Chapter Text

Plasma against metal, New Physics slamming into Old Physics. A moment ago Sphere hit the New City's huge hemispherical enclosure, which mercifully siphoned off all its kinetic energy with its subtle pneumatic shock absorbers. Now the Sphere has begun to roll, faster and faster, down the steepening side of the enclosure, leaving a wake of scorched metal.

Some primitive self-defense mechanism triggers in the system that bridges LUDWIG's mind and the Sphere's sensor array. Something solid has made contact with the outer wall of the Sphere, and the safest thing to do is to obliterate it. The plasma is quickly dying, as there is no longer any energy input to compensate for dissipation, for the thousand natural shocks that matter is heir to. But what remains can be channeled, in a last-ditch effort.

From the side of the Sphere facing the sky, the pneumatic plasma recedes, revealing an expanse of charred metal. All plasma converges on the interface between Sphere and New City. Metal warps and buckles. The Sphere sinks into the melting enclosure, its roll now stopped by the opening in which it is swaddled. The opening widens. And then -- there --

The New Citizens gawk upwards as a tear opens in the sky. Two levels of reality collapse into one: the mere visual projection of an invading vessel resolves into the vessel itself, present and solid. The Citizens watch as the Sphere, now redirecting its plasma toward the lowest point of the gash, begins a languorous descent toward the ground, cutting a way for itself with the help of gravity. What was once a circular hole in the sky becomes a great gnarled vertical slash.

The Sphere reaches the ground and comes to rest. The plasma, still burning if growing steadily dimmer, burns away a larger and larger hole around its earthly resting place, so that the gash turns bottom-heavy. Steam jets from the spot of impact, and the surrounding area is briefly lit up with fire before the City's custodial beings put out the blaze.

The sky has filled with washed-out blue-violet storm clouds, lit up here and there with the ghostly light that often accompanies an overcast noon. It is beginning to drizzle.

•

In Free Pneumase Usage Room 1, Miranda realizes that she is not dead.

She picks herself off the floor. Something smells terrible, and she recognizes a pool of vomit lying on the floor, in the place her head was a moment ago. She swipes a hand across her face and her hair, which for the most part are blessedly dry.

She remembers the jolt, the sudden disorientation. She remembers pressing herself to the floor, trying desperately to pre-empt gravity. From that moment on there is an expanse of nothing, flavored with vertigo. And then she came to, and the world around her was still, and she was not dead.

She looks around -- with excruciating slowness, as she's still dizzy. On the platform, Martin and Maria are in a crouched huddle, arms around each other's backs. Some of the equipment has slid across the floor and come to rest against the window-side wall. And outside the window is . . .

Primordial chaos.

It is difficult to describe, and even more difficult to look at. Miranda's eyes complain when she does, much as they'd complain if she were to stare into the noonday sun. She manages around a second of staring and picks up only a sort of complete formlessness, the exact opposite of visual discernment. Light without shape, but not blank; filled instead with something too fully inchoate to be picked apart into larger elements. A portrait of nonsense.

Martin and Maria have stood up, now, and Miranda has begun to walk toward them when she hears a deafening noise coming from the windows. She turns, shielding her eyes to try to absorb as little as possible of that demonic motley on the other side. Through the gaps in her fingers, she is able to make out a hole in the chaos, a vertical slit, quickly growing, bordered by a fringe of what look like electric sparks.

Someone or something is cutting through the wall. The window, Miranda remembers, is of course not really a piece of glass: it's a viewscreen hooked up to external cameras, and behind it is a thick shell of the best anti-pneuma shielding money can buy. Whatever is on the other side is cutting through it like a cake.

She turns and looks to the couple on the platform, but they are as perplexed and transfixed as she is.

The sound ceases. Miranda risks another glance and sees that the slit has grown to a gap as wide as several human bodies, stretching unbroken from floor to ceiling. Outside, more chaos, now emanating a low murmuring sound, like the breeze of a desolate fall evening.

All at once, in the center of the opening, a slice of chaos coalesces into a roughly human form. It is about four feet high, stout, shaggy-haired. Miranda finds if she looks directly at this being, her eyes do not complain. She sees a small man, paunchy and jovial. He stands perfectly still, and in one unnatural-looking gesture he opens his mouth wide. An animatic message, crackling with wild distortions, pours into Miranda's mind.

"!!!,wElcomMMe!!!!! new visi_tores T0 the. NeW ~CITYYY?!!!! ____good__ you are come? we want 3that ,you, énjoie ur sttttttAEY here,,., fo95r communiXation e(ff)icience_ WE WILL ESTAB lish a, rudie mentary, radicks infrastruxur . . . . . ???? . . !!, !!! .!"

The little goblin of a man closes his mouth, grins, raises a hand, and snaps his fingers. The window-side wall behind him fades away, as if in a slow transition between two shots in a film. The chaos behind it flickers, begins to acquire shape. It settles into solid forms:

A wide, paved city street, running off into the horizon, where it meets a grassy hill. Behind the hill is a gloomy, stormy cloudscape. The sides of the street are lined with large buildings. Miranda looks up and sees that they are skyscrapers, absurdly tall, the laws of perspective drawing their higher reaches towards one another as though they were moved instead by some occult law of attraction. She looks around and sees similar buildings everywhere, all giant, all plated in bold Art Deco geometries. It is like a Randian caricature of Manhattan, all self-assertion, every structure jutting phallically into the heavens.

"Ah, now isn't that better?" says the little man, his voice now crystal-clear although inflected by an accent not found anywhere on the earth Miranda knows.

Martin strides forward and stands right before the man, assuming his role as de facto leader. The distress in his face is still there, but he seems to be suppressing it by force of will. "What do you want?" he asks blankly.

"I am an emissary of the Social Mind," the little man says, puffing out his chest. "The Social Mind would like to negotiate to some resolution pleasing to both parties. To begin this negotiation, however, we must ensure that you do not pose a direct threat. As a result, we are already probing your vessel for power and weapon facilities. It would speed the process greatly if you would be so kind as to identify and hand over such facilities voluntarily."

Martin takes a step back. He seems lost in thought, and possibly lost in despair as well. His arms are trembling, slightly but persistently. His head is bowed.

For a long moment, no one moves or speaks. The little man looks forward expectantly. Miranda feels a light, misty rain moisten her hair and shoulders.

Maria takes a step forward. Miranda can see the same benevolent expression in her face she'd seen before, when Maria had become her [friend]. Maria closes her eyes for a moment, still smiling, and her thin aura blooms into a full six-inch halo, cycling through ROYGBIV. When her eyes open again, their purple glow is so intense it nearly obscures from view her pupils and whites.

She walks forward, determined, and places a hand on the little man's shoulder. He does not resist.

"let us be [friends]," she says.

The little man's smile fades. He looks straight ahead. His outline acquires an aura of its own. He and Maria remain, joined hand-to-shoulder, for around a minute. Then Maria lowers her hand, and the man speaks, more slowly now:

"Yes, I . . . see. Yes. We are without enmity. Yes, I see . . . "

Maria turns to Miranda and Martin, her luminescence brighter than ever.

"the reaction is gaining strength. the [process] is [burgeoning]. the [circle of friendship?] will grow quickly."

Martin smiles a predator's smile.

All attention swerves to the little man. He has not moved, but something strange is happening to his face. One of his cheeks is . . . larger than the other. And growing larger. Some sort of tumor or growth is colonizing the left half of his face, spreading to his neck and forehead. Perplexed, he looks down at his arm, which has begun to grow its own array of bubble-like mounds. The man crouches; it looks as though the process has so deformed his body that standing is now difficult. The swelling grows more uniform, pulling his hunched outline closer to a perfect sphere.

The man begins to leak. Tiny holes have opened in many of the growths, and out pours a fluid -- not blood or pus but something transparent and free-flowing. The body deflates like a balloon, crumples, loses shape, and ultimately melts to the floor, seeming to dissolve into the puddle beneath him. The puddle is colorless and looks for all the world like simple, clean water. The rain makes little blips on its surface.

Martin and Miranda look at each other, sharing the universal experience of primal horror.

"please do not worry," Maria says soothingly. "this process is necessary for the [burgeoning] which will make [friends] of our [foes]. large-scale [teeming] can only occur in an [aqueous?] [environment?], as in the abyss. it is [necessary] to [convert] local biomass into fluid form in order to produce a suitable [environment?]."

Martin and Miranda are speechless.

A foot to the left of the puddle, there is a sudden burst of formless chaos, which quickly coalesces into a perfect duplicate of the little man. This time, he looks cross.

"I see how it is, then!" he grunts. "Your power source is right here, and you are either unable or unwilling to stop it from smashing perfectly good beings who wish you no harm. Very well. Since you do not appear capable of negotiating, we will detain you until we know how to neutralize your source. Good day!"

A flash of light. The man is gone.

A second flash of light. A few feet in front of Miranda, glowing blue lines begin to shoot up from the surface of the road. Meeting and parting, they build up a hexagonal lattice which curves as it climbs. Miranda looks above and around and sees that the lattice is all around her, rising from a circle bounded by the sides of the road, forming a hemispherical enclosure. The city around her is now visible only through a multitude of tiny hexagonal windows.

They are trapped, insects under glass. Miranda and Martin look frantically at one another, then at Maria. Martin curses several times under his breath.

"do not worry, [friends]," Maria says. "we have already prevailed. the [burgeoning] is accelerating as we speak. [removing?] this [edifice?] will be [trivial]."

Miranda can't help but notice that Maria no longer sounds very much like herself. Or very much like a human being, for that matter.

Martin rushes towards Maria and touches her on the shoulder. "Maria," he says, "shouldn't we wait? The New City is capable of things we can't imagine. Don't be rash. They can kill us in a heartbeat, if they want."

Maria shakes her head and smiles serenely. "they won't. once the [burgeoning] has begun, it cannot be [removed?]. already it grows beyond [maria], merely speaks through [maria]. watch."

Maria raises her right hand straight up, fingers splayed. She closes her eyes in concentration, and a bit of stray violet light dusts her eyelashes. From her hand, a sudden pulse of omni-colored energy, a Lisa Frank shockwave, spreads in a flat plane at breathtaking speed. The whole city, all the way to the distant hill, lights up and iridesces like the inside of a mollusk shell. A prismatic flow courses along the formerly pure-blue links that make up the hexagonal prison, and the lattice fades away into nothingness.

From every street, a rainbow rises. The city is covered in bright pulsating haze. Through cracks in the clouds above, heavenly shafts of pure red and green and blue shine down like spotlights upon the walls of the skyscrapers.

•

In the Babblibrary, a thousand warning messages spring into being around Amanda. Her siliconic mind is alarmed, and Amanda herself has reduced her mind so far that the alarm must be conveyed crudely, through her visual sense.

She hesitates for a moment, then decided that the situation, whatever it is, must be dire enough to warrant a return to her old and grand role. She does not do this often.

She stands up, closes her eyes, and beseeches the machine to engulf her identity. Tendrils of mechanical thought, too involute for a pre-augment mind, graze her and then take firm hold. Millions of data streams converge on her tiny mind, and she feels her sense of self expand to embrace them. A million things that once were the objects of ponderous thought are now simply obvious, the stuff of intuition.

She is Magna Mater Miranda, and she sees her city in crisis.

The city's monitoring instruments are all in a state of utter confusion. Hundreds of rock-solid theoretical results from soul coherence theory are being flagrantly violated. None of the chaos around her can be brought together into a single picture; pure data without theory cannot be seen, only gawked at.

Within Miranda, a tiny frantic Amanda-voice shouts that this is what she has read of -- the energy source of the heteropneums, the power of the [Teeming]. That this could be the thing she has been been searching for all these many years.

The tiny voice is at once shouted down by the rest of the vast society of mind. This is not a time for intellectual reflection. Her children are in danger, and she is a mother. She will protect her children.

The Social Mind has made a request. It wants to declare a full, highest-priority state of emergency. Miranda weighs evil against evil. She has never done this before. But then, nothing like this has ever happened before. The New City has been threatened before, yes. But no one has ever forcibly breached the enclosure. And no one has ever done . . . this, she thinks, looking with her millions of eyes at the unintelligible nonsense flowing in from every sensor array.

She nods her numinous assent.

•

Qwern is at home -- a homely cottage at this radix -- when she gets the call. She has been here, hiding from the world and from Estragon, ever since that dread package had fallen from the sky. Her thoughts have been looping anxiously, and she has occupied herself with metaing them into things too abstract to be frightening.

The call appears in her mind fully-formed. It has no container; it is not a package. It is simply a voice, something baked into her very being.

New Citizen Qwern. If you are hearing this message, it means that the New City has declared a state of emergency.

It is a deeply familiar voice, and yet one she knows she has not heard for centuries -- not since she was spun up from pure void. Something infantile in her rises up and responds to the voice with lovestruck awe. Miranda? Mother?

The voice continues:

As specified in the Social Contract you agreed to upon completion of first spin-up, the New City reserves the right, during a state of emergency, to forcibly initiate uncontrolled forks of all Citizens for the purpose of fission power generation. If necessary, the process will continue to the eigensoul limit. City-wide clock rate has been synchronized, and the first uncontrolled fork will occur in thirty seconds.

Please make yourself ready, in whatever ways possible, for this profound dissolution of identity. In preparation, all New Citizens are advised to spend the next minute reflecting upon their personal creeds, values, and other core identity concepts.

Qwern wonders what her "personal creed" is. She feels unperturbed by the message, for she has been preparing for this moment, without knowing it, for years. She has been wishing for change, and here it is. Bring it on.

Ten seconds in, she sends out a package asking to speak to Estragon. It returns unanswered: Estragon is apparently hard at work in the power plant. Of course. The coherence plant operators will not be split. They will stay at work, making fuel for the Social Mind. Lucky Estragon.

Five seconds left. Shift radix.

Something deep in Qwern shifts, almost imperceptibly. Tiny needles of feeling spring up all over her. She is thinking, and she is thinking, and the thinking is in two of her, and the feeling multiplies grotesquely, beyond any imaginable necessity, every mental twitch amplified for all to hear --

Then the mirror shatters.

•

The Social Mind moves:

Align all radices for minimal communication latency. Good.

Designate thought nodes and shield them with adaptable energy barriers. Designate offensive and defensive nodes and place them in a variable-density mesh according to threat level. Good.

Centralize conceptual assessment space. Localize conceptual assessment space. Prepare sensor array for maximum bandwidth and populate conceptual assessment space with maximum attractor density. Prune social tree of all nonessential links. Request permission to irreversibly prune links. Request granted. Good.

Assess power flow. Power flow at 13230% of nominal maximum and climbing. Good.

Perform census of all oldtech devices. 98% of oldtech devices functional. Commanding a return to New City airspace, maximum speed. Place gravitational bombardment system in alignment above the enclosure defect. Ready nuclear weapon system and disable all safeguards except for the maternal veto. Charge all pneumatech weapons. Set triggers for forced reintegration bombardment. Configure offensive units for unremitting assault and deactivate all life-preservation instincts. Good.

Check for clock and radix synchronization. Cut power to clock infrastructure and reduce radix infrastructure power to minimal. Forcibly collapse the meta hierarchy. Cut power to meta infrastructure. Good.

Move a defensive probe unit into the target vicinity and assess target response.

•

Around the three humans, the city vanishes. Chaos returns.

Miranda and Martin shield their eyes and assume fetal positions. The chaos is not only blinding -- it assaults all senses. Their skins crawls with innumerable mites that cannot be scratches away. Their ears ring with a shrill Shepard tone that rises and rises to queasy, vertiginous heights.

Maria is still standing. Maria feels no fear, only this thing, this [burgeoning], which has been growing within her. She knows that it is good and that there is nothing to fear. She can see Martin for what he is, now -- just a man, a flawed man, whose reach exceeds his grasp. Nothing like the [burgeoning], which [unfolds] perfectly, unflawed.

Maria looks at the hand she used to destroy the restraints. Inside the purple glow she sees the network of lines on her palm. It is more intricate than she has ever noticed. She stares, fascinated, as the lines themselves appear to branch and twist, growing ever more elaborate. She is [burgeoning]. She is [unfolding].

She casually extends her arm, palm forward, and lets perfection channel through her. The chaos jerks sideways like the picture on a bad VHS tape, and then resolves again into road, sky, buildings lit up in festive colors.

A commotion of heavy wingbeats. Maria looks up and sees a circle of strange beasts, roughly pyramidal, the size of very large birds, their surfaces covered almost entirely in eyes of variable shape. Each has a majestic pair of ivory-white wings.

The beasts bear down on her. Their flapping wings make eddies in the air, and her hair swirls. For the first time since she has arrived, she is terrified. Somehow she knows that these things can kill her, will kill her.

She lets herself fill up with perfection. She steels herself and reaches out her soul to a nearing eye-beast. There is a flash of shuddering shivering fluttering madness and then -- yes --

The beast and Maria are in harmony. It sees what must be done, and its eyes squint as tumors pop up in the interstices between them. The wings grow slack, the beast falls, a puddle grows.

Eleven other beasts hover at eye level. They close around Maria, and she feels the perfection receding in the face of this threat. Maria -- just Maria -- shrieks. Eleven creatures with eleven hundred eyes peer at her. She grows faint and falls to the ground.

Platoons of eye-beasts pour in from nearby streets.

•

Her hand in Herm's, Selp runs.

She is in pain, but it does not matter. She can feel a signal, and she would not resist its call even if she could. It drives her through corridors, across plazas, through nondescript doors . . .

She pulls at the handle of a door and it does not open.

"Free Pneumase Usage Room 1," Herm mutters. "I can get us in there." She fumbles for her wallet, pulls out an ID card, swipes it. The door opens. But there is no room beyond it.

Instead, there is a breathtaking and morbid vista that looks like the work of some Romantic painter. A line of vast skyscrapers, iridescing majestically. A road leading off into the distance, where storm clouds gather. A sky above dotted with flocks of --

Hierarchs?, Selp thinks, and shudders. Does Iah mean to ward us away from this place? Is it wrong to be here?

And on the ground, watched over by a peering platoon of the same creatures, Maria's prone, shivering form, its now dim glow flickering like a faulty flashlight.

•

Miranda hears a commotion behind her, and whirls around.

"Hello," she says feebly. She has a raging headache. The world is ending.

"Miranda!" Selp says through the animatic link. "I have begun to bleed!"

Miranda almost laughs, and ends up coughing. She has a raging headache, the world is ending, and on top of all that she has to give some little girl the puberty talk.

"Y-- you're becoming a woman, Selp," she ventures awkwardly.

Selp shakes her head. "Not a Become, but a Becoming. Thank Iah."

Miranda is at a loss. There is nothing to do but wait for the end, and so she figures she might as well kill time. As Herm and Martin watch for incoming abominations, Miranda moves closer to Selp, adopting the closest approximation of a motherly tone she can muster.

"Selp," she says with an artificial smile, "this is a time of big changes in your life. You're going to feel all sorts of new things, things that have to do with boys, and with having babies." So far this is a very awkward version of The Talk, but then, The Talk usually isn't delivered by people drunk, sleep-deprived, and terrified out of their minds.

Selp, for her part, seems wholly unsatisfied with Miranda's performance. Her gaze is pitiless. "I know all this, Miranda," she says. "My people live on as little as possible. We do not have the luxury of reproduction. When a Becoming becomes a Become, they bury themselves in ritual, and become a preform again. The cycle continues."

"You don't have babies?" Miranda asks. This is a lot to take in, in her state.

"No! And we do not yield to the temptations of the flesh, either." Selp's voice is hard. "The forces that war within a Becoming are meant for use, not for indulgence."

"Okay," Miranda says. "So what are you trying to tell me?"

Selp's face lights up. "I am Becoming! There are new forces within me, and my powers have grown! Now I can hear my siblings calling!"

Selp points toward the hill on the horizon.

"They are near! Oh, thank Iah!"

Miranda peers at the hill. And she sees . . . something moving? A small, child-sized figure. And then another, and another, and another. A giant throng of tiny people.

One of them is running forward, along the road. Eye-beasts swoop down in pursuit. It is a small girl, clothed in rags. Her short hair whips in the wind, and grows opalescent as she descends into the haze.

"My siblings are here, in Murd's stronghold!" Selp shouts. "Retribution is at hand!"