1.09-Visions of Voidlance

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Friend of mine got lost once a couple centuries back. Real lost. Tried to fire up an old set of seraphim wings using a second hand drive core. Previous owner had never used it. No one in recent memory had. No way of knowing the thing was made with old Fervor Engine parts. One flick of the switch, and my friend was gone.Hamark knew an old Numeric Sage on Drekrit 4 who still practiced the old ways. An ancient, crusted mass of ghost diagnostic nodes barnacled over with cerebral husks. Dormant, Hamark jacked me in with Zery keeping watch. Everything went still. I could still see, but slowly with the thrum of the Sage booting a film came over my eyes.There was no sky. Lattices spanning hundreds of kilometers long wrapped around tri-helix braids of blessed silicon. Everything was the same size. Distance and perspective didn’t exist here. Vision used every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The world was orthographic. Precise. Symmetrical. Perfect.A mnemonic cherub flew by, made entirely of data. Below me other anima stirred. Digital angels, encrypted martyrs, the whole hierarchy of the Index. I was carried away from where I entered. The emanations grew more intense. Flocks of sanctified minor errata followed me as I was borne towards the center.We passed embedded spheres, geometries made of compressed information. Everywhere were sequences. Matter was laid bare, cracked open to reveal the data underneath. When I spoke, the words unfolded into fractals, infinitely detailed, deep, and winding.Lines converged, parallels crossed. The world narrowed. Folding, compressing, we went down. I fell. And then apart. Iterations exploded outward. A locked grid of myself repeating over and over only to rush back together in a void full of noise.And then, there they were. My friend dispersed as an elliptical mirage. Round and round. I grabbed them. A moment, and then we were torn backwards, up through the void, the fold, the sequences, the errata, the symmetry, all of it. We were back with the Hamark at the Sage terminal.Stories about the Voidlance Index are rare. Many electronic folk don’t seem keen to share their near-death experiences, and the glimpse they had like I did of what lies beyond for them.