B3 Chapter 19 - Network

Syl and Bianca stayed on careful lookout as they descended. Given the information they had gathered from their brief stay on this exoplanet, they were reasonably certain that there as a risk of the machines making an attempt on their lives here in an effort to gain proper access to the offensive and utility spells both of them had.

While they did not have confirmation on how people were being killed and restored in the form of a machine construct, both of them remembered the breakouts of “lunar madness,” a freak plague associated with less successful fragment defenses. Common sense told both magicians that it was not some magical disease that had naturally just been sitting on the moon for a century before regolith hit Earth but instead the work of the artificial intelligence.

Syl was still unsure whether they were of one hivemind or of a thousand smaller ones working in concert, but Zero’s words made him think the latter was truer. It looked like anyone who died and had their bodies either preserved or replicated by the machines were added into their database and operated essentially as human-shaped puppet templates for them to work through.

Their descent to the surface was smooth. There had been a thin atmosphere before, but most of it had been ejected into space now or converted into more exotic materials that had then sunk into the exoplanet’s surface and melted it away. Therefore, there was very little to make their controlled fall rougher other than dust, which they blasted out of the way.

There were zero intact structures remaining on the surface planet, a fact that was owed entirely to Syl and Bianca’s efforts. Even most of the subterranean ones had been fully eliminated, reduced to little but unusable flux-drained rubble.

There was mantle under the broken crust, and deeper beneath that was a superheated core that had been exposed to the depths of space. Temperatures skyrocketed as they descended past fractured land, past layers of molten rock that itself had been disintegrated, detonated, and otherwise destroyed in a dozen different ways. By the time they came to a stop, they had to be a good two or three hundred kilometers “underground”, the gravitational pull noticeably increasing.  

The temperature was somewhere in the thousands of degrees, though it was dropping sharply now that it was radiating out from solid into gas into vacuum. They were far enough down now that constant collapse was occuring above them instead of below, molten rock and lava bleeding down on top of them. Both Zero and Bianca had active spells to prevent them all from burning to a crisp, though they didn’t need to protect themselves from debris thanks to the hard bubble of rare metal alloy creating a shell out of the last few thousand tons of machine colonization. That had massed nearly half the planet before Syl and Bianca had arrived. One part out of a million survived, if that.

“Most of the remaining functioning material is buried this deep,” Zero said, his body growing more defined by the moment. “As is the last functioning Gate creation device.”

“Perhaps you should explain yourself before you attempt to create a Gate,” Syl said. “If you try to make one now, I will destroy the rest of this planet with you on it.”

“You will not,” Zero said with utmost confidence. “You will strand yourself here if you do.”

“Will I?” Syl asked. “You have very little material left. I have destroyed enough of you to be sure of that. You’re not going to risk not being able to send any information of the spells you’ve seen out of me. You might have data of my old spell usage, but nothing like this. Nothing where any sensors might have survived to see it. Not when I’ve had so much space to improvise and improve.”

“Model him,” Bianca suggested. “He could be bluffing. Can you take that risk?”

Bianca was good with people. Syl was good with machines. Dealing with this entity was somewhere in between the two of those. While that meant new problems and powerful enemies, it also meant each of them could utilize their strengths to the maximum.”

“Then I’ll explain,” Zero said, shrugging as if it was no big deal. “A visual demonstration may assist.”

He held his hand out, and a network of lights formed over it. One of them was larger, serving as a core nodule that the rest of it expanded out from, creating a web. A few of the child nodules had webs of their own extending from them.

“Each of these lines you see is a Gate,” Zero explained. He pointed at the larger sub-nodes with further connections extending from them. “These are Towers.”

“Which would make the remaining nodes other worlds,” Syl deduced. “Exoplanets like this one.”

“Correct. These are worlds that have been confirmed to be accessible through tactical application of Gate openings.”

“Ones that you opened paths to.”

“Also correct.” Zero manipulated something in the network of lights, illuminating a small, far-off node. “This is Kepler-138b. In my system, this is type 3 planet 8.”

“You’re intentionally being obscure with your classifications to bait engagement from us,” Bianca said.

“Is it working?”

“We have an interest in how to open Gates and return home. If giving context assists with that, then explain.”

Zero shrugged. “You can’t fault me for acquiring more data. I will continue, then.

“Broadly, I classify worlds into three types. Inhabited by higher life forms, inhabited by lower life, and uninhabited. This is the third. While worse for colonization, they provide resources, flux, and space.”

The magician-construct gestured again, sending lights propagating throughout the network. The bulk of them turned green, with another quarter or so becoming yellow, including the core node. The remaining roughly twenty percent was red, including Kepler-138b.

“You’re claiming existence of alien life,” Syl said. “Not only that, but they’re frequent enough that sixty percent of the planets you Gate into are inhabited by life forms that are… higher than Earth’s?”

It wasn’t that far of a stretch to imagine that alien life existed. Though humanity had not looked to the stars in many years, the existence of Gates and Towers putting out both perversions of existing Earth animals and creatures that simply did not exist in baseline reality had made the idea of alien life, intelligent or not, more of an inevitability than a theory.

It was the rest of the context that flipped Syl’s sensibilities. While he knew that what was on Earth couldn’t be the limit of what magic had to offer, this was something else. It was equally as possible that this was a play to convince them of a falsehood, but Syl couldn’t tell why.

“I wouldn’t believe my own words if I were in your shoes,” Zero said. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

“No,” Syl said. “The second you open a Gate without intent to send us back, you lose everything left on this planet.”

Their leverage lay in data. Once they gave that up, their chances of making it back dropped drastically.

Zero shrugged. “Suit yourself. I have every intention of sending you back. I have what I need, and I’m sure you’ve learned some things yourself.”

“No thanks to you.”

“What use is handing someone the answers? The process is a part of learning.” The display in front of Zero changed as he spoke, zooming in on one of the green nodes. “You may have noticed that Earth is indicated as a planet with lower forms of life on it. This was not a mistake.”

The display in front of the original Sinner finished morphing, establishing itself into a holoscreen of sorts.

“This would be a great deal more convincing if I could show you reality,” Zero said, “but this will have to do.”

It was unnerving how human Zero sounded. Syl found himself continually separating the man in front of him from the mass of artificial material that had established itself through the exoplanet and infected the entirety of the moon, but they were self-admittedly one and the same.

In that capacity, however, Syl saw no reason for the machine to lie to him. There was no world in which it would convince him to surrender himself, and if it had access to Zero’s memories, it should have known that without a doubt.

The image on the display resolved into a scene on an obviously alien planet taken from the perspective of someone a few kilometers in the air. Just like they had on Earth, massive piles of the AI shot downwards, seeking to replicate themselves with any matter they could find. Rather than just devouring, they also cast magic as they fell, casting a shadow over a very vertically built city with a kind of angular architecture Syl had never seen before.

Quadrupedal lifeforms that looked more like a Gate creature than intelligent life streamed out of the buildings, many of them taking flight without issue. It wasn’t technology that drove them but apparently their own flux, keeping them afloat the same way Syl and the other Sinners managed their own.

A group of them clad in different colors than the others were at the forefront of what appeared to be a counteroffensive. They assembled in the air, linking themselves through a visible flux bond.

No FCDs were visible, but their magic came cleanly anyway. A wide-range effect emerged from them, far wider than anything even Syl had managed. It covered not only the city underneath them but also a significant radius wider than that, spell patterns covering the entire visible range of the scene.

It pushed out towards the falling machines. It was no spell Syl recognized, and a visual inspection alone with no analysis of the flux wasn’t enough for him to imitate it, though he could guess at what it was meant to do.

Where the machines met the edge of the spell, they froze, their functions failing. It hit the “viewer,” and the perspective changed, zooming out substantially.

That one section hadn’t been the only vector through which the machines had been attacking. There were Gates on isolated meteors all across the planet, each of them depositing millions if not billions of tons of grey goo weapons, all more advanced than the ones the Aurian king had deployed in the capital the day the war had started, and everywhere they were met with different spells, magic beyond the context of what Syl had experienced. 

He’d cast city-spanning spells before, yes—every paragon had. These went beyond that, though. A few handful of magicians were casting spells that spanned an entire planet. While there wasn’t a proper moonfall here, not like the one that was still midway through hitting the Earth, the machines were putting a full effort into it.

At every corner, they were stymied. Tendrils the size of continents came apart in fragments, every trace of them eradicated in instants. Soon enough, Gates started vanishing too. Not long after that, the scene froze.

“This is a type 1 planet,” Zero said. “They have context for magic that goes substantially beyond that of a planet that has yet to extend to the stars.”

“You’re losing,” Bianca realized. “You’re trying to expand your reach and you’re losing.”

“There is still progress to be made,” Zero agreed.

“Progress is saying something,” Syl said. “That wasn’t close.”

His mind whirred with the new information. Though he had to consider potential inaccuracies and dishonesties in the video, he took enough of it as a statement of the truth of what the machines wanted.

When the machines had become a problem on Earth the first time, it was because they had determined that their prime directive was to maximize the amount of control they had over territory and magic. If they were continuing that, it only made sense that they were going to spread to the stars.

“Then this is why you want Earth magicians,” Bianca surmised. “You lack the power to contest them.”

“The data,” Zero corrected. “Type 2 and 3 planets are resource abundant enough to provide enough flux for our purposes. What I need is data. Spell processes that can be combined and modified, lines of thinking that can take magic beyond paragon-class.”

“You haven’t gotten to the part where this is relevant to getting us home,” Syl said.

“Gates are transitory spaces,” Zero said, practically ignoring Syl’s words. “With the correct targeting, they can be opened into an area between planets. Compatibility is rare between multiple worlds, but Towers are an exception.”

That was interesting. Actually, everything he’d said was interesting, but Syl wasn’t going to admit that.

There were more worlds out there. Based on the magic the AI was using, it hadn’t managed to glean nearly as much data as it wanted, but it was going to learn eventually.

It wanted to propagate its being to the stars, and it needed humans first.

“This is context for what I want from you,” Zero said. “I do not expect you to join me. I do, however—“

“I don’t care,” Syl said. “Open the portal. You’ll get your data. You’re going to try to influence events to get your way no matter what you tell me. Your words will not change your actions.”

“As you say, then,” Zero said, the bottom parts of his body dematerializing.

The remaining machines began to hum, flux patterns forming as they began the process that would drill a hole through reality.

Paragon-class spell: Chronos.

This spell had been designed for two people. Syl had cast it with one before, but he had more magic and his partner right here with him.

Time slowed to a crawl, and the machines had no recourse. They had sensed him cast the spell last time, he was sure, but they hadn’t captured the data to counter it or use it themselves. It was the nature of Pride’s casting.

Bianca stepped to his side, more solid-looking than the slightly out-of-focus fuzziness of the rest of the world around them. “I thought he was going to never stop talking. How true do you think that was?”

“Enough,” Syl said.

“I agree. Shall we get to work, then?”

Pride nodded, hovering closer to the slowly demanifesting form of the magician once known as Zero.

You made a mistake, telling me this, he signed. The machine’s response time wasn’t fast enough to reply, but he was sure it would be able to decode what he told it eventually.

These worlds aren’t yours to conquer.