Content warning: violence.
Mural laid down on the golden crest, popping her head over the top to gaze at the valley below through binoculars. The flat bottom was around 100 meters across, with the sloping walls reaching half that high. The tower lay in the center, its peak reaching nearly the height of the walls. Her eyes first went to the undulating pillar of black slag from the tower’s peak that formed a single looping pattern, streaming high into space. Below that, it was difficult to define where the tower ended and the environment began. She saw what reminded her of Earth’s sand dunes, only made of solid gold. That sight was certainly more “natural” than the twisting pipe billowing black tar like water flowing up a reversed stream. And yet the two pieces transitioned into each other smoothly without corners or cusps, the tower emerging from the ground like a blanket pinched up from its center.
Her mind did its best to simplify the scene and decided that the tower began not far up from the ground at the open port from which the enemy formed. Two of them roamed the surrounding surface, one three-hundred paces to the left and the other scuttled about the right side of the tower’s slope on eight legs. Both wore human-designed weapons and had gold speckled black skin, but her target was the one to the left. She could only see its heavy missile launcher atop its back from her vantage point. The right had swiveling mounted automatic rifles bore into its metal flesh. Both creatures were roughly twelve meters in length.
Mural crawled backwards slowly down the crest a few meters then stood up and about faced. There, further below atop a lower crest, were her remaining three field operators, who all wore burnt orange jumpsuits adorned with rubber-metal padding.
On her right, the load bearing machine that chose the name Rivers stood straight at two meters tall. They carried a rectangular pack nearly as tall as themselves, stuffed to the brim with supplies that to Mural appeared haphazardly placed. The inner mechanism of their mind organized each armament with a logic known only to the machine, but that never failed to keep every delicate object in pristine condition, and deployed with just as much efficiency.
The artillery alchemist, Striker, feigned sleep from the middle position at. Obviously she could not sleep standing up, so it was a rather ridiculous sight. Her eyes closed, arms crossed, head slacked forward and tungsten jaw tightened as the grinding of the iron teeth was heard by all. That much she did actually do in her sleep, unfortunately.
On the left, Walker’s face was dripped with sweat, despite his nearly completely neutral expression. She never liked to bring him out this far in the field, but the region’s metric had an insanely complex space and time dependence. Only his brain matter was laced with the PPC mechanical acid that allowed one to visualize four spatial dimensions for graphing the manifold.
From the high perch, she looked down upon them and spoke. “Alright, still only two GoldenSpawn. This should work mostly fine without Ophi.” She voiced certainty. “Rivers, Inventory.” She turned to the steel humanoid that stood six feet tall in the rightmost position.
“Weapons: One hand cannon with eight remaining shells, one gaussian cylinder, three of Striker’s sodium and potassium cyanide canisters each and the condensate rifle with thirty rounds.” Rivers emitted in mentally translated vibrations. “Medicinal: The carbon derivation and 8 poultice bands.” Their cylindrical head spun around 180 degrees with green lights from the slit scanning its oversized pack.
At once the golden surface beneath them shuttered briefly, the air thickened and thinned. All heads turned to Walker, his face obscured by the white band across his nose and cheek. He grabbed onto the η shaped device with haste and stared into its holographic surface. He breathed easy and shook his head.
Mural turned back to Rivers.
“Food: twenty-two liters of condensed paste, and three liters of the rescaler.” Rivers finished.
“Striker, what do you make of our chances?”
She pretended to jolt awake with a snort, then raised her left eyebrow. “Well, I’ll be sure as shit to get past the golden and plant the charges with time to spare. But this feather-” marked Striker with a jab on Walker’s shoulder, causing him to stumble slightly on the edge and bat the wake of her retreating fist, “-Is liable to collapse without Ophi’s medical ‘grace’. So best keep him on this side of the ridge. Rivers though, they’ll keep the big one distracted for as long as we need.” She batted him as well, to no response.
Mural’s eyes turned white as she began iterating. Her mind initiated the dense machine tucked in her skull. It took in the initial conditions she collected through her continuous environmental scans and plugged them into different theoretical models for the universe. Each model used a different combination of umbrella-physical theories and the sub-theories below them. She allotted power to the models she felt would be most appropriate now. Modern M-Theory, for example, would prove too computationally expensive and yield virtually identical results to quantum field theory in this rather generic scenario.
The Newtonian approximation for force calculations and gravity would be ideal for the short range of this golden valley. She could ignore the particle positions and momenta for anything further in this static landscape. So she allotted the majority of the models to different Newtonian sub-theories; Thermo/stat-mech for the stability of the tower, the golden-spawn, and the energy shared between. Optics for ray tracing the ensuing battle. Fluid mechanics for potential gas warfare, etc. However, all such models would fail completely without general relativistic corrections given a metric shift…
{…Iteration 378 Summary: Immediate attack upon the spawn point, Striker’s canister only damages the base of the tower, allowing EM fields to disrupt pilot Tyler’s navigation of the EagleWorks around the Metric Shift. In seconds to us, the centuries remaining for humanity are lost to a near-infinite redshifted surface…
…Iteration 398 Summary: Immediate attack upon the spawn point, Tower demolition is successful after Walker fumbles his perch and is slaughtered by the GoldenSpawn. Mission success rate decreased by 50%….
…Iteration 752 Summary: delayed attack upon the spawn point by a day to wait out the shift. No losses at spawn point and pilot Tyler’s successful maneuver increases mission success rate by 40%…
}
Her eyes returned to their blue tint, lips parting just as Walker interjected. “Around 5 minutes, captain.” He passed her a skin of water. She nodded back and bent her head over to pour water onto it. Sizzling smoke seeped through the pores of her skull with the air carrying a faint smell of bacon.
The results converged: ride out the oncoming metric shift. However, before she could utter a command, her mind flashed images of the remaining humanity half a galaxy away, dissolved by the all-encompassing gray goo and with them the beautiful structures of culture.
Society’s defense advanced enough after the initial onslaught to make the large scale ballistic battles of old obsolete, but by her leave with the 8th incursion, the goo had already learned to replicate human communication networks and supply lines. A few more millennia and they’ll strangle the remaining half of humanity through sheer out-competition. Worse yet, with the incalculable time dilation even Walker could not determine, who knows how many centuries already passed back on earth since then. It could not wait another day.
She sacrificed her nerve connections to her left hand to take on the processing power needed for the oncoming deception, crossing her arms to hold it limp.
“The optimal path for success is to press forward in 1.5 hours after Striker makes 2 more canisters.”
Rivers shifted in place as the others nodded.
“We’ll take point a mile out south.” She pointed in the opposite direction of the tower. “And defend Striker as she forges.”
———————
Striker took the lead, Rivers behind her, and Walker behind them. Mural took up the rear to observe, all around six feet away from each other. Striker and Rivers kept a steady pace with eyes forward, traveling over the rising and falling metal surface with ease. Walker mostly did the same, but he frequently turned his head every which way all the while pressing each finger against their thumb.
Mural halted and turned her eyes white for a few moments, then back to blue. She did her best to catch up silently, seeing none of their heads turn back. “Walker, run us through again on the metric.”
Striker groaned and looked over her shoulder. “Gods, really? Right now? Why?”
Mural’s fingers went numb. “Each time a perspective-breaking concept-” Mural reported as though reading
“-Concept is re-introduced, it becomes closer to intuition.” Striker ended fast. “I know. But like, for fuck’s sake, why don’t we each just get a PPC injected like Walker? Sure as shit make this more intuitive”
“You want to lug even more weight on top of your forge-jaw?”
“You can’t say shit about resource management this time. I’ve thought about that, and I damn well know the engineers back on earth could come up with something. I mean, Rivers was built in a goddam factory! No offense.”
“All taken, HAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Rivers he droned in purposeful monotone, to which Walker smiled back.
Striker gestured to the machine. “-And cost can’t be an issue. After everything they’ve already poured into us, there won’t be a 9th incursion. So might as well throw everything at the wall now!”
Mural spoke this with a firmness almost forgotten by the crew, “Respect on the field, Striker.”
Striker turned back forward as she marched. “Sorry, Captain. Honest question though, you have to be thinking the same.”
Mural actually hadn’t been. There was a silence in the air for a few seconds as she thought. This particular line of reasoning came easy to her. “If the Oligarch Iterators back home gave you the ability to fly, to teleport thirty meters, and to know perfectly the infinite past, you’d complain about not being able to swim, the range of the teleporter, and not knowing the infinite future.”
“What? No, I wouldn’t, that’d be fucking awesome.” Striker rebutted.
Walker slowly nodded while facing the sky. “I think it’s about scale, Striker. Let us recall before our ascension onto the incursion crew. All those decades ago we would’ve seen our current configurations as supreme. Roll time to now, and you feel just the same as you did before your scale readjusted.”
“Speak for yourself, buddy.” Striker retorted.
Mural’s voice cut through the moment “On with it, Walker.”
“Huh? Oh yes of course.” he turned to march sideways at an irregular pace to try and face everyone at once. His face became radiantly smiling. “The metric can be thought of as describing the geometry of the spacetime. For our purposes, it defines a sense of path lengths, the past and future for a given observer, and the objective ‘shortest distances’ for all observers.”
Even from the back, Mural could see Striker drag her palms down her face.
“In the absence of mass-energy, the metric becomes diagonal. If you ignored the time component, the remaining three dimensions would exactly be the ‘normal’ Euclidean space. Parallel lines stay parallel, angles in a triangle add to 180 degrees-”
“Vector dot products become the simple sum of the product of components.” Striker cut him off in a monotone voice.
Walker leaned his head towards Striker. “Very good! Would you like some sugar water?” He spoke in an infantile voice that ended with a chuckle.
“-oh, fuck you Robertson, I’ll bite your goddam headoff!” She laughed as well.
“Focus on the field.” Mural cut through once more.
“Right, sorry captain.” Walker recovered quickly. “When significant mass-energy enters the picture, the metric becomes rather problematic. Imagine spacetime as a stage, on which the picture-people walk and perform. Only now, the people are ants, seeing roughly only the surface. Ant A walks in a straight line that goes through a flat portion of the stage, while ant B goes through a depressive dent. Ant A measures a ‘normal’ triangle, while B measures a triangle with angles that sum to less than 180 degrees!”
At this last remark, Striker turned around to walk backward and opened her eyes and mouth wide while holding her face. Walker seemed to not react and simply continued. “In reality, note that one of the two coordinates we’ve chosen to represent space can also represent time. In that case, the curved portion implies Ant B experiences different elapsed time, simply for having taken a different path. ”
Mural felt a tinge in the deep recesses of her mind. It was like seeing the space in between the walls of a house she’d lived in her whole life. The relativistic equations for her iteration models were akin to second nature, but to her there was no geometry behind those numbers. It was… interesting to attempt to visualize the inside of her walls.
Walker seemed to live inside the walls, spouting their inner workings with ease. The tinge then grew stronger, enough to replace her focus on geometry. She thought back to what Striker had said about resource management. Imagine the model simplifications with a fully intuitive 4-D mapping. It’s almost wasted on his simple mind.
Walker continued with increasing fervor. “Also note this analogy has a third falsey objective observer, us. No observer experiences the ‘true’ sense of time or space. All observers are correct in their own local measurements. It is only through using the global metric can you make distant measurements.” He lifted the η-shaped device from his side. “And spacetime can curve perfectly well without any external higher dimensional space to curve into.” He turned around and looked at the others one by one, as though expecting some sort of reaction. After finding none, he blew some air through his lips.
“Fantastical, Walker! As usual.” said Rivers.
“There’s more! Normally, none of this really matters. On a local person’s scale, you can just approximate space to be flat. Also, most usual metrics, including those surrounding unaltered planets, have a static metric. Meaning no time component, same now as it was years ago. Regions surrounding the Golden Spawn, however… both of these simplifications utterly collapse under the metric shift. In days, hours, or an instant, all length scales can change. Space can expand and contract to near arbitrary complexity. The shortest path between you and a distant observer suddenly becomes nearly incomprehensible tracts. In extreme geometries, certain paths become inaccessi-”
Mural spoke over him without high volume. “Pause that, we’re far enough. Striker, start the forge.”
“Yessmam.” Striker gave a fake salute. Walker’s shoulder slumped as he broke rank to give her more space.
She looked around her feet and chose a small ripple in the golden wave that rose 20cm high. She got down on one knee and gripped the crest with both hands. She lowered her head as her jaw unhinged far past the point of any unaugmented human. As she did this, the others encircled her in a circle with a radius of 3 meters. They each faced away from Striker and watched the horizons for movement.
Striker slammed her jaw shut on the gold and opened it again, only to close it repeatedly at rapid speeds. The sound was akin to ancient hammers striking hot steel. Her iron teeth broke off a chunk of the metal as she pulled her head back quickly. The momentum carried her back to her feet with her chipped teeth letting through the sound of a massive gulp. She unzipped her suit from the bottom of her torso halfway up. She pulled open a latch the size of her abdominal region out from her stomach. Flame retched out of the hole.
“Rivers, c’mon.” She raised her right hand towards the machine. They bent their elbow joints backward to reach into their backpack and pulled out an empty canister, tossing it to Striker. She slammed it into her stomach cavity as flames turned rainbow. The geiger counters on each of their suits began to click quickly. Dark silky material emerged from the collar of their suites, stretching over their heads totally through a sort of inner thin metal scaffolding. The front portion was partially see-through, though deeply tinted.
Striker worked her hands in her stomach for the next hour, until the forge ran cold. All the way back to the first ridge, Walker continued his lecture, delving further into the mathematics as a reminder. Here, even Mural felt her mind begin to dull. It should prove useful for Striker and Rivers. But still, feels like another damned iteration…
———————
Striker returned to the original golden crest atop the tower’s valley. Once again she inched her head above the peak to see essentially the same sight: the quadruped off to the left while the octopod walked astride the tower’s base. She could still only see the top of the missile launcher on the quadruped.
She returned to the lower crest and faced the crew. “Alright, here’s the run: Walker takes point on the ridge top and keeps scope.” Mural pressed the binoculars to his chest as he grabbed at it. “Striker leads with the hand cannon and arcs right around to set the charges. Rivers holds down the octopod with condensed limited shot. I’ll disable the artillery with the Gauss.”
Walker nodded and took position just before the top crest. Striker grabbed from Rivers’ pack as their head spun and arms contorted to do the same. Rivers tossed Mural the cylinder, which she caught and inspected. A simple gridded one-meter rod with a handle. Mural popped a tiny sphere with an etched ⍴ marking and closed the tiny latch on the top. Each got into their positions.
Striker grabbed the top crest with heavy grip and shot herself over the ledge through an arm pivot. She launched into a sprint down the other side, triggering the rest of the crew. At once Mural vaulted over and rolled, catching herself before slipping too far. She jumped to her feet and broke into a run. Simultaneously Rivers hopped over and allowed gravity to propel them into the fray.
Above it all, Walker watched with green eyes through binoculars. To the tower’s right, the octopod took a few jittered movements towards them.
One. Two… Three. Walker thought to himself.
The creature then took a large step back at an angle.
35 degrees. Aaaand that’s one. Two… Thre- he tapped his wrist “You’ve been made!” He spoke within the minds of allies.
Mural saw the missile launcher creeping back towards the tower in an indirect pattern. As she broke away from the other two, it dashed on all fours directly at the tower. She shifted her focus, allowing all the worlds to fall away leaving only her and the opposition. She intercepted its path and saw clearly its twelve meter long tubular body carrying the missile. Its twisted front hands curled perfectly into the divots of the gold wave, back bony legs propelling it forward.
At the moment it charged her, Mural iterated 30 times over with only her left eye whitened. The iterations diverged with no common outputs, too small a sample size and too few initial conditions. Something sharp, yet faintly familiar coursed through her veins. Her sweat glistened, heart pace doubling. The sound of the hand cannon going off at the edge of her focus returned her senses.
The artillery left no further time already having crossed the distance. It stopped short on its front legs and lifted its back into the air. The whole body spun faster than it should’ve, its radiant back half slamming into her left forearm she lifted like a shield. She jumped to flow with the hit while something in her arm snapped clean. As she stuck to the speeding column, her right hand swung the gaussian cylinder clean onto the gold surface. At once, massive arcs of lightning sprung forth across the Column’s golden pieces. It slowed down enough for Mural to unstick and fly a few meters through the air. She landed in a tucked roll followed by a crouch, her suit’s rubber sheath steaming. The missile launcher shuttered a few steps backward, front arms seizing.
Back atop the ridge, Walker felt the air flow faster and cut short with high pressures across his body. Immediately he looked onto the η device. On its surface, a hologram of a triangle with angles marked mentally: “51.03… 39.01…90.01, 180.05!” Walker’s mind raced. He slammed his fist on his wrist holding the device that now transfigured into a g.
METRIC SHIFT! echoed in their minds.
Mural left arm radiated warmth when her view snapped toward the horizon. There, the waves began to undulate ever so slightly. She shot herself to her feet and tapped her wrist twice. Tyler, bring the EagleWorks to our location now. Metric shift inbound.
And the artillery!? He answered back telepathically.
Still working on it, prepare for evasive maneuvers worst case scenario.
The missile launcher reared up on its back legs, leading Mural to iterate thrice. She stanced her body sideways and threw the cylinder like a javelin into the leg joints. She turned and ran towards the tower and hoped she wouldn’t be obliterated by a 10% detonation likelihood. A poor gamble, she knew, but Iteration 378 rapidly approached.
Null that, head in with no delay.
The ground began to flow and the air carried a distorted clang of metal upon metal from all directions. Mural saw Striker exit the tower’s opening and slide down the shallow sloped side. Off to the right, Rivers climbed out of the mangled ruins of the octopod. Somehow, Walker was laying face down at the bottom of the first crest. Further down the line of sight, the ground of the horizon rose and fell like a blanket being shaken.
How did he even- “Rivers! Grab Walker!” ordered Mural.
Rivers began a slow trot that picked up pace towards the grounded Walker. Adding to the cacophony was the sound of screeching wind from below her feet. Mural looked up and guessed a direction. Out of the corner of her eye were the two rings around the needle-like body of the EagleWorks speeding into view.
Heading in for an aerial landing, launching pikes now! Tyler thought for all.
The EagleWorks stopped suddenly with no drag. Four long and thin black rods launched into the ground from its side.
Striker arrived first, attaching her wrist cuff to a rod. She stopped to look back, seeing Rivers not far behind carrying Walker on her back alongside a heap of the supplies. Mural overtook Striker and began to rise into the EagleWorks with the retracting spike.
All around the region shifted. There was no defined boundary across which the shift advanced, but its effects grew stronger and wider. For brief moments Mural’s breath was sucked out of her as a vacuum formed around her head and filled just as quickly. She added a right-hand grip to her wrist cuff. The horizon behind stretched into a ring, up to which distances stretched while others shortened.
Mural’s eyes kept focused on the rapidly approaching latch on the EagleWorks’ side. Just then, the tower detonated in seeming silence. She could only tell this after the flames appeared in front of her, far from the actual blast. The pike spun and twisted into abstract forms. Mural’s eyes closed tight as several Gs worth of force stretched the molecular bonds across her body in all directions, outside and within.
When her eyes opened, she had ascended into flatspace and struck the ceiling of the EagleWorks’ boarding chamber. She landed on her side and saw Striker rising into one of the 3 remaining open latches. Ignoring Striker’s clanging jaw (which shouted far louder than needed quite frankly), Mural pushed up into a dash toward the cockpit. Two seats were in front of a narrow window with a projection of the entire field of view compressed into a small sphere. On the edge of the left seat, Tyler spasmed all four of his arms and two of his legs. He pulled and prodded levers and buttons while shaking his head every which way to maintain the Eagleworks position despite the shattering of reality on the outside.
“Walker! To the Alcubierre dr-” He spoke at near unintelligible speeds.
“He’s incapacitated. I’ll take control of our coordinates to Minkowski space, initiate our passages now.” Mural interrupted in calm.
Without looking, Tyler jumped over a seat. She took his place and charted a path through the cascading spacetime. In front view, the horizon had overtaken them. The window presented a flowing collage of golden-smeared colors and in the center of it all a small black circle of space and stars shrinking every second. Some portions of the ground appeared to be slowing down, the surface shifting to a deeper orange and bright red. Her heart picked up pace once more, Iteration 378…
Mural read the final pike rising on the dashboard when Tyler shouted at a now appropriately loud volume.
“Ready wind and steady star, Captain!”
Mural slammed a rod into the dashboard’s core. The front of the ship pinched space itself as it retched out of the gravitational well. In seconds it traced Mural’s worldline, returning to global flatspace. Once again on their journey to launch the kill signal at Deed Obviom, from which the golden-gray goo receives its bugged command on loop to assimilate.
———————
Mural sat with others at the only lounge in the EagleWorks. The room was dominated by the large circular table with 6 seats. On one, Tyler prepared more alcohol-soaked concoctions out of the paste and fluid from Rivers’ pack. One hand stirred the pot, another poured the liquor, the third fidgeted with a plastic cube covered in tiny switches, the last shook the hands of Striker who was laughing with food falling out of her jaw to his right.
“-yeah! And from my view your flying in from the sky below, only thing I can see up above is this fucker-” She patted Walker to her right with her other hand as he shook it off “-who’s somehow still downed!? I mean how the fuck- you weren’t fighting!” She bellowed further.
Walker dropped his eyes to half open. “Rather than immediately writing out an explicit expression for my path towards the ground, let us first notice that my coordinates under an arbitrary curvature were invariant under spatial rotations and translations locally.” Walker word-vomited.
Agasp, Striker’s wide eyes watched in disbelief as he continued.
“Despite my mind mapping out the near manifold in global coordinates, in four dimensions I might add!” Walker shook his finger across the table. “-no local observer can simultaneously access all coordinate regions. So, while the mapping itself is intuitive, navigating across is not.”
“W-what the actual fuck are you saying!?” Striker could hardly contain her laughter.
Tyler dropped the whisk and tried to keep himself up with the now free elbow as his torso curled forward in howling joy. To Walker’s right, Rivers stood to speak.
“This fear or horror is very near to the smaller the dying, and, according the canonical penalty of true inner repentance, namely till our entrance of despair, fear, and assurance of heaven seem to differ the same time he hatred” oscillated River’s cylinder head in translated vibrations.
Tyler fell out of his chair and erupted. Striker gesticulated towards Mural across the table as nothing but rhythmic air came from her mouth as if pleading for just a hint of reason. Mural just shrugged and remained silent. Behind the shrug, her brain tickled with something faintly recognizable. She remembered she used to be able to contribute to casual conversation with ease. but she expunged those minor motor and cadence skills from her brain during a particularly difficult iterative computation at… some time ago?
“Thanks, Rivers. Consistently reliable no matter the situation!” said Walker.
Striker still had her silent smile with a backdrop of Tyler’s raucous applause from the floor. Walker briefly squinted his eyes. “Oh- they just said that there’s been a systemic lack of foresight in the crew’s culture. Not because of ignorance, but because it provides humor,” he spoke curtly through his grin.
Mural frowned. Sure, dedicating more resources to the translating Rivers oscillations as Walker clearly had would give them more range for complex speech, but such speech is unnecessary for a load bearer. Besides, none of the others could shift resources on a dime as fast as she could. “You’ll need to be more careful, Rivers. Can’t have any miscommunication out in the field. Just keep it simple.”
“Yes,” they stated.
Tyler crawled up from the floor as the laughter died down. Mural seemed to have a way of ending it when she spoke, though it was unclear as to why. She thought on iterating, but knew this by all past attempts: In conversation with other humans, there existed no iteration that both began with her eyes whitening and ended well.
“Alright,” Tyler bobbed his upper hands towards everyone as though they were nervous cattle. “Best we not forget our stitcher.” He closed his eyes. “I still see his form, clear and true,” Tyler sing-songed aloud.
“Yeah, well part of him is still kicking around here.” She took a massive bite of the drenched paste and spoke again before swallowing. “No doubt it’s in joy I remember him most.”
“Recall, it was through his normalization that we all summed to one,” Walker chimed in.
Mural rose her poulticed left arm, stiff with reconfigured organic tissue and bone. “Don’t worry, after all he left his notes. I think I can understand his craft well enough.” Striker nodded to that. Across the table, Rivers locked light with Mural’s eyes as they sat back down. Walker reached for his cup, missed, then aimed true on the second try. Tyler resumed stirring, the silence hanging for a few more moments.
———————
Later that cycle, Mural’s iterations in her quarters were interrupted by a knock at the door. She got up from her bed and walked across the tiny space. The door slid open, revealing Rivers. Their body was bent forward so that green light from their rod head matched Mural’s eyes.
“Captain. Earlier, atop the golden ridge, you lied. Why?”
Ah, iteration 256-423. Mural remembered not to take offense at Rivers’ subordination for brusque speech. She placed both her hands in her pockets and severed all nerves to her left arm, then spoke with absolute calm.
“The optimal path had the possibility of Walker’s passing. I didn’t want his nerves after hearing that throwing him off further, guaranteeing his death.”
“Captain. Earlier, in your room three seconds ago, you lied. Why?”
Mural gritted her teeth and raised both her hands.
“You got it right at the first word. I’m the captain. You need to know only what I tell you, nothing more. Or have you forgotten what’s at stake?”
“Sorry, Captain. Good cycle.” Rivers turned around and walked off down the short hallway. Mural analyzed their movements with precision but could detect no deviations from their normal gait.
Mural closed the door and cringed. She logged this encounter deep within her memory, then placed her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes looking down, leaning against the wall with the other hand. She began initiation for iterating, but the images of the divine structure of humanity sprouted forth. The brilliant architecture that had lasted for centuries. The intricate networks of culture and communication that spread across dozens of solar systems. The face of her nephew, who no doubt by now perished from old age centuries ago on the earth’s time. His, no, her descendants walking the stars at this very moment. All reduced by a golden array, that gray goo that’d take only from the corpse of civilization that which it deems useful. What remained of humanity would be its weapons of war, for the sake of annihilating any other living creature that was unfortunate enough to be born around this corner of the expanding infinite universe. No iteration was needed. The path forward was clear. To the High City; Deed-Obviom they traversed. On the eighth cycle, they arrived.
