Chapter Text

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Arthur Anderson, Bristol, England

The Night of The Swap

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Arthur Anderson was, he suspected, the most forgettable man in all of Bristol. Unmarried at 28, barely able to hold down a job as an aircraft technician despite nearly a decade of experience, lost between two other siblings (both far more successful than he), and culturally adrift in a sea of immigrants and foreigners- he felt that he was nothing to nobody, and it made him a little uncomfortable.

Well, maybe more than a little. He’d been more than a little loud tonight, more than a little drunk, when they threw him out of King Street Brew House. He’d definitely been a little pissed, a little tanked up, when he stumbled into The Old Duke, down the way. Drunk enough to put up a fight, when the human/gorilla hybrid that the locals called a bouncer began to escort him out. There’d been no thrown punches- he wasn’t that far gone. But he was going to make a statement, damn it.

He stood up on a chair, waving off the attempts by the bouncer and other patrons to wrestle him down, and held his fists high over his head. “You lot can’t ignore me, hear? I’m Arthur f-fucking Anderson, like the king, mind? I work ‘ard and I pay me taxes and if I don’t matter whassat make the rest of you, like? You throw me out here, next thing you know you’re gonna- gonna have trouble mattering.” He’d stopped the other conversations in the bar, at least- he took that as some kind of triumph, anyway. The bouncer had him by the legs now, was trying to lift him up and sling him over his shoulder. He kept his rant going, “We all got to matter or none of us do! I am Britain, hear me roar! God and Country! Oh, god, I’m gonna throw up…” That compelled the bouncer to move, and he found himself summarily dumped onto the floor.

As the room spun, lightning flashed- but hadn’t it been a sunny day outside? There were screams, the sounds of chairs being knocked back, and other noises- like old timey modems connecting, but they sounded more alarmed. He sat up and held his swirling head. The whole place was in chaos and he didn’t think it had been him- couldn’t be sure, but why would they have cared that much? Then he saw it. A human-sized beetle, dashing this way and that through the room, pushing aside furniture and shouting in that awful modem-screech language. It was clearly intelligent, but it didn’t look friendly. In a fit of drunken fearlessness, he kicked it and it crashed to the floor.

He looked around- the bar was half empty all of a sudden, and a dozen of these things had sprung from nowhere, seemingly. His bouncer escort was nowhere to be seen, and the other patrons were scrambling for the exits. He was flush with bravado off his first victory, and grabbed a chair, wielding it like club and shield combined as he posed for the fleeing humans. “You lot go on then, get out! I’ll hold ‘em off!” Not that the aliens needed much holding off. They gathered to one side of the room, screeching among themselves. He kept the chair firmly between himself and them. Even in his state it became pretty apparent that they weren’t interested in messing with him. At least they weren’t ignoring him! Well, except for one. There was an ant-looking thing in one of the back booths, far away from him and the other huddled aliens. It was hunched over, working on something he couldn’t see. Some part of him was still incensed at the thought that he might not have registered to this thing. Come to his planet and ignore his heroic last stand, would it?

He wandered over, jabbing with the chair. “Hey! You! Get out of there, get with your buddies! Yeah, I’m talking to you!” The ant-thing didn’t react. One of the others in the group of a half dozen stepped out towards him, arms outstretched, making distressed modem-noises, but the others pulled it back, hushed it up. Whatever it was trying to communicate to him, he didn’t care. This one was dangerous? Was that it? Well it was about to see how dangerous a sloshed englishman was, when he-

Finally he got close enough to look over its shoulder, see the pattern it was marking in the tabletop. It had blue chalk, maybe brought with it, maybe taken from the bar, but effective either way. On the surface of the bar’s table in thin white scratches was a shape- he couldn’t name it, try as he might. It recursed within itself, over and over again, like looking down a tunnel but the walls were alive, every time he looked at them they shifted- or maybe it was his understanding of them that was shifting? He could almost comprehend this thing, it was on the tip of his tongue, as he watched that ant-thing work. It was single-minded in its’ focus, feverish in its’ intensity. He didn’t have to wait long. Or maybe he did? Time didn’t seem to matter, as he stood there. The final lines slid into place, the grand design becoming clear. “Looks kind of like a parrot” was the last coherent thing he muttered before it took him. The geometric pattern worked as well on him as it had on the infomorph- it triggered neurons in a precise order, and something like a seizure began to grip him before his mind shut down.

When Arthur awoke, the others had fled the bar. That was fine- he was going to need some time to set up, to prepare. It had just clicked with him, when he looked at the thing. He understood what his purpose in life was, now. He was going to need a big surface and a lot of blue. But it would matter, when he was done.

As he stumbled out of the bar, eyes glowing lightly with the promise of a bright new future, the ant kept on scratching out the pattern on a second table. One of its legs had already fallen off, worn through at the joint from sheer overuse- but that was okay. It had several more.

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Several days after The Swap

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Arthur no longer remembered his name. He was hungry, so hungry, and a little thirsty too- or at least, he felt distantly that he should be. He knew the physical discomfort, but he no longer associated the concepts with hunger or thirst. There was only the Blue, the endless repetitive pattern that he must carve into every surface, paint on every wall, inscribe into every passing eyeball. The concepts of self, or starvation, or a terrifying, lonely death no longer registered to him. He was the picture, and he needed to reproduce. People would come in, see the pattern, fall unconscious. Then they’d get up and reproduce it. One at a time. Solitary. He saw fewer and fewer these days. He’d taken so many that the local population had thinned and grown wary of his corner of town. Normally this would be the end-state of a pattern infection- so virulent that it killed its own herd.

But unknown to him, the pattern hadn’t taken root quite as well in him as it had in the Infomorphs. It was as old as the species, and they had many ways to resist it, burn it out of their minds, but the fact remained- it was tailored to them, designed to consume their thoughts. For them, to be infected was to lose oneself entirely. Arthur still had some little portion of his brain left, enough to feel… creative. Enough to want to leave his mark, on the pattern. To be frustrated that he was still being ignored. Let it remember me … so he tweaked it. He couldn’t have said how, afterward. Didn’t retain enough self to even register that he’d done it. But the fact remained- the next version of the pattern he drew, was… different. Ever so slightly, the thought it encoded had changed. And viewing it, his visual cortex fired neurons in a new way, and he changed. Ever so slightly. The process repeated, over and over. View, paint, observe, repeat. The pattern shifted, became fluid, began encoding new thoughts, new overwhelming demands.

Eventually his latest variant snagged someone- a woman, middle aged, hurrying past with hands over her eyes slipped and caught the reflection of his latest wall mural in a puddle on the ground. She stood, staring at the mirror image- and her gaze climbed slowly, inexorably, to the real one, until she collapsed. He watched idly, still painting, as her body convulsed and twitched. After long minutes she stood, eyes glowing with inner light. And left.

He hadn’t the capacity to grunt or even acknowledge her, but she ran off anyway. Eventually she returned, food in bloodied hand. Perhaps she’d smashed a shop window nearby. She fed them both. Attention, that was what he’d encoded in one endless recursive loop, self modifying until it had had the desired effect. Attention to the Concept. Like him, she would prioritize its spread above all- but she could understand that keeping other bodies functional would allow it to spread faster, allow them to spend more time thinking about it. His body ate while he worked. But his satisfaction came simply from being noticed, being part of something now. No longer alone. A collective. The pattern continued to shift, to grow, to modify itself. She watched him for a time- just standing, staring, until another pattern triggered another thought within her. Wordlessly, she left again, returning with poster board and markers. This was good, this was efficient, he could spread the signals and she could attend. He continued to paint. New patterns, new ideas for the Concept, codified. They would overwrite the old. And people would pay attention.

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14 days after the Swap

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A nurse, a policeman, a young married couple, a salesman, and an old ex-SAS soldier were holed up in the Clarendon Center, Oxford. They had stolen a helicopter in the general collapse, and crash-landed on the roof due to Stephen’s terrible piloting. But the door of the place was barricaded, and they knew enough not to look at anything the zombies might throw up on the windows while they went about the process of blacking them out. “Looking at what they show you,” said Roger, the old soldier. “That’s how they get you.”

They didn’t understand how it worked, but they were wise enough not to look. They parked a truck over the main doors, blocked the side entrances with wood and covered the windows, and they shot anything trying to get inside. Not that it deterred the glowing-eyed zombies much- they had zero instinct for self preservation, and anything short of lethal damage would simply be ignored. They’d use their own bodies as battering rams if they thought it might make a difference.

It wasn’t all bad. They still had TV, and the mall had some nice crap in it, enough that they could throw parties every night. Why not- it was the end of the world, right? The zombies had spread like a tide, within a week the whole country had gone under. 27 million English, maybe more from Wales and Scotland, gone just like that. Why not blow the doors off every night? They had a makeshift periscope with a tiny slit for a view that they poked out of an upper story window to observe the crowds below. As long as they didn’t get a full-on view of whatever that freaky blue picture was, it didn’t seem like it hurt them. But they could also see that the crowds weren’t dissipating. They sat around the entrances, just… waiting. Watching. They knew someone was inside, and they weren’t going away. They really wanted to spread that picture.

That was why it was so surprising when, on the morning of the 14th day after the whole ordeal began, somebody knocked on the front door. “Hello? Any survivors in there? I could use a hand out here!” Roger ran upstairs and checked the periscope while the others waited with guns ready, aimed at the door. Silence reigned, inside and out. But soon enough the call came back- only one guy outside, and he’d moved the truck. The crowds were gone.

Cursing, they ran down and unbarred the door to pull him in. But they got an unpleasant surprise, when they opened the door. The man standing at it was smiling vacantly, and the blue glow behind his eyes told them all they needed to know about his mental state. But he had spoken! They’d all heard it. Behind him on the ground, a great tiled version of the blue pattern was angled upwards- built to be precisely visible by their periscope. Horror dawned on the faces of those swift enough to grasp what they were seeing. The zombies had learned. Roger was compromised. And the truck was gone, yes- but the man outside was not alone. The crowd swarmed in, and nobody made it back to the helicopter on the roof.

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21 days after The Swap

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Selena Davis leaned against the makeshift barricade at the top of the hospital stairs. London was burning, around her. It was burning. The zombies, or whatever they were, had lit whole city blocks on fire. This wasn’t at all like the movies. First, half of everyone had disappeared, and then they came. Like a tide, from the west. Nobody knew what happened if they got you- they didn’t tear you apart or anything- but once they dragged you off, nobody saw you again. They didn’t care if you shot them, either. Unless it was immediately fatal they’d just keep coming. Some of them had even learned to say things, come at you making small talk or pretending to be a survivor, until they got close enough that you could see that blue light behind their eyes, and then it was probably too late. Nobody had expected them to be smart. And they were getting smarter.

For a while the military had held the line in cordon zones, shot them to death and that had been the end of it. But then they’d showed up with projectors. Started throwing out that pattern on any surface at the drop of a hat. Anyone who saw it seized, and got up a minute later to help them. She’d watched a battlefield medic shoot a trio of them, see whatever it was that made that light, and get right back up and start treating the wounds he’d made. It was like the second it hit you, you just… switched sides, and stopped caring about your own body. She’d seen them crawl through barbed wire, come at her with broken legs or half their faces hanging off. They were still human, they bled and died, but- they didn’t care anymore. That last was what had broken her. She’d fled from other refugees, then- holed herself up at the top of this building, taken the elevator out of commission and barricaded the stairs. Her only hope was that isolation would keep them from noticing her. They hadn’t figured out how to use radios yet, so she’d been calling for help from overseas. Oh please let there be somebody left, overseas. But they’d run out of big groups to seize, and had begun to simply burn whole blocks, grabbing the last stragglers as they stumbled away from the fires. And now they’d found her. Seen her through an upper window, perhaps, or simply conducted a building by building search. They certainly didn’t seem to sleep much.

She heard them in the stairwell. Feet stamping up, a half dozen at least. “Hello? Anyone up there? Survivors!” one of them called, with that false hollow friendliness. A Talker, she called those. They sound like salesmen, she thought. She had one grenade, and she didn’t want to throw it without a damned good reason. “We’re here to help! Fire!” he called. You’re the ones burning it in the first place, you gits, she snarled in her head, lips curling back. She couldn’t decide if she’d rather die to the fire and smoke, or risk fighting them, risk the chance that they’d brought some way to show her that blue light. Would it even be that bad?

“I ain’t goin’ down to you fuckers!” she called out, before she realized she’d even begun to speak. She cursed herself silently. Now they know you’re here. One week without talking to anyone and you start treating zombies like company, you idiot. Oh well, she was done for now. She could at least satisfy her curiosity. “What do you assholes want with us, anyway?”

The call came from down the stairs, beyond her makeshift barricade of jumbled hotel furniture and barbed wire. It sounded like they might be trying to shift a way through, down there. The Talker yelled back. “We’re here to help!” Still perfectly friendly, but it wasn’t entirely clear if it was even responding to her or just using a set of stock phrases. “Once you see it you’ll understand. Hang on!” The sound of rubble shifted- there was a sound of wood breaking, and a crash, and a wet thump, echoing again and again. Somebody had tried to scale the barricade, broken something, and fallen down the stairwell. They didn’t make a single sound as they fell. There was no power to the building, this late into the siege there wasn’t any power to the city, so she couldn’t see it- she was thankful for that. From the sound of it, the others were still working down there. She pulled the pin on her grenade, counted to five, lobbed it into the stairwell. It clinked and echoed as it bounced down the stairs and then… nothing. God damn lousy army surplus bullshit, she cursed to herself. She had no gun, nothing but a chair leg to defend herself with now.

She scrambled back from the stairwell and down the ward hallway, where the light from the windows at least gave her something to fight by. It wasn’t long before the fire escape door swung open, and the first of them came through. He turned and saw her, and smiled, but it was all in the mouth- his eyes were emotionless, and blue. He wore the suit of a London businessman, from the waist up, though it was torn and bloody. From the waist down his pants had burned away, and his legs were red-raw from the heat of some fire or other that he’d walked through to get here. There were bloody scratches and welts across his body, no doubt from the furniture and barbed wire he’d just scrambled over. He strode towards her, not impaired at all by his injuries. He said not a word- the time for talking was clearly over. She could smell smoke, wafting up the stairway behind him. Others followed.

She had two choices now- him, or the window. She screamed, and hefted her chair leg with nails still in, and charged. The club connected, a perfect clean blow across the head, and she saw it stagger him. But then he stood back up, club still stuck to his face where the nail had embedded in his neck, and grabbed her. There was no smile on his face now- no hatred, either. He was expressionless, the mask dropped the second it was no longer necessary. Blood ran down his neck. His grip was like iron. He turned her, slammed her against the wall, arms behind her back. She struggled but he had a mad kind of strength, and knew perfectly how to keep her in place. The others spread out, silently, searching each room for more survivors. “There’s nobody else here, you utter fuckers,” she taunted. “All that manpower wasted, chasing me down. I hope it was worth it.” They didn’t respond, didn’t even register the insult. The Talker, if that was the man holding her, didn’t say a word. Why would he? He already had her in place. One of their healers was seeing to the wound on his neck even as he held her. Finally they had searched to their satisfaction, and one of the stragglers, a young boy at some point in the past, produced a smart phone with an image loaded onto it that threw a harsh blue light over the hallway. She had just enough time to think to herself oh shit, they’ve figured out electronics before the piece of crap grenade she’d thrown minutes ago finally, finally blew. Bits of shredded wood and iron shotgunned up out of the stairwell, not killing anyone but actually startling her captor long enough for him to loosen his hold.

She took the only out she could, darting for that high window. Death it is, then. She ran down the corridor, shoulder checking one of them out of the way, and leapt at the glass with all her might- only to slam headfirst into it, sliding to the floor. Well of course they made it shatter resistant, she thought dimly, as they caught up to her and the picture came into view. Wow- it was so intricate. It was shifting, constantly shifting, updating with new instructions in real-time now, so fast she couldn’t process what she was seeing, couldn’t comprehend-

5 minutes later, she stood up. They had cleared the stairwell which was good, because fire was rapidly spreading from the lower levels and they’d probably have to run through it. Her collarbone was broken but that was fine. Someone would set it for her, if she needed it. She went to help them work the radios.

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28 days after The Swap

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Lord Asriel, late of Oxford, now trapped on some other world entirely, glared at the young girl who had summoned him to this benighted place. “You’ve killed me, do you understand that?” he hissed at the slip of a thing, only 12 years old. His daemon, Stelmaria, paced behind her, taught and ready for violence. “You wanted a daemon of your own and now you’ve killed me. There will be no escaping… this.” He gestured at the horde, thousands strong, gathering outside their refuge. The Concept, they called themselves. People whose wills had been subverted, utterly, by some infestation from beyond this pathetic world. In some ways they reminded him of the children upon whom he’d performed intercision. Listless, emotionally numb, more automaton than human. And yet- the zombies learned, and grew, and now they threatened to overwhelm. The armored bears of the panserbjorne, who this idiot child had also summoned, held a desperate rearguard outside. They at least were strange enough that the images had no effect on them, but they could not stand forever. The noise of their battle was cacophonous, even several stories up. There was nowhere left for him to retreat to. They were trapped in the old manor, living out their final moments as far as he was concerned. His narrator, his anchor, a pathetic child named Anna, cowered away from the window. She could not risk looking out and catching a glimpse of that terrible pattern. Her recently formed daemon Telantes raced around her feet in the shape of a chipmunk.

“Escape is not the only solution, Lord Asriel,” said a tall and brooding figure standing by the mantle. He cut a dashing figure with his smoking jacket and pipe, though he was a long way from Baker Street, now. “This world cried out for the greatest detective it had ever known, and I answered the call. As you well know, the mind-influencing effect of this Concept cannot impact us. We are not part of this world or subject to its’ narratives. As long as those anchoring us here are safe, we are safe from corruption. Assuming the horde does not simply kill us, of course, which they well might.” Sherlock Holmes lit his pipe and stepped away from the fireplace. “We alone are uniquely placed- we cannot fight our way out, but we cannot be subdued- perhaps we could bargain? ”

The fourth and final member of their group, a young witch-to-be named Gretchen who had received her owl to Hogwarts on the very night of the Swap, looked skeptical. “What could we possibly offer them, Mr. Holmes? They only want us to view those horrible pictures.”

He nodded. “That they do. We can offer them knowledge. Assuming there’s something left in them that understands the need for it, that can actually communicate, as opposed to the crude simulation their Talkers seem to make use of. For example- the pattern that governs them appears to be self-modifying, updated from some central node or location in response to challenge and stimulus. Not only is this terribly inefficient, it represents a critical weakness in their functioning, one that-”

He was cut off by a voice at the window. “One that we will be well on the way to correcting, once we have you on board, Mr. Holmes.” The man stepping through their mysteriously-open third-floor manor window was… incomparable. At first glance, he appeared to be a middle aged, weathered man with a short black beard, a streak of madness in his eyes. A wild man from the woods, perhaps. He wore a cloak of simple earth tones over a black robe. A plethora of rings and charms hung from his neck and glittered on his fingers. On second glance he could have been forty years old, or a thousand. In his hand, a staff of gnarled wood with a blue gem at the top. The light from the gem matched that coming from his eyes. Lord Asriel drew a pistol from a hip holster the moment he entered the room, but a gesture from the sorcerer removed the threat, turning it to little more than dust in an instant.

Holmes sighed, and nodded in checkmate. “Myrddin. I had wondered, that we had not seen some sign of your story. Do they have the rest of Arthur’s court, then? If they have your narrator, they must-”

The young witch-to-be interrupted him with rash action. With a despairing, suicidal roar she launched herself at the single greatest mage in the history of the world, knocking him backwards toward the window. He tottered in it, for a moment, before falling out of it with a smile and a sly wink at her. She shouted in triumph before she realized- the open window- and the hordes arrayed beyond, posterboards and projectors always at the ready. She was destined for Hogwarts, but she was a narrator- from this world, beholden to its rules. She could not close her eyes in time to escape the images.

As she fell to the floor unconscious, their aggressor stepped back into the room through a doorway that had certainly not been there a moment before, and did not carry on existing for one second after he exited it. He looked at her with an appraising eye. “We’ll have to find something special, for that one. Gryffindor through and through, I think.”

Holmes interjected. “You work for them, but you still have a concept of self. It does not affect you, then?”

The wizard shook his head. “Just my values, but not my mind, which is what will make the rest of you so useful. My narrator’s quite gone to the meme, I’m afraid, and now I’ll have to do for the rest of you. There’s a crew breaking into your man’s bunker now, Mr. Holmes, and you Mr. Asriel, oh-so-helpfully brought yours straight to us.” Both stiffened, but it was Asriel who acted.

Pulling a second holdout pistol from his coat, he turned in one motion and fired at the girl before Merlin or Holmes could do more than shout in alarm. A neat and tiny hole bloomed over her heart, and she sighed softly and fell backwards. “You think I wouldn’t kill a child, to avoid the fate you describe? Even you would make that exchange, Emrys. Oh yes, we have tales of you in my Oxford, as well. I believe there’s even a likeness of you on the golden compass.”

Holmes darted to the child, attempting to resuscitate her. The wizard simply sighed and raised his staff. The events of the last moment reversed, and this time when the bullet fired, he was there to intercept. It smacked harmlessly off his staff, and then he shone something from his gem into her eyes, and she collapsed. Holmes and Asriel stood ramrod-straight, struggling in vain to resist some compulsion from beyond themselves, but it was no use. They gradually relaxed, and became themselves again- but with no hostility towards the old mage, anymore. Whatever part of them had desired not to belong to the Concept was gone. In the corner the young girl’s daemon cowered in the shape of a field mouse. The three great men took no notice of it, or the fact that it had alone not been affected when her mind was taken.

“Now then,” said Merlin. “I believe you mentioned, Mr. Holmes, something about a weakness that we must correct.”