2.03 - Whisper of Azertycus

[Transcript]Picked up a data lace from the Garden of Eve. Little known branch of the mythosphere along the linear Y rim of Apotheosis bleeding over to this side of reality. The lace is woven in a style I don’t recognize. Stranger still is Hamark doesn’t recognize it either. Thing was a part of an echo-capsule buried in an older part of the Garden. The Reapers of Eve were torching an old ilgar vine. The liana had grown so long and brambled it couldn’t be burned by ground approach. Had to use orbital bombardment to scour the plant away to make room for new vegetation. The torched biomass revealed something synthetic beneath the ashes. Called in an Oldanti archeologist and a few of the remaining Numeric Sages to come to figure out it was the echo-capsule. The ilgar vine was estimated at nearly 2 billion years old before they scorched it meaning the capsule is even older.Origin analysis by the Numeric Sages pointed to somewhere out past the Bor Gad Quadrant. Coordinates land off in the Heaven satellite galaxy outside Nadir. Reapers asked us to scope it out, bring the data lace home. Had to call in a favor with the Wrot Majar Absolute for a cognitive displace to get to the coordinates in Heaven. No fulcrum diodes I knew of going out that way. The displacement is rough. Zery, me, and Hamark all black out. Ship alarm jogs us out of it. Two standard cycles have passed. We’re in a white dwarf system on a collision course with a small, dark world. No bio signs and all EM readings are silent. But even from close orbit the entire planet’s surface has been terraformed into transistor pathways.We land on the barren world. The system’s start blew out into a red giant some half a million years ago from the scans but Hamark says that wasn’t what wiped everyone out here. There are no signs of disaster, turmoil—no calamity. Hamark tries to crack the data lace for some clues but its mostly corrupted after however many eons beneath the Garden of Eve.During a sleep cycle later I hear scratching from outside of my sarcophagus. I peer from under the lid. Ruthin is coiled up around the echo-capsule, her long spindles tinkering with the data lace when she manages to eke out a single audio playback: “Breach Azertycus or feel the Fourth Coming.” I lay awake for the rest of the cycle.