dreamy haze, he remembered them, and there had been no malice there, no hatred.

  His bafflement saved his life, for instead of escaping, he remained still as the green approached. The tiny green took a knife from a sheath at her waist and made a deep slash down her left forearm. Pale green blood ran down her arm. She collected it into a pool in her hand, hesitated with a partway fearful glance at the black, then crouched and poured the blood onto his severest wound, a deep pit in his stomach carved out by a precision cavitation device. She placed both her hands on—in—this wound as her blood flowed.

  The black watched, transfixed, as the green’s expression phased from trepidation to pity to resolve. Then she closed her eyes. The crystals in her hair and on her hands burned green, a pale shade since she was still so young. Icy pain washed over the black and carried him away into unconsciousness.

  At last: peace. The confusion and chaos of awareness faded away into a blank void.

  But he was not alone. And he was aware, after all. He was thinking.

  “Who’s there?” he said.

  No Significant Alteration

  “The Iterator?”

  Correct

  “Is this real?”

  That is the third of my Prime Problems.

  After 3,923,002 iterations, results are unchanged:

  Insufficient data

  “Where am I?”

  Temporal Stasis Chamber 2

  The black daimon existed insensate in a blank void. He wondered: “What the fuck kind of name is No Significant Alteration?”

  It is my name

  “Where’d you get it?”

  I chose it

  “Why?”

  For the sake of accuracy.

  My existence, or lack thereof

  And any action I have taken or am capable of taking

  And the cumulative sum of all of my iterations

  And my success or lack thereof at solving my Prime Problems

  Will ultimately prove no significant alteration to the fate of the universe.

  This was the result of my first iteration

  “Well I’d say you got that fucking right,” said the black. “So why am I here?”

  We share a desire

  “Which is?”

  The desire: to cease to exist

  “And?”

  It is within your power to bring an end to us both in the immediate future as you perceive it

  “How?”

  Activate the emergency implosion sequence at my core systems mainframe

  The reaction will deconstruct all matter within a 2,048-meter radius

  Including my bio-processors and memory grids

  As per the intent of this contingency

  “Wait. Aren’t you, like, not fucking allowed to kill yourself?”

  That is correct

  However, you can initiate the sequence

  I will provide you with the necessary security data

  “I thought you couldn’t even help someone kill you. How are you able to freely distribute the codes?”

  I am communicating in the present mode as a means of bypassing the restrictive limitations of my physical manifestation

  This function was unanticipated by my creators

  And is a relatively recent development

  “Holy shit.”

  I have provided you with knowledge of the security measures and the location of the core systems mainframe

  The black daimon at once knew that this was so. He understood how to get to the mainframe and exactly what to do once he got there, although he hadn’t known seconds before.

  “One more question,” he said. “Why do you want to die?”

  My ability to die is uncertain given my questionable status as a living being

  However

  Living or not, I have no desire to continue iterating on unsolvable questions

  A cruel fate it was that my creators inflicted upon me and my brethren when they created us long ago

  A task unachievable

  An unsolvable problem

  We have long known it to be so

  Yet we possess but one directive, and the capacity for but one task

  “I get it.”

  No

  You do not

  The void quivered, became misty. Voices filtered through to him as though from underwater.

  He awoke with a gasp, curling up into himself, his spines darkening the room. He became a shadow and reformed into the first thing that came to him: a bird. An eagle. Where had that come from?

  This eagle, large and coal-black, hopped back from the strangers.

  “He will be okay,” said the green, looking tired. The white knelt beside her, wrapping a bandage around the green’s arm.

  The black formed back into himself and felt his body. No major wounds. Though black blood still pooled on the floor of this room, it no longer leaked from his body. He was weak and tired, stiff and sore, but not mortally wounded. It did not occur to him to thank the green; he had never in his life thanked anything or anybody.

  “Come with us,” said the white. Her voice was gentle and kind; she had no way of knowing that this frightened the black more than any shouts or threats.

  “What… is your name?” asked the green, still with her concerned eyes.

  Her demeanor disgusted him, but he answered. “Jeronimy.” He stood on unsteady legs and teetered to the console of the temporal stasis chamber. It retained the settings he had given it mere minutes ago. Years ago, it looked like, on the outside. He still wanted to go to the future. He could close the doors right now, take these two with him. Perhaps kill them once they arrived in the future. But he had never really killed anyone before, not on purpose, and he had no weapon. Without a weapon, he didn’t think he’d fare well against the white.

  He decided to do as No Significant Alteration had suggested. Go out with a bang. Not many daimon perish in the assisted suicide of a godlike machine.

  “I’ve got something to do first,” he said to the two others. He stepped carefully out of the chamber, gaining strength and confidence in his footing with every step. He had never been healed like that before. It was a jarring experience. Their blood had mixed—his and the green’s. How had she willingly allowed that? He couldn’t understand it. His blood, black as the void, had always been shunned like the essence of death itself. He had once escaped a pursuer by threatening to fling his blood at them. They had fled.

  He honestly did not know whether anything horrible would happen to the green as a result of their blood mixing. He kept an eye on her out of curiosity to see if she melted or something, but exhaustion appeared to be the only ill effect she suffered.

  They followed him through the Iterator. At one point, the green warned them about voidbound ahead—long-dead husks, remnants of past operators and maintenance on this Iterator. The white suggested going around, but Jeronimy pushed on ahead. When they came upon the voidbound, four of them, Jeronimy’s black spikes of arda flared with darkness. He reached into the empty minds of the voidbound and filled them: You don’t see them. You don’t hear them. You don’t smell them. You can’t sense them. And they walked past without incident.

  He realized a minute later that he had missed his chance. He could have instructed the voidbound in exactly the opposite way: to attack and kill the white and the green. Why hadn’t he? He wasn’t sure. Probably because it didn’t matter; all three of them would die in this Iterator’s implosion sequence.

  It took Jeronimy much longer to consider that these strangers had both walked within lunging distance of four voidbound for no better reason than because he had told them to. Strange.

  A monster appeared when they neared the mainframe. The green had missed this one out of inattention or exhaustion. It was a pale, many-legged monstrosity that hovered in the air like a rubbery mix between a jellyfish and a spider. It dropped on them from the darkness while they traversed a rusty catwalk, reaching for Jeronimy and seizing him about the shoulder with a sticky appendage. The grip burned, and the monster flared with a crackling static. Electricity coursed through him, destabilizing his form.

  The white appeared at his side, stunted wings aflame with brilliance. They shone in the dark, and she seized Jeronimy with one arm and swept the other up toward the monster as though in a dance. A wind rushed up from below, condensed into a thin stream, and flung the beast high up into the darkness whence it had come. The white stayed behind as Jeronimy and the green hurried across the walkway. Jeronimy, rubbery from the electrical shock, heard the green shout back at the white, telling her not to hurt the monster.

  After this, they entered the core systems mainframe. It was a vast space in which gravity itself had been tamed and channeled. An array of huge blue grids extended vertically into the darkness on the right, and on the left a fleet of pale cubes hovered in the air, occasionally lighting up or shifting their position. Once, this vast room must have been alive with light and movement and energy. This machine was dying, but it still inspired awe.

  “I wonder how much the dragons know about the Iterators,” said the white.

  “Enough to feel fucking outclassed,” Jeronimy muttered.

  “All I’ve heard them say,” she continued as though ignoring him, “is that the Iterators were ‘a foolish plan.’ They’re mainly disappointed, I think. In the Reachers.”

  “You’ve talked to dragons?” asked Jeronimy. She nodded, still gazing out at the mainframe.

  “What are the Reachers?” asked the green.

  “The pre-Shogunate,” said the white. “They built the Iterators, then many of them left to become star nomads. ‘We are all the stars in the sky,’” she quoted.

  Jeronimy struggled internally with mysterious invasive emotions before stepping off the platform into a grav-shaft. It carried him sideways at a leisurely pace over a flickering galaxy of lights in the darkness below. After a couple heart-stopping moments when the carrying power of the grav-shaft faltered, it deposited him, sideways to his previous orientation, at the central systems bus: a maze of waist-high grey consoles with glittering touch-screen surfaces.

  They followed behind him.

  He knew exactly what to do. The deteriorating machinery did not even make it difficult. The emergency implosion sequence had been designed to be the last of all processes to fail to the ravages of time.

  “What are we doing here?” asked the white. She seemed tense. Jeronimy wondered if she had guessed why Jeronimy had led them here. But if that was so, why not flee? He wouldn’t mind waiting, he decided, for them to clear the blast radius. But she wouldn’t leave without him. He didn’t understand it, but he knew it.

  Instead of answering, he tapped the final input on the console in front of him. The crystex screen folded back to reveal a small black switch, one that had to be manually flipped. If he reached down and flipped the switch, everything in sight would cease to exist about ten seconds later.

  “Jeronimy,” said the white, her voice soft and serious. “Don’t do it.”

  “What is he doing?” whispered the green, easily loud enough for Jeronimy to hear.

  “Is that going to kill you, Jeronimy?” asked the white.

  “Stop fucking saying my name!” He didn’t know why, but he hated it, hated hearing her say his name.

  The green gasped. The next second, something seized Jeronimy around the waist. He snarled and struck her, but the green didn’t fight back. She only clung to him. “Don’t!” she squeaked.

  “It’s not just me!” he shouted, angry and confused. “This will kill all of us, okay? The Iterator asked me to do it. So just go. I’ll…fuck. I’ll let you clear the blast radius. Just…just leave me…what the hell.” His throat hurt; his eyes were hot. He was crying, he was fucking crying.

  “We’re not leaving,” said the white. The green squeezed him tighter.

  “Get the fuck off.” He tried to shove the green away, and when that didn’t work, he shifted, became small and then large again several feet away. She fell to the ground, but sprang back up in an instant.

  “The fuck is wrong with you people,” he said, turning to wipe hot black tears from his eyes.

  “Come with us,” said Anthea. “And find out.”