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Description

A looming shadow was cast over the megacity of Triumvirate, when the beating heart at its center ceased. One day, there were simply no more outbursts of orange lightning from the tower atop Triumvirate’s namesake, no more steadily paced bursts of dimensional static. One day, there was simply… Silence. A dozen billion Novahumans stopped with bated breath, fully aware that something was wrong, for even those that had no other way of knowing could feel it in their implants, in the very gemstones that housed their minds.

When the Transdimensional Displacement Engine stopped, so did all traffic between Triumvirate and its extraterrestrial and extra-universal colonies. No more exotic materials, no more supplies for the colonists, no more convenient zero-latency communications or faster-than-light travel to the colonies. Some were afraid, while many others were both ready and willing to begin emergency protocols - gather every single Novahuman capable of manifesting the iridescent lifeblood of civilization, the primordial soup of existence, the supreme power source known by some as Nilsen radiation, and by all as void energy, for it seemed to have truly come from nowhere. Indeed, the emergency protocols involved gathering nearly every single adult in Triumvirate and performing a world-shattering mass ritual in every sense of the word, using the city’s own power grid as the ritual circle, to rip open a hole into the world between worlds and resurrect the T.D.E.

The people of Novahome, and even more so those of Triumvirate were not meek sheep, they had fought for decades, some for millennia for the place they called home. Many died for this cause, once, twice, a dozen or a hundred times over. To them, no sacrifice was too great as long as they got to return to their homes and live their lives in peace at some point. After all, they had all the time in the universe and then some - it wasn’t as if they were drawing only on the energy and resources of their world, for with each ignition of the T.D.E. and each trip, more “new” matter and energy was brought from the colonies to Novahome. Performing a mass ritual and risking total crystallization from void energy over-exposure, risking true death, that was not something most of them had to do before. There were certainly enough people with enough power and skill within the esoteric arts to perform such a ritual with little to no risk and less than a few hundred thousand individuals to bear the strain, but the common man didn’t know that.

The bounty hunter with half a dozen arms and two massive guns didn’t know that, for he was only fifty.

The barista with a kick strong enough to split a grown man in two didn’t know that, for she was only seventy.

The white-haired, mustachioed walking tank with a heart of gold didn’t know that, for he was only three hundred.

Not even the experienced runesmith with a thousand years of experience and a dozen spare bodies knew, for he had never considered such an act of self-sacrifice.

Only, it never came to pass. For it was from within the Triumvirate itself that their salvation came. The dead god-machine came alive for the first time in a decade. It raised its four intact arms, tremendous arcs of red and orange arcing between its fingers, and suddenly, a voice rang out. An all-permeating, wordless scream, a defiant roar into the cosmic ocean. All those who lived within the ever-expanding walls of Triumvirate heard it, for it was not sound or a signal, it was a vibration carried on the same void energy which permeated the megacity’s streets, its buildings, its people, like haemolymph within the thorax of a great cosmic spider.

Like the jolt of a defibrillator, a tremendous power power surge swept outward from T.D.E. complex. Were it not contained by the elaborate system of failsafes and inward-facing containment fields which had been built specifically for that purpose, it would’ve caused more damage to the city’s infrastructure than the T.D.E.’s failure ever could’ve. Nevertheless, the system wasn’t built to withstand this level of power output for more than a mere moment, and the damage had already been done - both to the city’s failsafes, and the true beating heart at its center.

An obsidian-skinned, vaguely humanoid shape stumbled through the maintenance tunnels under one of many hidden apartments owned anonymously by a certain well-known CEO. Its head was crowned with wicked horns and a raging mane of orange crystal. Ichorous, black fluid ran down its body and trailed across the ground, mixing with showers of extremely fine sand of the same colour to form a sort of putty on the ground. Its metal feet click-clacked against the stone-like floor, its flaming eyes and gaping maw illuminated its surroundings like some sort of perverted Jack-o-Lantern. Sparks of orange danced and crackled across what had once been its skin, waves of black sand falling off with each pulse.

Step by step, the creature made its way to the exit hatch, and with an inhuman synthesized growl, it yanked the heavy-duty seal open like so much as paper tissue. The security terminal screeched and beeped at the violation, but even it was silenced by a stray tendril of unworldly lightning as it lashed out at in its general direction from the creature’s upper arm.

It stepped out into the alley, and a puddle of black ichor formed beneath its foot within seconds.

It began making its way towards a secret back door which otherwise perfectly blended into the wall, and with each step, more of its exoskeleton fell away, exposing not veins, organs, bones and muscles, but alien formations of braided crystal, a mixture of red, orange, and yellow hues, violently rippling and pulsing with even the slightest motion.

The thing reached out with its right hand, which was missing the middle and pinkie finger altogether, now only represented by vaguely finger-shaped crystalline tendrils. It seemed to shrink back ever so slightly when the expected keypad didn’t present itself, only for another tendril of lightning to lash out of its hand. It somehow overwhelmed the secret door’s mechanisms with its sheer violence, yet didn’t damage it in the slightest. The secret door slid open with a faint hiss, and the creature entered a tiny, hidden room - an airlock of sorts, with an even stronger door at the other side, meant as a measure to stop exactly this sort of intrusion. Only… This mighty bulwark yielded just the same as the one which came before it.

Body shedding black sand, dark ichor bubbling up from cracks in its carapace and running to the floor, and an un-worldly, maddening force driving it forward, the creature stepped past the precipice. The soft, lilac and blue lights flickered on, and the house VI awoke. “Welc-” it chirped in an upbeat voice, only to cut itself off with an almost lifelike sense of shock. The firey-eyed humanoid craned its head upwards, then began to stumble its way through the main living space and towards a machine which resembled something between a coffee maker and a fridge, the brand “Hagomune Y-3789” embossed on its metallic chassis in plain lettering.

Without so much as a word, the VI dispensed a white cup made of ceramic-like material, and began filling it with fluorescent-orange liquid. “You’re not supposed to do that unless the ritual fails, you know,” the VI admonished.

“Someone might’ve gotten it wrong. Put thousands in danger,” she rumbled, reaching out for the mug. As she did, her self-repair protocols finally caught up, and the liquid nanites running down her body finally managed to consolidate and re-form missing pieces of exoskeleton. She unceremoniously kicked back the drink, and exhaled a tremendous cloud of steam. The combination of barely legal stimulants and biogel so good no amount of money can buy it kickstarted secondary self-repair subroutines, causing a coating of translucent orange jelly to rapidly flow out of the pores in her exoskeleton and form into a false coating of soft tissue, the very top layer rapidly becoming a matte, pale skin colour.

Akaso reached for a second cup, and with a few steps in-between, sprawled out on a sofa. The holo-lens embedded in the coffee table came alive, and began projecting the most watched broadcasts covering the events which had just transpired, and which she had just single-handedly stopped.

Nobody would know, not officially.

But she couldn’t have just let the people that put so much trust in her creations risk their lives.

She’d go to a cafe and pretend she had no hand in it.

She’d act like she hadn’t just stared catastrophe in the face and told it “No.”

She’d pretend she was the larger-than-life icon that her people thought her to be.

She’d pretend she wasn’t afraid. Sad. Lonely.

She’d pretend she really was a thousand times more mature than other Novahumans of her age.

She’d pretend the fame and fortune changed her, stripped her of vulnerability.

She’d pretend, until she found the rare individuals who could see past the facade, past the riches and influence, past the raw power.

She’d wait for those who saw that she was a demigod built from pieces of a broken child, held together by the sacrifice of a father, and still thought to reach out.

She’d wait. And even until then, she wouldn’t be alone.

After a few minutes she got up, and made her way to the roof of the building, only three floors off the street - and yet, far above the megacity of Triumvirate, for it sat at the edge of one of its many monolithic skyscrapers, each containing a city in its own right. She took a sip of her drink, exhaled a puff of steam, and looked out across the blossoming creation of a dozen billion souls.

A tear of black ichor ran down her face. A faint smile quirked her lips.

She didn’t have to bear the weight of the world alone.

[DATE]

383.5 Imperial Years [932 Novahome Cycles] Post-Heresy

[PERSONNEL]

Chief of Xenocultural Relations and Research; Agulloz of the Thinker Caste

[BEGIN VOICE LOG]

I have lived among the Children of Nova for over five of their cycles now, which translates to approximately one and a half imperial years. In my time here I’ve seen, felt, learned, and experienced things that, frankly, we don’t even have words for. I learned how it is that these people so freely change their forms. I’ve learned that, in truth, they haven’t excised the savage side of themselves, but rather compressed and chained it, only to release it in controlled, violent displays, be it in combat or even musical performance.

Of all things however, I learned how different their view of life is. Just as we did, they obtained a means of avoiding death through aging, but unlike us, it wasn’t through longevity and metamorphosis. No, they are constantly at war with time itself. Their treatment of their bodies as no more than hardware has given them an entirely different perspective. The people I would go as far as to call friends all own half a dozen different bodies each, each with a different build, different capabilities, a different purpose, yet united in a single, consistent aesthetic, each recognizable as the person inside.

They switch these bodies out as we do with armor or weapons, the moment a module or an entire shell becomes obsolete, they either buy a new one, upgrade it themselves, or pay a professional craftsman to do it.

It is this way that they cheat death - the relentless march of consumerism, held in a tight yoke by the truly draconian anti-corporatist institutions they’d put in place long ago. It is as though this future was meant to fail, as though those who remembered their home world clamored for the rule of oligopolies and corporate warlords, and yet, the children of this new world ripped the future from the jaws of the past.

How they did it, I have no clue. Who did it, I do not know either. Why they did it, I am certain.

They do not dream of the future and study the past in the same way those that came before them did. When you live among them, you find yourself living day to day as though each could be your last, only to find you’ve lived a thousand years.

Description

A looming shadow was cast over the megacity of Triumvirate, when the beating heart at its center ceased. One day, there were simply no more outbursts of orange lightning from the tower atop Triumvirate’s namesake, no more steadily paced bursts of dimensional static. One day, there was simply… Silence. A dozen billion Novahumans stopped with bated breath, fully aware that something was wrong, for even those that had no other way of knowing could feel it in their implants, in the very gemstones that housed their minds.

When the Transdimensional Displacement Engine stopped, so did all traffic between Triumvirate and its extraterrestrial and extra-universal colonies. No more exotic materials, no more supplies for the colonists, no more convenient zero-latency communications or faster-than-light travel to the colonies. Some were afraid, while many others were both ready and willing to begin emergency protocols - gather every single Novahuman capable of manifesting the iridescent lifeblood of civilization, the primordial soup of existence, the supreme power source known by some as Nilsen radiation, and by all as void energy, for it seemed to have truly come from nowhere. Indeed, the emergency protocols involved gathering nearly every single adult in Triumvirate and performing a world-shattering mass ritual in every sense of the word, using the city’s own power grid as the ritual circle, to rip open a hole into the world between worlds and resurrect the T.D.E.

The people of Novahome, and even more so those of Triumvirate were not meek sheep, they had fought for decades, some for millennia for the place they called home. Many died for this cause, once, twice, a dozen or a hundred times over. To them, no sacrifice was too great as long as they got to return to their homes and live their lives in peace at some point. After all, they had all the time in the universe and then some - it wasn’t as if they were drawing only on the energy and resources of their world, for with each ignition of the T.D.E. and each trip, more “new” matter and energy was brought from the colonies to Novahome. Performing a mass ritual and risking total crystallization from void energy over-exposure, risking true death, that was not something most of them had to do before. There were certainly enough people with enough power and skill within the esoteric arts to perform such a ritual with little to no risk and less than a few hundred thousand individuals to bear the strain, but the common man didn’t know that.

The bounty hunter with half a dozen arms and two massive guns didn’t know that, for he was only fifty.

The barista with a kick strong enough to split a grown man in two didn’t know that, for she was only seventy.

The white-haired, mustachioed walking tank with a heart of gold didn’t know that, for he was only three hundred.

Not even the experienced runesmith with a thousand years of experience and a dozen spare bodies knew, for he had never considered such an act of self-sacrifice.

Only, it never came to pass. For it was from within the Triumvirate itself that their salvation came. The dead god-machine came alive for the first time in a decade. It raised its four intact arms, tremendous arcs of red and orange arcing between its fingers, and suddenly, a voice rang out. An all-permeating, wordless scream, a defiant roar into the cosmic ocean. All those who lived within the ever-expanding walls of Triumvirate heard it, for it was not sound or a signal, it was a vibration carried on the same void energy which permeated the megacity’s streets, its buildings, its people, like haemolymph within the thorax of a great cosmic spider.

Like the jolt of a defibrillator, a tremendous power power surge swept outward from T.D.E. complex. Were it not contained by the elaborate system of failsafes and inward-facing containment fields which had been built specifically for that purpose, it would’ve caused more damage to the city’s infrastructure than the T.D.E.’s failure ever could’ve. Nevertheless, the system wasn’t built to withstand this level of power output for more than a mere moment, and the damage had already been done - both to the city’s failsafes, and the true beating heart at its center.

An obsidian-skinned, vaguely humanoid shape stumbled through the maintenance tunnels under one of many hidden apartments owned anonymously by a certain well-known CEO. Its head was crowned with wicked horns and a raging mane of orange crystal. Ichorous, black fluid ran down its body and trailed across the ground, mixing with showers of extremely fine sand of the same colour to form a sort of putty on the ground. Its metal feet click-clacked against the stone-like floor, its flaming eyes and gaping maw illuminated its surroundings like some sort of perverted Jack-o-Lantern. Sparks of orange danced and crackled across what had once been its skin, waves of black sand falling off with each pulse.

Step by step, the creature made its way to the exit hatch, and with an inhuman synthesized growl, it yanked the heavy-duty seal open like so much as paper tissue. The security terminal screeched and beeped at the violation, but even it was silenced by a stray tendril of unworldly lightning as it lashed out at in its general direction from the creature’s upper arm.

It stepped out into the alley, and a puddle of black ichor formed beneath its foot within seconds.

It began making its way towards a secret back door which otherwise perfectly blended into the wall, and with each step, more of its exoskeleton fell away, exposing not veins, organs, bones and muscles, but alien formations of braided crystal, a mixture of red, orange, and yellow hues, violently rippling and pulsing with even the slightest motion.

The thing reached out with its right hand, which was missing the middle and pinkie finger altogether, now only represented by vaguely finger-shaped crystalline tendrils. It seemed to shrink back ever so slightly when the expected keypad didn’t present itself, only for another tendril of lightning to lash out of its hand. It somehow overwhelmed the secret door’s mechanisms with its sheer violence, yet didn’t damage it in the slightest. The secret door slid open with a faint hiss, and the creature entered a tiny, hidden room - an airlock of sorts, with an even stronger door at the other side, meant as a measure to stop exactly this sort of intrusion. Only… This mighty bulwark yielded just the same as the one which came before it.

Body shedding black sand, dark ichor bubbling up from cracks in its carapace and running to the floor, and an un-worldly, maddening force driving it forward, the creature stepped past the precipice. The soft, lilac and blue lights flickered on, and the house VI awoke. “Welc-” it chirped in an upbeat voice, only to cut itself off with an almost lifelike sense of shock. The firey-eyed humanoid craned its head upwards, then began to stumble its way through the main living space and towards a machine which resembled something between a coffee maker and a fridge, the brand “Hagomune Y-3789” embossed on its metallic chassis in plain lettering.

Without so much as a word, the VI dispensed a white cup made of ceramic-like material, and began filling it with fluorescent-orange liquid. “You’re not supposed to do that unless the ritual fails, you know,” the VI admonished.

“Someone might’ve gotten it wrong. Put thousands in danger,” she rumbled, reaching out for the mug. As she did, her self-repair protocols finally caught up, and the liquid nanites running down her body finally managed to consolidate and re-form missing pieces of exoskeleton. She unceremoniously kicked back the drink, and exhaled a tremendous cloud of steam. The combination of barely legal stimulants and biogel so good no amount of money can buy it kickstarted secondary self-repair subroutines, causing a coating of translucent orange jelly to rapidly flow out of the pores in her exoskeleton and form into a false coating of soft tissue, the very top layer rapidly becoming a matte, pale skin colour.

Akaso reached for a second cup, and with a few steps in-between, sprawled out on a sofa. The holo-lens embedded in the coffee table came alive, and began projecting the most watched broadcasts covering the events which had just transpired, and which she had just single-handedly stopped.

Nobody would know, not officially.

But she couldn’t have just let the people that put so much trust in her creations risk their lives.

She’d go to a cafe and pretend she had no hand in it.

She’d act like she hadn’t just stared catastrophe in the face and told it “No.”

She’d pretend she was the larger-than-life icon that her people thought her to be.

She’d pretend she wasn’t afraid. Sad. Lonely.

She’d pretend she really was a thousand times more mature than other Novahumans of her age.

She’d pretend the fame and fortune changed her, stripped her of vulnerability.

She’d pretend, until she found the rare individuals who could see past the facade, past the riches and influence, past the raw power.

She’d wait for those who saw that she was a demigod built from pieces of a broken child, held together by the sacrifice of a father, and still thought to reach out.

She’d wait. And even until then, she wouldn’t be alone.

After a few minutes she got up, and made her way to the roof of the building, only three floors off the street - and yet, far above the megacity of Triumvirate, for it sat at the edge of one of its many monolithic skyscrapers, each containing a city in its own right. She took a sip of her drink, exhaled a puff of steam, and looked out across the blossoming creation of a dozen billion souls.

A tear of black ichor ran down her face. A faint smile quirked her lips.

She didn’t have to bear the weight of the world alone.

[DATE]

383.5 Imperial Years [932 Novahome Cycles] Post-Heresy

[PERSONNEL]

Chief of Xenocultural Relations and Research; Agulloz of the Thinker Caste

[BEGIN VOICE LOG]

I have lived among the Children of Nova for over five of their cycles now, which translates to approximately one and a half imperial years. In my time here I’ve seen, felt, learned, and experienced things that, frankly, we don’t even have words for. I learned how it is that these people so freely change their forms. I’ve learned that, in truth, they haven’t excised the savage side of themselves, but rather compressed and chained it, only to release it in controlled, violent displays, be it in combat or even musical performance.

Of all things however, I learned how different their view of life is. Just as we did, they obtained a means of avoiding death through aging, but unlike us, it wasn’t through longevity and metamorphosis. No, they are constantly at war with time itself. Their treatment of their bodies as no more than hardware has given them an entirely different perspective. The people I would go as far as to call friends all own half a dozen different bodies each, each with a different build, different capabilities, a different purpose, yet united in a single, consistent aesthetic, each recognizable as the person inside.

They switch these bodies out as we do with armor or weapons, the moment a module or an entire shell becomes obsolete, they either buy a new one, upgrade it themselves, or pay a professional craftsman to do it.

It is this way that they cheat death - the relentless march of consumerism, held in a tight yoke by the truly draconian anti-corporatist institutions they’d put in place long ago. It is as though this future was meant to fail, as though those who remembered their home world clamored for the rule of oligopolies and corporate warlords, and yet, the children of this new world ripped the future from the jaws of the past.

How they did it, I have no clue. Who did it, I do not know either. Why they did it, I am certain.

They do not dream of the future and study the past in the same way those that came before them did. When you live among them, you find yourself living day to day as though each could be your last, only to find you’ve lived a thousand years.