We’re entering the final chapters of this arc. For those of you that have been following since the beginning, thank you, and I hope that I can deliver you a satisfying conclusion. For anyone just now discovering the crazy galaxy I’m creating, I recommend you start with chapter one.
The Story Thus Far
The wentletrap spiral of the data storage facility caught the light of the setting sun as the emerald sea roiled at its base.
A crablike creature, distant cousin of the much larger and more intelligent Belichorians, made its way up a jagged rock only to be struck from its perch by a cresting wave. Moments later it reappeared, stubbornly mounting the same pitted and algae spackled granite spike, only to be dragged once more into the verdant churn. It succeeded on its third attempt, reaching the highest point and digging its claws in firmly, allowing its delicate feelers to catch the salty breeze. Its whole body began to sway with the rhythm of the waves as more of its kin emerged from the green depths, slowly covering the embankment with an undulating melee of courtship.
Suddenly, the water began to churn as huge bubbles surfaced a few meters from the rocky shore. Crustaceans scattered in every direction as an arachnoid form dragged itself from the waves, leaving a trail of translucent blue jelly in its wake. Within seconds, the rocks were deserted again, save that alien mechanical form with a ragged hole in its side. Like its tiny brethren had, it seemed to taste the air with its metal antennae, perhaps searching for a faint electromagnetic signal. Then it stiffened and its coloration shifted. To a distant observer, it would have vanished entirely, so well did it match the colors and textures of its surroundings. Then, humming slightly, it tore off across the narrow spit of land, heading for the spaceport.
Dreln considered himself an open-minded person; far from perfect, not immune to bias, but never bigoted. He believed every living thing had a right to exist, and that variety in form and perspective was what gave life value. And yet, the more he learned about the Eupanoma of Frond V, the less he liked them, and the more deeply wrong their world felt. The journey across two spiral arms had taken over a month—the Andomeites devoted their resources to their research outfits, not fast ships—and he had used that time to consume as much of the research material he’d been provided with as possible, having recently learned the hard way that visiting a new planet without making at least a token effort to understand its people could be a costly mistake.
In a way, the Eupanoma were all-too-human: bilaterally symmetrical endothermic vertebrates (albeit with a chitinous exterior) with deep and abiding passions for art, science, religion, and most of all, war. Historical records that had already been collated and databased for perusal off-world were fragmentary at best, but still painted a bloody picture of the last few thousand years of Eupanoma history: four very different cultures had risen to primacy, each one dominating or absorbing smaller and more diffuse groups that shared its geographic region. Massive mountain ranges kept these four civilizations mostly independent, with little interaction or cross-pollination of ideas, until they began developing powered flight and radio communications technology.
As far as Dreln could tell, the key difference between the four cultures was metaphysical: one was monotheistic, another polytheistic, and the other two pantheist. Once they were each advanced enough to begin competing for the same resources on the global stage, the planet quickly became engulfed in endless war that dwarfed all prior regional conflicts in scale, technological sophistication, and brutality. While each government made claims to respecting the lives of non-combatants, the record showed just how false this assertion was: civilian populations were routinely caught up in territorial spats, with entire cities being levelled by atomic weaponry.
A few local decades after the start of their modern era, a cult called the Body of God rose to prominence within one of the two beleaguered pantheist cultures—a fanatical response to miserable living conditions imposed by the dominant groups. While records of their inevitable coup were conspicuously absent from the materials Dreln had been provided, their control quickly became total. In anticipation of the birth of their prophesized “Body of God”, they dissolved the government and usurped the church, then turned the tide of battle with a barbaric wave of suicidal terrorism. Those that survived were indoctrinated. Those that resisted indoctrination were tortured to death.
Within a few generations, the Body of God was Frond V’s dominant religion, and its church was the singular legislative authority. All that had been required for the species to be fully united as a single monolithic culture was the coming of their chosen one, an event that had apparently occurred recently, in the last few galactic minutes. Strangely, while the Eupanoma were not particularly long-lived, the histories seemed to indicate that this ‘physical manifestation of the will of the cosmos’ was still alive and in control of his planetary empire…
Clade Ruffeline wasn’t dead, but wished he was. The acidic waters of Belichore’s ocean ate away at his cytoplasm everywhere they contacted it—he was being burned alive by liquid fire. The only thing that had delayed his inevitable disintegration had been a reflexive clutching of his cilia that preserved a thin protective coating of nutrient matrix around his body. But then there was the pressure; he had been expelled from his s-skin by the differential moments after it was punctured by what he presumed to be some kind of energy weapon. It barely mattered. The wound it had given him was already healing, but he wouldn’t last long without a proper balance of chemicals and sufficient external pressure.
Weakly, tentatively, so as not to dislodge the nutrient jelly shielding him from his poison environment, he swam downwards through the partially collapsed and completely flooded spiral tower, seeking a depth where the weight of the fluid above would be sufficient to mimic that of his distant, watery home world. He contorted himself to fit between a chunk of ceiling and a toppled row of shelves, their diamond leaf contents scattered haphazardly across the rubble, glinting in the fading bioluminescence of his nutrient matrix.
He had been betrayed—of that he was sure—perhaps by the very ones that had set him on this assignment in this first place. Quite a convenient ‘accident’ for him to have, on the cusp of uncovering a galaxy-spanning conspiracy. He didn’t quite have the whole thing figured out yet, and the evidence he’d sent back to his ship aboard his s-skin was far from damning, but it hardly mattered at this point. He was going to die soon, and he didn’t much care what became of the galaxy after he left it. It was an intriguing puzzle, one that had granted him power and freedom far beyond the reach of most galactic denizens, and his only regret was that he wouldn’t be there personally when the conspirators were taken into custody.
Deeper and deeper he swam—how far down into the ocean did this spiral go? He’d been blasted a good distance by the first torrent of seawater, yet he still felt as if he were about to explode. Melted and shredded simultaneously, he thought to himself, it’s almost comical. The sort of thing I’d threaten suspects with when they wouldn’t comply…The outward pressure he felt was finally starting to lessen, but he was losing more and more matrix by the second and the ocean water was dissolving his cilia, accelerating the process. As consciousness began to slip away, he pressed himself into a crevasse and sealed himself in with the remainder of his jelly, creating a water seal. The pressure felt about right, so now all he had to worry about was asphyxiating and starving…
Clade Ruffeline slowly drifted into unconsciousness, ambivalent as to whether he was awaiting rescue or death.
Life on Frond V was difficult to adjust to. Its gravity was slightly higher than Earth’s, which left Dreln feeling extra sore and tired at the end of each day, and it didn’t help that those were only 18 Earth-hours long—not at first, anyway. His sleep schedule was chaotic for the first few weeks at the Andomeite hermitage, but at least he was free to conduct his delving on his own timetable, taking his meals and naps when he chose. He came and went as he pleased, rarely leaving the grounds, and preferring to stay indoors where the gas mixture was far less sulfurous.
There were about forty other scholars in the institution, a moderately large, castle-like stone building that was perched between two mountain peaks at the end of a long road littered with switchbacks. In a certain sense, this was Frond V’s center: twin mountain ranges encircled the planet and met in the equatorial region where the Andomeites had negotiated to establish their planetside base of operations. The four geographic regions, formerly home to unique civilizations, were all only minutes away via shuttle but mostly identical in Frond V’s modern era: the baroque architecture of antiquity had been almost entirely demolished to make way for the Body of God’s gothic brutalism and art-deco sculptures of idealized Eupanoma bodies.
This cultural genocide was at the heart of Dreln’s task on Frond V: a few defectors had escaped the Body of God’s purge and made supplications to the Andomeite council, begging them to preserve their heritage before it could be completely erased by the heretics. Months of careful negotiations had followed, in which the Andomeites had promised resources and secrecy in exchange for access to the dwindling body of Eupanoma historical knowledge. The priests of the Body of God cared little if outsiders accessed their records, so long as their followers couldn’t, and their empire was resource-hungry enough to accept any and all foreign-aid. They wouldn’t admit it, but it was obvious they were assembling a warp-fleet.
Dreln’s work consisted mostly of delving into data ampules brought to him by the hermitage’s field agents. They risked life and limb daily, negotiating without GC backing for access to archives, libraries, museums, vaults, and private collections. Several had already been killed—quite violently—but this was par for the course, he was told; species that didn’t participate in the Galactic Commonwealth couldn’t be held to the same standards as those that did, so the Andomeites dealt with the Eupanoma at their own peril.
Despite the violence and chaos that had gripped the world for centuries, the data Dreln was given was mostly textual and banal—government records, historical works, scientific research, and the like—and he was amazed at how liberating it was to delve without fear of what he might stumble across. He’d always believed himself to have been toughened by the horrors of Earth’s old net, but this fresh perspective finally helped him realize how fragile the trauma had made him. Unable to process the violence and sadism he’d witnessed daily, he’d slowly cut friends and family from his life, become a recluse…now, likely the only human on this strange, dark world, he rediscovered himself. He quickly befriended the two other delvers on-site—twin cephalopods called Paxlin and Monda—as well as the abbot, a dour but good-natured reptilian called Schanderkreit.
“The work we do here is among the most important in all the Andomeite Order,” Kreit (as everyone respectfully addressed him) had told Dreln on their first meeting. “It is rare for aggressive, post-warp civilizations to evade Galactic Commonwealth attention for so long as the Eupanoma have, and we must now play catch-up.”
“I thought the work we did was apolitical?” Dreln asked quizzically, and Kreit nodded solemnly.
“Indeed so. There are, however, many ways that the knowledge we gather seeps into the collective over generations even without direct data transfers, so what is today private record is common knowledge tomorrow. The GC is like an organism, Dreln, and we are one of its sense-organs: the information we gather begins compartmentalized, but is ultimately embodied by the whole.”
Dreln was forced to accept that he was too literal-minded to grasp so subtle a concept, but this did little to inhibit his work. Learning the new data structures and delving interface was an engrossing challenge, and he was fascinated by the storage medium itself: the Eupanoma had extremely advanced genetics technology, and had opted at some point in their history to embrace organic compounds as a data retention method. The crystalline ampules that arrived daily held exabytes of data, stored on coiled, meters-long molecules. When added to the specialized feed tank of a delving apparatus, the billions of nanomachines within would attach themselves to it variously along its length and communicate their readings wirelessly with the central computer, where the data could be visualized according to the delver’s preference.
In a symbolic final abandonment of his old life, he gave up being ‘The Builder’ and became ‘The Puzzlemaker’, calibrating his rig to display the data variously as tavern puzzles and n-dimensional Rubik’s cubes. Within weeks, he became obsessed with a particular puzzle, one Paxlin and Monda advised him not to waste time on:
“We tried to crack that ampule for months,” they said in unison (as they always spoke, being synchronized twins), “it does not follow the logic of anything else we have encountered on this planet. It is unreadable.”
Dreln was determined, however, and eager to prove himself as the latest addition to the team. The densely-looped, multi-threaded knot hung in his dreams as clearly as it was suspended in VR, taunting him even in sleep. If only he could find the proper way to fold it, the right viewing angle…
Clade awoke slowly, and to his great surprise and relief found that the burning had stopped. He was a few thousand cilia shy of whole, but they would regrow soon enough, and more importantly he was back in a cozy chemical and pressure equilibrium: he was in his s-skin, drifting through the dark depths of the flooded tower. A quick check of the skin’s logs revealed what had happened: the onboard AI had judged him to have decent odds of survival, so after completing his request to return the data he’d gathered to the ship and repairing itself, it had autonomously elected to return to his last known location and attempt a rescue, using its biosensors to locate Clade wedged into an empty shelf in those cold, dark depths.
Carefully, almost lovingly, the machine had extracted Clade’s fragile, unconscious form and drawn him into itself through the emergency lock, then gone dormant to await his next orders. Though the thing was just that—a machine—no more capable of thought or feeling than the diamond leaves that littered the ruined interior of the tower, Clade felt an intense kinship to it. It was confining, even claustrophobic at times, yet when he allowed himself to forget what and where he was, it became an extension of his delicate form. Mere armor it was, yet it had saved his life, and gave him the power and agency he craved. It was apart from him and a part of him. An extension of his will into the physical world, the action implied by thought.
Reconfiguring the s-skin around him into a sinuous, aquatic form, Clade located the hole in the tower with his suite of sensors and slipped out into open ocean, tacking towards the spaceport. He would have to steal a ship: those that had betrayed him likely thought him dead, and he didn’t wish to dispel them of that misconception. The data he’d gathered was already being broadcast to his network of trusted contacts via his dead man’s switch, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough on its own. He had to get to the heart of this conspiracy himself, off the books, and he knew exactly where he needed to go next.
A few hours later, a small Belichorian shuttle lifted off from the equatorial region, ascending towards the spaceport, inexplicably a few dozen kilograms overweight. Thirty minutes after it docked, a small warpcraft made an unscheduled departure on a trajectory out along the galactic arm. Three hours after that, the security system of the station was rebooted and a gap was found in surveillance data, along with the unconscious body of the guard that had been responsible for the missing craft. It was also around this time that, unbeknownst to the administrators of the Belichore spaceport, the stolen ship dropped out of warp, made a course-correction, then rebubbled and began barreling towards the Erileytha system at top speed.