The Soul Continuum (44 page)

It takes me several seconds to conquer the mounting agony, and I try to focus on something else, anything else. Our companion Soul Consortiums speed alongside us, following our lead toward our destination, and I redouble my efforts to look at the un-thing ahead, willing my senses into submission, conquering the compulsion to look away.

Like a root system or some titanic flailing anemone, a nest of serpentine cracks festers in the darkness, complex and writhing at the relatively small epicenter but less intense and slower at the extremities. Like Vieta's jewel, it emanates indigo light from the cracks. We must have passed some kind of warning barrier, because the initial pain and agonizing sound is gone (or now understood and compensated for by the Control Core) and I stare dumbstruck at the phenomenon, still trying to makes sense of it, not speaking, just observing.

Ironius steps forward, crosses his arms, and grins. “That, my friend, is another rift.”

“Correct,” Qod says, “but this one is here by design. The rift we caused in the Promethean Singularity is crude. It was an accident, with very limited access to whatever might exist on the other side. This—whatever it is you brought us to—is a wide-open door.”

“Another rift?” I say. “But we don't know how to close it. We haven't even been able to close the one we created.”

“Salem!” The sound of an alarmed Qod is enough to send my heart into my mouth.

“What is it?”

“Movement. Form. Energy. Everywhere. We're under attack. Worse . . . than before. We have to get out of here. I can't . . . sustain . . .”

“Good,” says Ironius.

I look at him in disbelief. “What do you mean, ‘good'?”

“It means the Jagannath is terrified, you imbecile. Why else would it act so desperately? We have to take our stand. It's why Oluvia Wade sent us here, isn't it? Why would she just send you here without a way to close it?”

Ironius gazes at me expectantly, but I have nothing.

“Well?” he insists. “You have to go
in
there.”

“No, Salem.” The voice is Qod's. “You . . . must not.”

“Ironius is right,” I tell her. “It's our only hope. Whatever Oluvia knew, whatever she passed on through that algorithm, is all we have. We have to trust her. What other choice do we have?”

Qod does not answer.

M
y insignificant scout pod—without defense or weaponry—is the only way to reach the rift. Teleportation would have been my preferred method; the journey would have been over in the blink of an eye. No waiting, and none of the fear that accompanies a journey, but the rift defies all attempts at locking local target coordinates. It will take around sixty standard minutes to get there at near light speed, and every five of those means the destruction of another Soul Consortium. My guess is that I am now too insignificant a target for the Jagannath to care about, but that is all it is—a guess. My heart is pounding so hard as my little pod weaves through the clouds of chaos, it is all I can hear, and I cannot decide if I really want to see what is happening around me. One moment I opaque the skin of the pod so that all I can see is a smooth white wall, but the next, I command the skin to be translucent, and the full ugly spectacle of war is visible. Except that this is no war. In war, both sides take casualties. Here, the enemy seems invulnerable.

After thirty minutes I am five AUs distant from the battle, escaping the perimeter of the carnage, no longer buffeted by the gravitational eddies of collapsing Soul Consortiums and no longer tortured by the sight of them crackling into impotent glowing embers. With my back to
the rift, all I see is a stretch of golden mist where my brothers
have gathered. In a perverse way, the scene is quite beautiful as I speed away from it. A nova flare here, a splash of light there. Another victim. The emerging patterns of glowing debris remind me of nebula formation, and I have spent so many years delightedly watching those. But nebulas eventually become calm as the elements cool, and I begin to wonder how long this holocaust can continue and how many other Consortiums Seventy-Seven was able to recruit. Did he give others the same task? Could an infinite quantity of Soul Consortiums be arriving here, only to provide a never-ending supply of food for this conflict?

I turn my back on the war, ashamed that I can find beauty in such destruction and that I am more interested in speculation than the suffering contained in those images. I swivel my seat to look at the rift instead, forcing myself to suffer the vision of it, a sort of penance. I am almost there now, and its scale is terrifying. The center of it is probably no larger than an average gas giant planet, but the myriad extremities flailing outward like the tentacles of a kraken in the final paroxysm of death suggest something much larger. It is like an animal, full of rage and power, its reaching tendrils of unreality thrashing and squirming, and the vertigo is almost unbearable. I consider turning my back on it again, but an awe overtakes me, my mind suddenly bursting wide open into a new paradigm of experience. Whether it is the algorithm or simply a delayed response to the thing before me, I am unable to speculate, but I am reminded of a life I once lived that was polluted by the abuse of mind-modification software designed to enhance emotional response to external stimuli. The man's last few days were a vile spiral into terror and tears and madness, but before the end, it was like a vision of heaven had caught him.

It feels much like that now. Gods. Humanity has always needed them, always sought them, and it's like I have found the kernel of that hardwired instinct. I feel like I have come home, or like I have passed into a state of being that recognizes my eons-long life to be nothing more than the kindling for an inferno in which I am about to be consumed. But I am not dead. I am more alive than I have ever been, caught in rapture, devoured by an unparalleled consciousness, and as if falling into a waking dream, I am no longer inside my pod.

Suddenly, the elation is gone. Like a helpless insect lured by the sweet honey smell of a carnivorous plant, still struggling to escape, my mind tries to cling to the exultant feeling that I have transcended the inconsequential existence on the other side of consciousness. But the fantasy slips away, and suddenly I am suspended in deep indigo light, snapped back into the reality of my body, very much aware of its paralysis. There is a presence here, an icy intelligence close but invisible. Something or someone watches me, a million eyes assessing and deliberating as one. I fight to take a breath, instinctively wriggling my fingers and toes against the rigidity of my muscles, and as I choke, I panic, wondering why the Jagannath has decided upon this mode of death.

But soon the sensation passes, breathing becomes easier,
and there is a gentle tug of gravity causing the tips of my toes to brush against something smooth and . . . pleasant. Wet sand! There is wet sand cool against the soles of my bare feet. The rhythm of my breath calms. It matches tempo with the soft whoosh and hiss of waves lapping a beach, and the indigo space surrounding me recedes into familiar landscape. A line of tall white houses skirts the border of grassy plains a mile from shore, and there is a scattering of smooth boulders for the sea foam to froth upon. I can even see gulls circling above them, hunting for scraps. This is Saliel, the last home of Salomi Deya, exactly as I remember it, in perfect detail.

For the length of an excited heartbeat I think I am home. I think that I have woken from some terrible dream and that I will run to meet three friends on the beach to run and splash and laugh. But then I see the tower. The ominous hulking form of Keitus Vieta glaring down at me from high above, ready to come alive and step on me like a worm. I want to run from it, but I am still paralyzed, forced to look at him. He should not be here invading Salomi's life, invading mine, but worse still, the statue is Keitus Vieta no more. His form is changing, shifting to become one with the beach, turning to sand. My eyes are helplessly locked to his as the metamorphosis continues, but I am aware that
the sand is turning graphite black, becoming more animated,
keeping cohesion but writhing, as if each grain has a life of its own. And then I realize these are nanodrones in one of their earliest designs. These are the drones that Salomi's mother engineered, the ones that were reconfigured to destroy the community.

The nanodrone Vieta speaks. Words like rushing water boom from the mouth of the tower, hurting my ears. “It has been successful in finding us, but this is the first of its memories following algorithmic insertion. The information is inconsequential. Move to the next sequence.”

I struggle against my paralysis to no avail as a heaving
darkness swallows the tower and the beach. Again I am breathless, forced to watch as my surroundings change once more. Spots of shimmering light crackle into view like white ink splashing across black paper. It takes me a moment to realize I am at the center of a star field. I recognize this sky, but it is not one that has existed, or will exist again, for a very long time. There is the grumble of falling rock as mossy blocks of stone assemble all around. Claustrophobia comes with the oppression of a low ceiling in a gloomy dungeon. Whispers and shadows race around me to usher more stones rising through cracks in the floor, until it builds the familiar sight of a walled pool. Incense tingles in my nose to mask the smell of rotten flesh. I want to cover my mouth, but I cannot move.

I am back in the Chambers of Veneration, the place
of incarceration for Diabolis Evomere, but there are differences. The pool is a frothing, bubbling cauldron belching
chunks of viscous gore and broken bones, flooding the dungeon until a monstrous beast heaves its bulk over the lip to collapse sticky and quivering on the hard stone floor. There is no order to the limbs and organs, only the bristling discordant carnage of a body that should not be alive. The thing moans and gurgles, coughing up blood from a mouth that looks more like a tooth-infested gash. A nest of crooked hands breaks through its back, pushing upward, jerking and swaying like hungry chicks straining from their nest for food, until they branch outward to form a kind of hydra. Faces burst forth like infected polyps from the palm of each hand—people I recognize from Diabolis's life—Ninsuni, Kaliki, Phalana, Nitocris. They are all here. Kaliki, who could not speak in life, breaks his silence to utter words of explanation to the other heads. His voice is the same as the nanodrone Vieta's on the beach.

The Jagannath—or whatever this entity really is—is
showing me details from two of the lives I recently lived and verbalizing its understanding as it siphons the information
from my memories. Like the nonsense of a dream, the details are muddled and distorted, but I can feel it is sifting through the algorithm in my brain, groping, hunting for data and knowledge. This is why I was brought here. I am nothing more than a messenger—a package of information for the Jagannath.

It was only ever a fleeting consideration on my part that my will had been manipulated to follow a certain path. Now that the algorithm has served its purpose, it has taken me here to pass on what has been learned. Qod was suspicious. She suspected there was more to the algorithm than was revealed, but I was swept along, unable to resist its influence. But now I share in this entity's knowledge as it takes what it needs from me. So much becomes clear, revelations so profound I can think of nothing to which to compare them.

The universe—this plane of existence in which I have roamed for so very long—is a self-contained experiment.
No, much more than an experiment—it is like an incubator.
A place for time and physics and life to develop into something new, something so utterly alien I am not capable of grasping it. Life in all its forms, it seems, is not the end point. It is merely an ever-growing stream of increasing complexity, growing into what will eventually evolve into something recognizable to the Jagannath but not to us as we are now. This rift to which we have been summoned is like a womb. This—and many other rifts like it—is where life energy has flowed out and beyond into some unknown pocket of reality, where it must gestate until development is complete.

But something has gone terribly wrong.

It is our fault. Human nature caused a premature birth. Something deep inside us recognized the need to become something greater than we were, but we did not know it would happen naturally, and we created our own exit. So desperate to escape the heartbeat cycle of our universe, the Soul Consortium ripped its own way out, leaving the cosmos damaged like a torn mother. It was from this damage, the rift that we created in the Promethean Singularity, that the danger came. The merging life energy that some may prefer to describe as souls, the great gestalt of all human consciousness, was unwittingly drawn back through the rift to redress the imbalance. It was incomplete, immature, warped, and corrupted like a stillborn child—Keitus Vieta.

But the tragedy did not end there. This stillborn child, lost and filled with resentment, failing to understand its true purpose but also sensing the need to become something greater, was driven to fulfill its purpose the only way it knew how. Keitus Vieta set about collecting the life energy of dying humans, using it to create what he could not now become. He called it his daughter, expecting it to bring about the true birth that had been aborted. He would repair the damage, eventually consuming all of creation so that this plane of existence would be reborn into the image of the creators' original intent. But all he created was the agonized parody that called itself Diabolis Evomere.

“We have extracted enough from this memory,” says the Kaliki head. “Move to the next sequence. We must understand how we were prevented from repairing the damage.”

I sense deeper revelations to come, and the bricks of the dungeon crack and disintegrate, forced aside by tall slabs of concrete veined with mahogany beams, twisting and lengthening to form what I recognize to be Clifford Arken-Bright's laboratory. Electric power cables weave out through the beams, splintering the wood as they struggle through, and like leaves budding from a vine, objects from Arken-Bright's laboratory sprout from them. Keitus Vieta's blue jewel swells like a ripening fruit in the center of the lab, larger than its real counterpart, making the table creak with its weight. In the corner by the door, Professor Withering's hanged corpse sways in shadow, and I can faintly see his bulging eyes and parted lips, black and bloated. The corpse speaks to a convulsing shape curled in a fetal position on the floorboards: Edith Levaux.