Grave Orbits

[Transcript]Power. I need more power. The accretion disk could work. I would need to repair the solar cells. I don’t have enough energy left for that and a record given the rate of decay I’m currently experiencing.The record is more important. They need to know what happened. What could have been.It started when all the outposts began going dark along the Harbinger Void. The Sages pulled all deployed Emulants from the frontier, the elder terminal combing back through the records. The Networks skepticism couldn’t stem the tide of panic sweeping over both galaxies towards our small Heaven on the parameter.Then, Nalgani technopaths arrived on our doorstep. They dragged an Emulant from their hold. Their data lace was inoperable. Several technicians performed a cyopsy on the cerebral husk remains. The results didn’t make sense. How could the senescence decay cycle already be on its second revolution? A Sage and a single node from the Network combed through the lateral storage archives. They found a-gah!-they found one from almost a billion years ago. From when the Third Coming had swept through Nadir. The signs were almost identical. It was happening again.We had approximately 10,000 years to prepare before the encrypted Martyrs reached us out in our dwarf galaxy. All dyson projects were reallocated. Energy consolidation and matter particle manufacturing were given extensive resources. Scouting efforts searched everywhere for a place to hide. While they searched, we built. And built. And built. I remember my sense of awe at the sheer number of constructor forms. The generation ship-city, our salvation: Azertycus. But then it all went wrong.An Encrypted Martyr found us. Kill on site, but they managed to plant some kind of plague or curse before they were disintegrated. Cancerous data started spreading around the ground-zero point of the Martyr’s death. Quarantines were in place and holding, but if one Martyr found us, it wouldn’t be long before more showed up.The scouts had come back with some success. A small black hole within Paladin’s Burst. We could hide in the time dilation field until the Fourth Coming ended. No other sentient life there other than some burgeoning and primitive fungal organism. The Network didn’t wait for a final report. It was time to move.Preparations to launch Azertycus were rushed. Mobs of plague stricken Emulants tried to force their way into the flying city-ship. I remember the horror, watching the throngs of wave-form tumor ridden bodies scrambling over each other to come with us. The Sentinels obliterated them without hesitation.It was almost humanoid how things went wrong. The black hole was larger than we expected. Data carcinogens began cropping up inside Azertycus. Between the adjustments needed to keep the city-ship from falling into the event horizon and the Sentinels increasingly frantic efforts to quell the blighted portion of the population, an error was inevitable.I was on a patrol when I saw the tumors. Not on an Emulant. But on Azertycus’s drive core. The plague was a part of the city now. Engineers did their best, but unrest outside the control nexus spelled our doom. Crowds of the afflicted stormed the central hub, either out of a pursuit of fair treatment or the increasingly addled state of their minds. It could have been both.A critical course correction for the ship failed to process during the chaos. Azertycus lilted towards the black hole. Then it was too late. Billions of us rushed to the escape shuttles. Maybe a hundred of us made it.I don’t have long. There’s a wave-form tumor on my left-axial limb. The power drain rate is…terminal. A parsec away, I can see it still, our beautiful city, our once salvation slowly churning to ash under the beating of the accretion disk. The remains plummet into the event horizon, fading from view as time warps them beyond any recognition. It couldn’t have been a marvel. It could have been-been-been-been…

[Transcript]The Fridjardin Lightway is a cluster of systems about 3 lightyears long. Too short to bother using an Odo Lens or metaphysic diaphragm. Neutrino substrates are frowned on there by the residents. Never met one myself. They’re said to be like comets, long flowing trains of ice and metal dust in their wake.The Lightway is dense with almost 4,000 systems packed into such a small stretch of the Continuum. But for how crowded it can be, it's quiet. A gentle wash flows over the traditional coms. I’m taking a Lamorae to the other side to meet family of theirs. We lay out the hours reclining in the pilot and co-pilot seats, watching the glow of greater things drift by outside.Lamorae says they're nervous about the meeting. Lamorae hatch from egg sacks that grow along the length of a central placental vine. I don’t pretend to understand how that works, but from what I’ve gathered, those closest to them when they emerge are a bit like siblings. My Lamorae friend hadn’t seen theirs in some time. Got stranded in the Lecodran Quadrant during the Cymolgyt Civil War. Made travel difficult and first chance they got they wanted to head back home.I said it would likely be fine. Family should understand if something you can’t control’s got you hold up some place. The Lamorae rubbed their mandibles together. Sure, but you never know. I shrugged. That’s all you can hope for.What about you? The Lamorae asked. Family? Outside at this speed, the accretion disk of a black hole whizzes by. I watch it fade into the distance, remembering how time gets all mangled once you get close to the event horizon. You lose track of how fast things are going. You get separated, cut off even if you didn’t plan it. But gravity, like time, moves us whether we want it or not.We get to the end of the Lightway. Lamorae’s sibling comes out to meet them. They’ve got rows of faded blue baleen instead of the red of my passenger had. They say goodbye and I watch them go, two people together in the whole universe. I look back at the rich stretch of stars in the Fridjardin. I think about how long I’ve been doing this. How long I’ve done it by myself. And I don’t know if I want to keep doing it that way anymore.

[Transcript]Fellwhim Commune got wind of us finishing a job over in the Eadron Quadrant. . That abbot I gave a ride to way back when must have told them an abomination was loose in the Continuum. Not like I’m the only one.Hyperskiff drifters come blasting out of faster than light travel, their neutrino substrates hot on the scopes. Hamark takes co-pilot and Zery takes point on the reverse thermal accelerators on the back of the ship. Ruthin starts running in circles in the hold around her chrysalis, but no time to calm her down. The first trio of Hyperskiffs come in from linear Y fast and I have to hammer a stilted command into the console to duck the ship into a roll.Hamark gets fully integrated and I give him the stick. The Commune drifters open fire with Weak Force repeaters. One hit of those and the vitro-plastic steel will spontaneously alpha-decay under the strain.  We tuck into the Spectrum Nebula and that mistake hits us like a wall as a blistering scalpel of psychic energy slams into us. Ruthin is going more frantic but not time to worry about that. The Avantis Commune taught me a few things about cognitive duals and I managed to deflect the worst but, Shoals be damned, they must have an abbot or Creed Inquisitor on one of those hyperskiffs.Hamark and Zery are feeling it, too. Right up until Ruthin stops panicking and then goes stock still. The psychic pressure of the attack vanishes but the drifter’s hail fire from behind doesn’t let up. It’s touch and go. A few scrapes from the repeaters but no hull breaches. Hamark’s busy with flying and I start plotting coordinates. Can’t get our celestial bearings in the nebula so I settle for the metaphysic diagram. I try a nerve request but get no response. Try again, but nothing. Hamark throws us into another roll and I tumble from the cockpit to trouble shoot. Down and towards the back where the vitro-plastic steel flowers cobalt-blue veins. The thrum cage beats irregularly. The organic and elemental vault where the diaphragm breaths is soaked in blood, a hemorrhage somewhere from one of the repeater shots.There’s no time for a better plan. I cut along one of my dorsal arms, pushing my fist into the thrum cage membrane. I feel it latch on, the cobalt rich blood inculcate into my body and my own vitality bleeds into it. The diaphragm gets more stable but I start seeing dark circles. I scream for Hamark to hit the nerve request one last time.

[Transcript]Zery’s more familiar with Morobian customs and rites than Hamark, Ruthin, or myself. Though, given Ruthin’s fallen back into hypernation, that ain’t sayin’ much. Zery says the Morobians are an adventurous type, brave, and courageous and all that. The one in the cargo hold is rechecking that suit of theirs for the fortieth time. Morobian anatomy is mainly crystalized exodermis shielding the botanical membranes that make up their guts. I notice their suit ain’t got any slots for their wings. Gossamare things. Two sets that can beat faster than Pojket Jet Piston. Yep, no wing slots, but they do have a CO2 canister.Tedriskeer is half way out into the Drelneigh Quadrant. Bodaclorian Xenogeologists reckon its dune covered surface is from the aggressive winds and the merciless meteorite bombardment it gets on the other side of its star. I release the metaphysic diaphragm and enter atmo above Tediskeer. You can see the vortexes sand from here. Beyond the wind and astroids, Tediskeer is dangerous for another reason. Those xenogeologists still aren’t sure why but something deep in the planet vibrates. The whole surface shifts and undulates to the rhythm, the sand melts into currents from the oscillations.30 meters from the shifting sands, our Morobian pal hooks their safety line into the fuselage with one hand, checks their CO2 with their other, finally tightening their equipment belt with the third. They raise a hand in a fist: go time.Cargo bay hatch drops. Morobian doesn’t even look, just leaps, the sitrisine cable scratching as it reels out. Hamark’s colony synthesizes a telescopic eye. Through it we all watch as our friend makes the planet fall. And then dives into the sands.The cable reels out fast. Too fast. The spindle thins aggressively. We wait. Then…it catches. Moments pass. And all at once the ground below our hover gives way, emptying into a massive concave bowl. At the center is our friend atop some construct. At it’s center is a massive tangle of what look like feathers vibrating to beat back the sands.We reel in the Morobian. As they stumble back on board and we put par secs between us and Tedriskeer, I see our friend clutching something. A small statue. Humanoid. Child-like. A figure encased in volcanic tephra.

[Transcript]The Methagor Dwarf Galaxy lies about 650,000 light years up linear-y from Apotheosis. Dexikai home world, Dexes, is on the far rim. Zery managed to sweet talk us a job from the Termescash Conclave. They’re trying to establish a new fulcrum diode that goes out beyond the Kedder Void, beyond the Fubrosis Supercluster. The job would take us further away from home than I’ve ever been.We stocked provisions, I sent some final messages to Tod’rish Scar and a few other friends. Hamark left some data packets for his Orware family and Zery wrote a synth entry to her mother. She was sad she might never see the weavers on Hakelm Adi again. But a job’s a job.Termescash Conclave gave us an antique Odo lens. The Seraphim cornea they sculpted it from still had the nictitating membrane over the iris. The antique lens would let us jump straight into the Kedder Void for the survey work. Tasks were simple enough. Take their measurements, collect density data from the void, investigate and dwarf galaxies or other celestial bodies. And then come back. I dipped my hand into Hamark’s micro-colony, Zery’s silken fingers giving my other a squeeze before I set the lens telemetry. Way. Way out there. Into the dark we went.We track our orientation with precision. Most reference Em waves are too redshifted to be of any use to get back otherwise. It’s empty. Blank. A black, velvet sweep of nothingness in all directions for 436 million lightyears. We hurry to get the job done, eager to return to the rest of the Continuum where there’s life, light, and an assurance you are not utterly isolated from the rest of the universe.We’re wrapping the last of the density survey data when Hamark sees something on the scopes. It’s thin maybe no more than 6-10 centimeters wide. But it is long, stretching well beyond sensor or psychic range and off into the null vacuum nothingness. A job’s a job. So we follow it deeper into the void.It goes on and on. Hamark takes exact telemetry notes each time we use the lens to follow this surreal filament deeper into the darkness. At one point he notes it's almost 200 million light years long. And still it stretches before us. We pause, closing in on the strand to get a better look, giving up trying to find the end. Up close it’s a string of nanoscopic beads chained together with the strangest data lacing I’ve ever seen. And there’s something else. Power. 10^40 joules worth of energy flowing through these intergalactic cables. From where to what? We don’t stick around to find out.

[Transcript]Zery and I were looking for another crew member.  Startin’ to feel the strain of only the two of us doing jobs. Met a Gahjavian while working for the Commune of Obdrin. Poor bastards still trying to save their Wrot. Zery bets it won’t last another millennium. I give them another hundred years.Obdrin Commune had us going towards the galactic heart of Apotheosis. Said there was a genus of beings there who might have a way to save their Wrot. Commission had a handsome reward through Apotheosis’s heart is a devil to navigate. Gahjavian said they could do it for us. We’d need the help to make it.Density of solar masses and interstellar medium at the heart means no metaphysic diaphragm and no Odo lenses to jump in close. Gotta lean on your neutrino substrate. And pray.Amid the hyper-density, a wicked, wide arch comes through the viewport. A lopsided ring a lightyear across. And it’s alive. Something starts gumming up the outside of the ship. Thick film of organic matter which I didn’t think was possible in this part of the galaxy. They grow gills, indusium veils weave over the surface of our ship which yank us towards the ring. The super-structure perspires droplets into space but the distance and sheer size are deceptive. We get closer and those droplets are planets. Deliquescent maturations of the larger fungal gleba. And it is fungal. The organic membrane around the ship seeps through the Oganesson-Titanium seals holding the vitro-plastic steel together. Zery and I duck into the sarcophagus but our Gahjavian navigator is too slow. Invading mycelial veins grab them. Mycorrhiza threads plait through their exoskeleton and then they grow still. I hear the ship land. After a few hours, Zery cracks the sarcophagus lid. It’s been hauled from the ship. Prototaxite stems nine meters tall surround us, the Gahjavian encrusted into the trunk of one. As we stir, so do they, their torso breaking off from the coniferous prototaxite, effluvial fluid gushing from the hole they leave behind.The fungal avatar of our former crewmate stands expectant. We explain why we’ve come here. No, they have nothing for this dying Wrot far away. Death doesn’t seem to be something they understand. And so, with no say in the matter, we’re ushered back out into space, empty handed, the Gahjavian still tethered to the strange fungal ring world in the galactic center.

[Transcript]Tritium barnacles don’t come off vitro-plastic steel easy but the commission from the Escathai was too good to pass up. Ship is docked on the dorsal side of their Reef Leviathan for the time bein’. They needed navigation help gettin’ around the Lorn Supercluster. Something I just so happen to be uniquely qualified for.We take a wide arch around the it but that has the unfortunate consequence of steering us close to the Gates of Phet. Doorway to the Dominium Vitae of the Herlochti. Been there as long as I can recall and ain’t never met anyone or anything can remember a time the Gates didn’t stand looming over the Drawt Nebula at their feet.Escathai use Odo Lenses exclusively so we jump as close as I dare to the Gates before taking the next few cycles to double check my sightings before jumping us out. Hamark had never seen ‘em before but they ain’t much to look at. A three by three by five grid of perfect cubes each of them exactly one light-year in each dimension. No one’s sure if there are any Herlochti left. The few celestorians and Segathi Trance Seekers have recorded seem drawn uncontrollably to the Gates of Phet. One of the few thousand or so known entities the viral vector of human cognizance can’t attach itself to. They move by fractal, the passage of time flowing through their bodies is what lets them reposition themselves. They can be made of just about anything, the pattern bein’ what really gives ‘em life.Phet is a kind of afterlife, from what I hear. A realm constructed of pure psyche like the Mythosphere is for humanoids. Except time doesn’t seem to exist there. Our only external account comes from the Wrot Kelemandias who tried to force their way through the Gates of Phet about two and a half billion years ago. It’s no mean thing to kill a Wrot, but that did. The commune was tapped into their psychic stream the moment Kelemandias breached the Dominium Vitae barrier. What lays beyond is immutable, permanent, fixed for all eternity extending into the past and present. In Phet time doesn’t exist. Rest, I’d guess, from the never ending stream the rest of us must endure.

[Transcript]Badacamsana is not a friendly place if you don’t know what you’re about. A Sckelian’s been talking us up to transport a Kedash Monolith for a friend of his there. Hamark is back on Plaxis so it was just Zery and I on the scout to see if the delivery was even possible.Badacamasana lies between three white dwarfs. Celestorian out of Falomorgon hitched along for the ride out. The Badacamsanese tell a legend of an angel breaking through the oneiric plane, their dark world at the end of tendrils of light and data placed at the precise center of the three stars. Balanced impossibly in the midst of the three celestial bodies. Seems there’s debate about this in celestial circles. Falomorgian’s come out to settle a bet from the sound of things with a Vikoorite colleague of theirs. Vikoorite says the angel in the story is a Seraphim at its peak back between the 1st and 2nd coming. That would make Badacamsana real old. The Falomorgian thinks that’s unlikely. Cognitive decay scales with size and temporal dissonance and xeno-ontologists don’t see that in the Badacamsanese. What are they like? Zery asks, cuttin’ into the Falomorgian’s tellin’. He lets out a humorous thrum from their mucus membranes. We’ll see for ourselves.I almost don’t believe it on the scopes. Badacamsana is massive. Any bigger and it’d collapse into a star. Nitro and hydrogen rich. Almost nothing but. Ain’t any far orbit stations. Falomorgian puts a mandible on the controls, and angles straight down.Pressure gets thick. I have to stack pharaoh charms on the diaphragm to keep us from getting crushed. I almost don’t have enough. Clouds around us get colder, denser. Soon we’re moving through supercritical chlorine with odd shapes floating in the supercritical expanse.Then lights in the X-ray spectrum. Brilliant sellels and washed out letops, colors outside the 380-750 range. Caustics float over corals made from hyper compressed polymerized nitrogen. Sculpture architecture hewn from metallic hydrogen-neon lattices. I-I ain’t ever seen anything like it. Badacamsanese come out to meet use, tubular, liquid beings made from synth-organic compounds normalized at this pressure. Ultra-violet pulses like constellations ring out from a group. I looked at our Falomorgian. They ain’t got a mouth but I hear a smile in their voice. What’s going on? I ask. They’re saying hello, he says.

[Transcript]Wrots. Iron psychic celestial parasites. Most stars aren’t sentient until one of the fissile larva takes root. Commune of Vortixi gave us the job. Their wrot is one of the few to have survived solar collapse, the worm god entombed behind the event horizon, bound to a singularity. Reality breaking power, if only it could get free.The commune is only one of three out in the Yan quadrant and I reckon a big reason the Pure Shards haven’t poked too far into the region. That and they have their hands full of Boklin Marauders.I fancy myself a humanoid hard to surprise anymore. I don’t know what I thought the Vortixi Commune wanted us to transport from their temples to Thregosis, but I was humbled and not a little disturbed when they rolled a sarcophagus into our cargo bay. The same kind I’ve sleep in every night.Destination coordinates. No other instructions save to jettison the box at a precis velocity upon arrival. We make quick time, me pushing the collector-fire conduits to max, nearly scraping the neutrino substrate dry trying to get us there as fast as possible. I don’t like that on the ship. Hamark and I stay in the cockpit but I catch Zery and Ruthin probing the second sarcophagus. The two have gotten along a lot better than I’d thought since Ruthin’s become more active.They rupture the seal. Something gurgles inside. I catch only a glimpse from the front. 2 meter long maggots, thin as ropes squirming over each other, webbed together with some kind of amniotic membrane the color of cobalt. Then the temperature drops. Condensation turns frost before we’re all encased in nitrogen ice. The Hamark manages to avoid solidification as the larva drains the thermal energy from the room deadly fast. He slams the lid down. We thaw for the rest of the trip.We arrive at Thregosis, a super cluster of astroids. It’ll likely be a planet in a few hundred thousand years. 31 and a half m/s2 goes the 2nd sarcophagus from our coordinates into the super cluster. It tumbles end over end into the darkness, the shrouded asteroid masses swaddle the occult coffin, hiding it for the future.

[Transcript]Job is on relay from the neighboring quadrant on behalf of the Commune of Yistoff. I think their Wrot is trying to make paths into Vikoor culture here but so have half a dozen other worms over the last million years. I’m not worried.What does get my head scratchin’ are the details. Salvage brief the Commune relayed through our contact on Vikoor didn’t have much. Metallic, we know that much. Artificial is likely though the size is what I’m concerned with. If it’s a station, that’s a lot of material and a huge windfall. But Wrot’s aren’t known to be generous.Thing gains some definition on the scopes as the diaphragm drops on the far side of Jamoor, one of the outer twelve planets. Gas giant rich in neon and krypton. The noble gases flash along Jamoor’s surface as we arc across to its dark side. Lightning storms the size of continents blast away in the nebulous clouds below, the splintered forks bright orange and blistering white in the exotic atmosphere.20 kilometers to contact. In the shadow of the planet there’s no visual so the scanners are our guide. Not a station, that’s for sure. But if it’s a ship I ain’t ever seen its like. There is something haunting in how familiar it is, though. I bring us alongside, kick on the floods. Brutal looking. Rows and rows of mechanical teeth and judging from the ratios of gears and servos, the thing has enough torque to crack a small moon. Drills and excavators and dredging equipment up and down and around. There’s a bang in the back of our ship. That ball of iron I have by my sarcophagus is rolling on the ground. Then slams into the side of the ship, magnetized. Then whatever is outside comes to life. The vast stretches of jagged machinery roar into motion. The iron ball groans as it dents the vitro plastic steel of the hull and Zery has to help me fight with the controls to fly us away from the kilometer long shredded belt that’s just come back to life.Back on the far side of Jamoor the iron ball stops actin’ on its own. I’ll need to stow it with a friend back on Vikoor 6. Before today, I didn’t know Calradian machines could tell when they’re near their home moon, no matter how little of it is left.

[Transcript]Temis Beta has an orchard that was cozy enough. Client wanted a delivery sent to Trinity Breach out in the Alagda Quadrant. Ayin and Veshinai territory. Fulcrum diodes out to that part of Apotheosis are watched by Slavers. Hamark isn’t humanoid and Zery is amorphous when she wants to be. So I stayed behind on this one.Temis Beta is uninhabited. Swevor mite colonies organize seed pods on their own so I wasn’t surprised by the neat rows despite no one living on the planet. Or so I thought. Didn’t see any mites or their bore holes around the trees. Figured the ship landing had scared them away. But then I took a closer look at the trees.Starlight white leaves. Chains made of marble wrapped around their limbs. Skinless fruit hung from the boughs. Rows and rows of a ripe crop. I reached for one but hesitated, a sudden uneasiness grabbing hold of me like this wasn’t for me. Like I was being tested. Like I was being watched.Alert, I walked the soft regolith around the trees back to my landing site. Or I tried to. There was no clearing any more.Nothing. Even my footprints were gone. Just Rows and rows of ethereal fruit trees, all identical-ephemeral.It should’ve gotten dark. The suns overhead should have moved. Or had it always been just the one in this system?The sky was a bright teal and the air was sweet. I sat back against a tree. “I need to keep looking,” I told her. “Can’t. Rest. Yet.”Her palm cupped my face gently, soft as flower petals, then her arachnid eyes tense. Leaves blew by, drifting in and out of her figure like water over stones only this river was deep. Something vast, ideal, and unlike the grasping claims of a Wrot or Peraphim—divine. And then…hot sand. Windswept. Around me lay dunes, my back against a gnarled gyoshin stem withered and dead in the midst of that desert. Hamark and Zery were just as confused when they picked me up. Hadn’t they left me in the garden?Hallucination, Zery said. I would agree but there under the on ramp to the ship sat a beautiful, skinless fruit. A small piece of a paradise I was never meant to see.

[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.

[Transcript]Fuel shortage on Gadrion Gadrion left the three of us with a lot of spare time. First break in a while, we set the awning along a cue of ships waiting our turn for a  neutrino substrate. Metaphysic flight is banded inside the Gadros system of worlds except on Gadrion Peqor. News comes down the line and the Jeshure Mergini in front of us passes the word it will be another rotation before things start moving again. We chat with them and a few of their Weevillites passengers to pass the time. Overhead the caruncular vex mesh begins solidifying to block out the neutron star pulses a few quadrants over. The CVM keeps the night side of the planet from getting fried this time of year.Company of a couple other ships join us. Among them are a few Corvitals itchin’ for news back home on Plaxis. Hamark leaves to integrate with them back at their ship. But no sooner than he leaves than some Pan-Animate folks join the circle. Sklorn Anthropods. The brand of Theer is embossed on their sleeves and I sit up straight, Zery also takin’ notice. Wicked EM spears across their backs and with PH-type carapace they watch us all with iridescent compound eyes.Gadrion Gadrion recently laxed their laws around mercenary recruitment. Tod’rish Scar told me lot of folks weren’t happy about it, said it opened the planets up to the Pan-Animate influence and sure enough no sooner than when we entered atmo yesterday I get slammed by propaganda on the psychic stream carrying on about the Animate’s aspirational Crusades.The Sklorn are staring down the Weevillites who get real quiet. We all do. My thermal accelerator is out of its holster on a side table. Zery starts idly sharpening her weaver’s falchion with poc stone. The Morobian sitting by the Weevillites casually puts herself between them and the Theer disciples who glare hard enough to bore a hole through them.Skidder Moth flaps mix with the thrum of Zestial carts in the city’s traffic around us. My fingers twitch, the Sklorn reach a hand towards their backs. And then Hamark and the Corvitals come back sayin’ more substrate’s just been delivered. We slowly go back to our ships.

[Transcript]Access Attempt 35…FailureAccess Attempt 36…FailureAccess Attempt 37…SuccessData veil pierced. Commencing cortex breach. Power integration start…Integration complete. Origin of genesis: unknown:Location recovered: Regina Quadrant, coordinates 04-99-132 at 131° off galactic axis off Linear X.Information storage model: unknown. Analysis:: Partial data lace splice embedded in cognitive sieve. Data lace braiding technique is not in technical reference archive.Attempting bio-reticule Bridge. Running…Bridge established.Diagnostics retrieved:Hull … WorkingAntena … OperativeGyroscope … OperativeStabilizers … DisabledNeuron colony … OperativeCentral nodes … DisabledAuxiliary nodes … OperativePulse reserves … DepletedBeta Decay Relay … DisabledInternal data storage capacity estimate: 2.6 Giga-roms. 85% corrupted or irretrievable. Extracting data with highest integrity…Extraction complete.░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░Error. Semiotic mismatch. Running lexical transmutation…Transmutation complete. Accuracy estimated at 76%. Data retrieved as follows:***Log: 896 million annum. Navigation check shows another 2 degrees of alignment drift from stellar coordinates at Observation start. Total drift is now almost 26,000 units away at almost 45 degrees off linear zed.Ample psionics in the region means the psychic battery recharges on the regular. I’ve taken to splurging with the excess runoff gardening the cellulose foliations in the nearby debris field. Dreadnoughts seems a befitting name for them. The organic clusters thrive in the heavy hydrogen nebula and have reached masses of 203 billion kilograms. They anchor to the few asteroids in orbit around the lone planet here. It had a moon but gravitational drift pulled it out into the nebula around 23 million annum after observation began. It glowed faintly in the 150-175 mega-hertz range. Radio active decay is the most probable cause. I feel a little lonelier since it left.NOTES: Civilization Thorn-Ultra-Seeker 0079 surpassed primitive tools at 309 million annum. Progression has dramatically exceeded the initial evolution vector with the cognitive-to-mass ratio almost reaching 0.8. And they continue to surprise, forgoing industrial development altogether and leaning into spiritual technologies. Last observation cycle I witnessed a series of halo craft leave the planet, the civilization’s first off-world excursion.This cycle saw them take their new found stellar freedom to spread their spiritual practices. Highly effective missionary deployment along with strategic altruistic dissemination pushed their cultural influence tensor far past the gavel benchmark. For a few million annum they held dynamic sway over six other adjacent quadrants and I logged intercepted communication between their government, a counsel known as Magi, showing they had interests in expanding to galactic positions of authority.And then nothing. Silence. The whole planet stops sending transmissions, ships, bridges to the mythisphere or the Dominium Vitae. On the cusp of a major expansion of power and sovereignty, they withdrawHYPOTHESIS 1: Cultural collapse due to unaddressed class strain between upper echelons referred to as “voyers” and other cultural strata often referred to as “Dross” in intercepted communications. Confidence rating 53%.HYPOTHESIS 2: Spiritual overreach and misaligned orison vectors with Dominium Vitae resultant. Resultant vernacular identifies with “wisdom, charity, kindness, self-reliance.” Spiritual divergence could not be calculated due to insufficient data. Confidence rating 12%.HYPOTHESIS 3: Dynamic synthesis of secular identity postulates with corrosive cultural interference may have-░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░End of successful lexical transmutation. Data findings logged: number 66-78-93. Labeled “Downfall.”End of access attempt. Terminating connection.

[Transcript]Pivot sits down linear Y at the crux of Nadir and Apotheosis. The two galaxies' spiral arms snare each other in a bramble garden of star nurseries and primitive solar masses shepherded under the Geist Brumes. Chum of mine, Tod’rish Scar, chats over the entangled coms as we make our final approach to Pivot’s docking port. I check on “Ruthin” in the cargo bay. It was Zery’s idea to give ‘em a nickname. Tucked behind the compact Jeder Reef grain we’re dropping off, she’s still coiled around her chrysalis. Asleep. I grab the last of the grain, flip off the lights, and wonder if she dreams.The Pivot doesn’t bother tryin’ for a night cycle. The Far Orbit Station’s awash with all the nearby ambient star light. Legend says the place was built by refugees from the Great Anathema, but the hurus out in Yan will be the first to tell you that ain’t true.Pivot’s busy this visit, full of metabotanists from all over. Badacamsanese, Dexikai, Palidrophites, and Ugrians who I reckon would love to try to grow the Lotuses back on Memkin VIII. They’re all gathered on the observation deck to see the Vector Lotus effloresce out in the stellar nurseries. Hamark is never that interested and Zery is busy with her Dexekai sweetheart. So, alone, I put my four feet up on the cockpit console and lean back to enjoy the show.A nimbus see emerges from the Mythosphere shedding vestigial ethos albugo. Celestial velamen explode outward towards any humanoids within three lightyears. Communion established, scions of shimmering green grow outward, coiling around the young stars as the lotus quickly flowers, its petals hundreds of astronomical units wide.I watch the astrophilous process but freeze as a long, skeletal spine moves in my peripheral vision. The cabin fills with a soft mossy luminance as Ruthin undulates her thousands of eyes around to look out the view port. I expect an attack, physical, psychic, metacausal, something. But she just looks into the stars as the Geist Brumes prune the Vector Lotuses.She's back in the hold now, wrapped around that chrysalis again. Zery doesn’t know but Harmark can see I’m shaken. I blame it on the Lotuses, still not sure what I just saw or maybe how lucky I am to be alive.

Get the Soundtrack here: [Transcript]Ether-shrike commission target was along the underbelly of Nadir. Not my home galaxy but I’m familiar. Long ancient home to humanoids this side of the Chasm though that was almost 8 billion years ago.Coordinates park us below the galactic disk on a moon without craters. We wait for the sands in the Pore Glass to stop moving. Zero kelvin at the top of the hour, we jettison the pod. Ether-shrike didn’t say what’s inside. Hamark revealed EMF readings, nothing else. Time’s up. Pod is sucked into vacuum, catches on the dorsal vent of the metaphysic diaphragm. Work to get it free when a shape breaks from the moon below. Aperiodic tiling like a Werslegosh honeycomb, front grid radiating heat high enough to trip environmental alarms. The comb closes over the pod, descends to the surface, takin’ us with it.Sands in a helitical funnel transition us from orbit to subterranean. Dark. I switch visual to infrared. Epsio-alloy scaffolding. It’s everywhere. Mounted in recesses are spools of a white ethereal silk as big as the ship, thread being fed from where we’re being dragged-the center of the moon.The strands pass through sieves splitten’ ‘em apart, sowing something else between ‘em, then sewing the whole thing up again. Needles threading tens of strings at once shift in right angles from one sieve to the next. Above us, below, on both sides, it’s all one mechanism spooling from a source at the center. A furnace or Nimian Arachnid are my guesses. Only I’m dead wrong.Ether-shrikes have small homes. Most gaseous, they take refuge in pressurized mercer tanks to reconstitute. They like music, humming by vibrating their tanks. Am fond of those immortal bastards. They’re almost as coveted as humanoids on the slave markets so we have common ground. Earned their trust dearly and didn’t question this job. Now I’m not so sure.At the center of the moon was a house. Dislodged the pod but was close enough to peer through a window. Arms of a machine crack the casing on our former cargo. Ether-shrike drifts out, lays out on a table next to another who’s older, ancient, the silk strands bleeding from its mouth as it sings a final note before the song and strand are siphoned from their replacement, the thread seamless in the transition.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Only met a handful of Spinal Druids over the millenia. Help to reache versifier networks. Filaments made from parable silk, yarns made out of yarns. They help with traveling through the Mythosphere. Cut off from the linear flow of time, it's hard to get there if you aren’t humanoid in some way. Can’t take the ship. Gotta start at a legend mecca, swear a pilgrimage bond to an Apex Denier. Gaunt beings shrouded in cloaks of dust. Legend meccas dotted with their hovels, branches of yore reeds eternally wafting smoke. Between the boughs of soot, you kneel before the Denier. Then they touch your scalp with the mark of ashes. You don’t walk through the gate to the Mythosphere. With the mark of a Denier, you then visit the legend mecca Spinal Druid. They reach through your eyes and give a mystic tap to your vertebrae. Your backbone splits, one half here in the mundane world, the other a post in the realm of saga. Between the two lies the path to the Mythosphere.I have little practice with lorewalking myself. I don’t keep much of my history on the other side, stripped down to a bucolic runt. Social ideas, lineages, legends and tradition are given flesh and blood there. Hierarchies and destiny are as real as gravity.Step by step, compelled by pilgrimage, I walk in a meager caravan of other Observers. A Seeker leads the procession. Our protector and only thread here in the land of pre-destination.Night comes. Simple fires ward off the dark infested with beasts. One of my companions is taken. Food for the narrative. We weep as is expected. As is foretold.There are no planets in the Mythosphere. No stars, no galaxies. A never-ending plane upon which all things must be. The world obeys the rules of anecdote and allegory. I am guarded by the Periapt of Secrets. A fellow next to me, one of Destiny. Another, one of Luck.We approach our destination. A Well of Resolve. We draw the pure water with care in our wooden buckets. We return, the Druid soldering my backbone anew, my pailful of water now the most valuable thing in the Continuum. Hod. Pure, undirected Agency.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Ugrians are a strange folks. Half descended from humanoids some six and a half million years ago and an earlier kind of Hemotripe, tall gymnosperms found at home over on Petrichor VIII. Arboreal world protected by stratis-palms, orbit breaching plants with sap caustic enough to eat through vitro-plastic. Valued in the Yontis medical community. Only thing that can get through Fetus Snail Shells for surgery.Transport is dangerous, though. Memkin VIII is a protected site for Ugrians. Tablet of sanctioned entry’s required for any off-worlders. The planet and its moon, Ichor, are under the eye of the Cornerstone Armada. Deceptively simple ships made of stone. BUt hidden in their ranks are the Spears of Rain. Long pillars made from enriched wedkitsite. Not a fierce deterrent. To the uninitiated. Ground level, the rich biosphere washes over you. Modrakeets and Zeteel Salamanders roam wild Besher grain fields, their iron red stems shaking in the chlorine rich air. Calls ring out from kell stalkers in the nearby woods and a line of chit bugs crawl over my boots. I can feel the soft give in the sulfuric earth as I follow my Ugrian guide to the fallen stratis-palm three kilometers from the landing site. I can already hear the music.Its fronds shade a third of the sky. Already decomposing, I can feel the static build up around the felled giant. I’m careful not to touch and tommil ferns as we walk, though I have my respirator and arc suit on for protection.The trunk of the palm looms up before us. 4 kilometers diameter, a swarm of other harvesters teaming around the contact point on the ground. Flashing fires dot the campsites as harvesters gather around sodium contact burners. I recognize Ketta across the way who waves back with a mandible. Good to see she’s back in the game this year.I set up my fluoropolymer tent and tap the trunk with my ceramic spike. Stratis-palm sap is thixotropic so the spike vibrates to increase the drip rate. It’ll take at least 76 hours to get a good pour so I take some seat by Ketta’s contact burner. She’s already got her stringed lyther out, strumming absently as a waxing Ich or crests the horizon. The moon silhouettes the Spears of Rain in orbit and I settle in.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Between the cantilevered axis of the Nadir and Apotheosis galaxies lies the Chasm. Nadir’s spiral arm locks with Apotheosis some 80 million light years below us. Odo lens cracked again, spinning us way out into the breach here. Not as bad as gettin’ hurled into the Lorn Supercluster, but unlike that there’s little help out here.We were transportin’ a Kedash Monolith for a Penumbra Vigil on Badacamsana. It’s strapped down in the hold next to what we found along the edge of the Lestif Quadrant. We drift, bathed in the distant light of nebulae and cosmic luminant brumes. Rogue IGM storms brush the vitro-plastic steel of the ship. Hamark checks to see if anyone back on Gashia is watching for entangled coms and Zery gives me the hundredth look about replacing our Odo lenses. We drift.Cycles pass. Entangled coms are silent. Galactic cores on both sides of the viewport stare like adrisconic pupils at us, watching. Supplies run low. Metaphysic diaphragm can’t replenish this far away from life elsewhere. We conserve power. Lights are left off. Hamark works on a reserve battery. Zery and I slumber in the sarcophagus together to let the cabin drop to ambient vacuum temperature while we rest.Two thirds through a cycle, I wake up to hear scratches as if something’s wriggling along the haul. Nothing outside the viewport. Pitch black but it undulates. And we’re moving. Inertia holds us to the floor as we gain speed. Then a metallic thud. Zery kicks on the cabin lights. The darkness ahead of us is smaller somehow than where we are. There’s a gurgle outside and a shunt forward but the ship can’t seem to fit. Whatever’s got us tries again and again and I worry the diaphragm will break under the strain. But then it stops. And we start gettin’ pushed the other way.Now we are really moving. Stars appear behind us. We’re over the rim of Apotheosis. I can nearly see Vikoor 6 on the scopes. Hamark’s on entangled coms which are resounding with chatter. Zery pulls out the Psychic Zoetrope to astral project to the outside of the ship but freezes. Pulling back into the Chasm is a winding shape of crooked silken darkness that I can’t help thinking looked almost like a root.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Running scared. I can’t find Zery. Clouds of lithium ion blast crimson lightning over the land against a red sky. I can feel ‘em in orbit. Zether’yin isn’t supposed to be a part of their patrol pattern. Hamark hands me the syringe of ji’fra extract. We only got a few seconds.Had to dump the Verkin sediment in the emergency landing. They won’t be happy but we didn’t have a choice. Ten seconds Hamark says. There’s this massive weight in the sky. Zether’yin’s dual moons get shoved to the side far overhead as the Ayin push closer to the planet.A hand under a fall lolo spore stem. I pull Zery out but she’s already unconscious. Hamark understands and shuts off. I hold him and Zery close before stabbing the needle into my neck.I go blank. Nothing but impulse. I’m all instinct for the next 3 hours. That’s usually long enough but it’s hard to tell. The consciousness suppressant blunts my memory but I can recall their descent.Vast interconnecting discs fill my vision. The Ayin crawl along the underside of the Oneiric Plane towards the planet. I can feel the whir of the oracle centrifuge driving this one, a complex para-voyant urge. Anagogic intuition tries to take hold. The ji’fra holds my mind down, pinning my cognisance firmly to my body. Zery stirs but doesn’t get lulled in. The lolo stem, however, roars to life. Freshly awakened to self-awareness, its only moments of sapience are cut short as the Ayin subsumes its burgeoning percipience, another disk in the giant spinning wheels of the oracle centrifuge. An inverted rain of minds ripped from bodies fly through the lithium ion clouds out into space. Like grain raised up only to meet the scythe, the planet is culled of all new born sentience. Ticks bleed out of the Oneiric plane, drawn by the rich concentration of psychic mass–a writhing mass of preternatural glut fills the horizon from end to end and I black out to a feeding frenzy in the heavens.We can feel the psychic scar on Zether’yin when we come to. The ji’fra wears off and we high-tail it out of there. I drop a message nearby on the humanoid colony Ido that an Ayin is in the quadrant and to be careful.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]The star at the center of the Obdrisceant rings is dyin’. The commune of Obdrin been hiring our flyers from all over to bring their followers to the rings. They want to all be together when their god passes away.The Wrot has tried to keep the natural death cycle to a minimum. No super nova, no collapsing into a black hole. Its strange hearing a Wrot be so selfless. The cosmic parasites will do just about anything to hang on to power. Rumor has it this one never propagated. No progeny to save or covet resources for.It’s host star, however, likely doesn’t care. Elder Obdrin been working for generations on a way to avert their own destruction and maybe preserve their object of worship. And they found something.Circlin’ the Wrot and half as big as its star is a Reef Leviathan. Hulking ship from tritium-infused polyps grown by Escathai vertebrae, small, silk-thin animals made entirely of nerve cells. The bigger the colony, the more food, sodium, and magnesium there is to go around. Plenty like to live on their own before the Commune of Hristoth came and took their seas. Their twin home worlds of Escar and Esceer, moons around the ocean giant Tel’im are adrift in the void somewhere. Now the Reef Leviathans are their only sanctuaries.Waves of psychic miasma cloud the onlookers as the Commune across all 418 rings watch their god breath its last. A flow of plasma streams off the surface of the star, magnetized into the vast coral ship in orbit. The Wrot dies with a sigh in the shadow of the Escathai colony.In the days that follow, the entire commune hitches a ride on the Leviathan. One of the folks we brought to see the event was a celestorian. She kept wondering why the Escathai would help here seein’ as a Wrot was what did in Tel’im, their home world. The Escathai aren’t known for being generous and compassionate. They ain’t mean or nothing, just don’t like to interfere.I remember tryin’ to see the rings out the viewport as we left, the system nothing but a black husk with the Wrot gone. And I think about Escar and Esceer floatin’ somewhere off in the dark. I wonder if those abandoned worlds will ever meet.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Route between Sevetis IX and Gadrion Gadrion is nothing special. Along the rim of the Lestif Quadrant, nothing’s back there except the occasional wandering pillar drifting over from Gipsum Formations beyond Agora. Was transporting a Lamorae gene seer and a Nelgani technopath through there the other day. Hamark was back on Plaxis to visit the rest of the nanite colony so it was just Zery and I pulling shuttle duty. Zery’s hibernating in the sarcophagus so it’s just me listening to the two gab on in the back. Nelgani don’t get out much and the Lamorae’s telling them a classic yarn. Story’s about a Lamorae and humanoid excavator on Oxrose XI. They’re surveying for geode deposits and find a big ol’cavity under ground. Huge triangular cavern, walls pocketed with chrysalis. I give half an ear as I move to check out some debris on the scopes. It’s too big to fit in the hold with two passengers.Roaming the cavern are the caretakers who tell the Lamorae and humanoid the chrysalises, the Djar, are dreaming. Of what? the Lamorae asks. The caretaker doesn’t respond. The Lamorae and Humanoid leave to tell others about all this but when they come back the strange catacombs are gone.I drop off the two on Gadrion Gadrion, the Nelgani plying the Lamorae with questions about what the caretakers look like. The Lamorae describes them as arachnids with humanoid torsos and I shake my head as I take us back into orbit and the long route back to Sevetis IX. Descriptions vary depending on who’s telling the tale. Adxerxians say they’re worms, Ether-Shrikes call ‘em “boifmitar” for “floating heads,” Voit-consoles don’t even claim they have a body. Everyone’s got their spin on the story, but most agree they are watching over what's in those chrysalises: the Djar, whatever they are. I double back to the debris floating off in no man’s land. Figure it could be worth a little in salvage. Hauling it aboard’s simple enough but when I check the bay to see what it is, I stop.Some sort of creature. A metallic spine growin’ hundreds of legs, nodes–closed eye sockets- run the length. It’s underbelly a semi-transparent pouch alight with a green glow from a liquid or plasma it's hard to tell. Whole thing is maybe twenty - twenty-five meters long, asleep it seems, and wrapped around a canister–a chrysalis

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Sefrin. It’s cold when we land on the dark side of the last planet in the chain. I take a deep breath of my nitrogen mask, the atmosphere nearly pure O2 outside. Chaldricom, our contact, walks up the loading ramp to say hello, the fiery waves of his body dancing shadows on the hull. I shake his hand, sweatin’ in my suit from the radiant heat. They’re tall, Phasmagoths. We step off the ship, his gown of interlocking crystal clinking in the early morning air. Others pass us in proud dresses, frocks, and kilts made of the same. Spires of interwoven glass, faience, terracotta, and anaglyptics of all sorts tower over us in the dark: the famed ceramics of Sefrin. And above them, the 47th pillar of The Bridge.As we walk the streets star light rains down from the night sky. First only twinkles of light pierce atmo, but then more join the constellation until whole sections build into a blinding white light. Artificial sunrise. Phasmagoths have a reputation for being unfriendly and overly ambitious. Can’t say they haven’t earned it. Each of the three planets in their home system are linked together in a sort of planetary chain; vast bridges made of echodurum built over millennia physically connect one to the other. Legend says the entire thing is made from the Sefrin glass.We get to the depot. Chaldricom and Zery negotiate. She does most of the talking when we do deliveries here. Hakelm Adi and Sefrin culture have a lot in common. I’ve heard more than a few Oldanti archeologists speculate the two were sister peoples in the long distant past. Of course, neither group is about to let outsiders go poking around their historical and sacred sites to find out. Many have tried and never been seen again.We head back to the ship. I can see the discoloration on the hull only after a few hours. Rapid onset oxidation. VRS scrubs the O2 down to normal levels. Feels good to breathe with the mask off. We break atmo. Camoris, the system’s only star, shines 800 million kilometers away through the thin atmosphere. Hamark does the flying, weaving through the ten million satellites of mirrors and lenses in orbit that haul the sunrise from one end of the planets to the other.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I need to visit the Yan quandart more. Simple delivery for a huru on the cathedral world of Teshilpelemonvesti. Weevillites hollowed the entire planet through with chapels, vestibules, and foyers. Ain’t got no divine ties myself but I always take my hat off in those halls. Respect for the space if not the faith. The Anathema out in Yan are some of my favorite clients to work for and I don't mind taking a knee every now and again to show my gratitude.Few records remain of the Yan Collapse. A few Segathi Trance Seekers have probed the hazy memories of Asterwhales, Wrots, mortorspores and other folks more than a few billion years old. That’s where we’ve gotten most of the history for the Yan Quadrant. Of course, the trance seekers were looking for Ür itself so the Collapse is only a footnote for them.No stars out in that part of my home galaxy. Yan is barren of light. Hop in a diode across the way and look at the night sky–just a big ol’ chunk of its dark. But it ain’t empty. Planets stuck themselves to gas giants, brown dwarfs, and empty dyson spheres. Whole branches of civilizations live in the shadow of the rest of the galaxy.Much of the Great Anathema fled there after the cyber coalescence some six or seven million years ago. Lot of folks in the communes still don’t like the idea of machines with ethereal ties. The idea of 1s and 0s with souls makes ‘em itch. But by convention or convenience, they pretty much leave the Yan Quadrant alone.Things might be changing, though. Heard enough derisive talk in liquol bars and far orbit stations between Pure Shards and the Pan-Animate to get my synthetic hairs on edge. Discussion of purges, pogroms, and the marshaling of Crusade into Yan to rid the galaxy of the Anathema.Sittin’ in the hallowed halls of Teshilpelemonvesti, looking at the statues, the woven exorasson worn by the hurus for worship, the sacraments of oil and silicon on the dias, I realize it could all disappear. Hamark says not to worry, such radical scares come and go, but I can’t shake many of my Anathema friends here might be in danger. And that something’s coming.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]It came that time to jump the rim. Finishing our business on Palathora, we told the Lorewalker we were going to the Fulcrum Diode in orbit round Termer Kai. Busy body like them make sure everyone knows where we ain’t going.Ayin patrol the diodes, figuring humanoids will go in or out of one sooner or later. Frozen in crystalline sapient solution means we can’t run away either. Why I was lucky to find that cave on the eight hundred and first moon of Lumaworth IV. Experiment gone wrong, or so they say, couple million years ago. Left the gas giant with a core of almost pure radium. Dark side swirls with luminant clouds. Cult of Omrot inhabited the moons for nearly six-hundred thousands years, finding portents in the radioactive clouds at night. But nobody’s seen them since the Fourth Coming.Eight-o-one don’t got a name. Zery’s wanted to give it one but I always say no one can ambush you if can’t tell ‘em where you’re goin’. Small divot of a moon, the ground made of old asteroid iron. Tidal forces from Lumaworth IV fold the landscape on itself, crimping the moon over and over again. Slow but steady erasure. Turns the whole thing into these swirls of metal, frozen, spaceblack waves.First found the Fulcrum Diode on a run for a Bernec’cog Zeolot studying the Omrot folks. Went to try to find one of their old temples on the moons. Didn’t see no temple, but picked up Asterwhale reverbs from Eight-o-One. Diode was half buried but Shoals Blessed, it still worked despite what must have been a couple million years worth of cosmic ray bombardment.Diode’s synced up to a brown dwarf next galaxy over. Travel comes in waves. You freeze yourself in crystalline sapient solution first. CSS keeps everything nice and neat when the Asterwhale mind cycles over. Then out you go at your destination. Always wild looking back from the other Fulcrum Diode a galaxy over, the spiral arm of this one smashin’ into the arm of the other. Most diodes go between these two. Oh, there are some that go further out into the filaments, but the Ayin pretty much keep those to themselves. Still, I’d like to travel out there some day. Some day.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Psychic zoetropes are a new thing. Only really started being used about a thousand years ago. Zery likes to remind me they're older but so are a lot of things. Hamark and I met her when she was a junior weaver on Hakelm Adi. Mystic place. Busy now that word has gotten out. Ships washing over the planet like locusts. Zery pilots whenever we go. Hamark can’t see the oracle interlace and I’m not much better. You can feel it, though. Like a shadow passing over you. Beautiful, grand, invisible. Hakelm Adi is industrially barren. No metals on the entire planet. It’s all crimson oases  and quartz desert dunes. Colossal tents tower into the atmosphere. Augur Weave. Kites of a thousand strands and as long as comet trails hold them aloft. You can see them from the surface, sparkling in the solar winds.Zery doesn’t leave the ship. I’ve never understood her disgust. Hamark and I take my old dreams to market having finally found a buyer. Dense, the scent of old bodies and young dreams. People from all over. Money changing hands and hands changed by their money. Bronze chimes mark the vendor stalls. The sibyls and their astral looms work in the shade. Boys bring them cool vapor stills and the weavers inhale it deeply through their trident nostrils, glad of the relief from the heat.Elder woman is the buyer. Down the stairs, below the sands, other dreams hang from the ceiling in her shop. Psychic Zoetrope in the corner holds a tick. A bowl of inhibitions sits next to it. A pet. Deal as agreed. I hand over my discarded dreams. She flips through them, eyes a light as she evaluates. Those three pupils lock on me, catch me staring. I want to ask.I give Hamark the bolt of weave and we head back to the ship. Shadows like caustics ripple over the sands. The kites overhead part, the Augur Weave unfolds as a godet ray leaves for space made entirely of astral canvas. Zery is watching it when we get back, eyes fixed on the billow fabric taking flight. Again I want to ask. Instead, Hamark takes us into orbit, Zery still watching the godet ray until she takes the controls, that look in her eyes seeming all too familiar.

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.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Was looking for Shriipal Ice shards when I was hailed. Minor abbot of the Fellwhim Commune had gotten. I gave him a lift off the asteroid. Said he’d been there close to three centuries. He’d lie there on the tidally locked side, contorted in prayer to Fellwhim. The Wrot must have heard him as wreck after wreck came drifting out of the void laden with supplies.It was a good eighty-four hours until we could make port on the other side of the tenebrink. Poor fella looked like he could use some rest. Seemed confused when I offered him my sarcophagus. Didn’t know what it was.Made in Arorar, out in the Lorn supercluster. Wound up there by mistake, actually. Odo lens I was using had a crack in it. Telemetry got refracted, hurled me lightyears past the target system. Cosmic alignment was so warped I skipped off the Oneiric Plane. Got real messed up along the way.Woke up under iridescence. Brilliant pinks and violets. Shapes were huddled around me holding rings and crudely hewn stones. I was strapped to a table made of volcanic glass. One of them held a ring to my forehead. I blacked out again.The abbot leaned forward. “Sarcophagus” is the best translation for what I woke up in. They were in the middle of a death rite when they found my ship. They tried but I was too far gone. Put me in the coffin with their dead, fearing I would be alone on the road to my afterlife.“You’re not dead,” the abbot said. Nope. Got locked in a box with a strange corpse for company. What came out was—well…Woke up that night, abbot standing over the sarcophagus, twisted in prayer. His arms wrapped around his head, his fingers bifurcated creating a mask over his eyes. The sign of abomination. Something slammed into the ship. Hamark scattered on the floor, Zery smacked her head and dropped. Now I was made.The abbot began chanting. Another collision. The sarcophagus is bolted down. Pulled Hamark and Zery inside, hit the emergency airlock release, and closed the lid.Have to steer clear of the Fellwhim Commune along with the Zortic and Astrum. Gotta lie low when you offend the gods.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I’ve been alive long enough to remember when Corvisites were a galactic panic. Hurus and politicians, Priests and Wrots said they would be the end of the Continuum. That in a thousand years we’d all be drowning in nano-particles.I was on the other side of the Drelneigh Quadrant when the first ones appeared on Plaxis. Of course there was a huge push to try to use them for something. Industrial decomposition, synaptic repair, hell, even entertainment. Had a Nelgani technopath try to explain them to me once but I never had much head for that stuff. Bottom line is, no one could figure out how to replicate the base crystal Corvisites use. Of course, by that time, they were in everything on the planet save outgoing ships. In the span of a few months they had integrated into the Plaxis ecosystems. A few years after that they started reshaping them.Whole planet is dusted yellow now with striations in the atmosphere. Later I learned those were jetstreams. The Corvisites had weather engineered the seasons out of the meteorology. The little machines had fine tuned their own production.Ambassadors tried making contact but the little things seemed to prefer their own company. A couple strands broke off, making their own way in the Continuum. A mico-colony short the typical full sixty billion complement, lives with me on the ship. I call ‘em Hamark.All the worry about them spreading never amounted much. Seems culturally taboo amongst them to replicate unscrupulously off world. They’ll find a nice nook somewhere and hold up. Ghost ships, a couple natural satellites, some in symbiosis. Human and Orware physiology seems to work well. Corvitals we call ‘em. Make these golden exoskeleton for themselves. And their eyes disappear, vestigial sensory organs I’d guess.I drop by Plaxis every decade or so. Hamark likes to keep tabs on their kin. They used to go down to the surface but you can’t do that no more. Atmosphere holds suspended, ambient aluminum particles at 137 parts per million. No wires, just raw power surging through the air. A mess of storms following latitude lines. Makes it hard to go on or off world. The grid is ubiquitous, omnipresent, but as Hamark pointed out, a grid can also be a cage.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Shimmer Fly. I once was either unlucky or fortunate enough, depending who you ask, to get caught in the Cascade. Thousands of nests take to space, born aloft by biogenic balloons expanding from thermogenesis. This time, the dorsal sacks on a Shimmer caught my port-side stabilizer and I was along for the ride.Once gave a lift to a celestorian off of Vikoor 6. She could talk. So can the Fly. I made my apologies to the Shimmer, Ohulumon, my ship was adjoined to. For their part they enjoyed the company. Apparently Shimmer don’t talk much once the Cascade starts. That celestorian loved to talk about the Shimmer Fly. Whole life devoted to them. Even made friends during her long-term observations from previous Cascades. Says they only happen once every fifty galactic revolutions and can last for years.Ohulumon and I settled in. We killed time talking space, love, life, food, and friends. Ohulumon was young by Shimmer standards. Cascade came earlier in life for them. Described it like a longing, an urge, that one day you look up at the firmament and your body starts changing.The celestorian said as much when I was shuttling her around. Said Shimmer don’t have a stage of maturity. They why, I asked her, do they migrate in the Cascade?I asked Ohulumon that. Where were they all going? A warm place they said. You’re surrounded on all sides by this glow and you can’t feel no pain, no worry, no regrets. Their journey to paradise.As we traveled, Ohulumon started getting smaller. All the Shimmer began shrinking. Not just that, but regressing. Backlit by the suns of many systems, they warped and bent and folded down into primitive things.Why do they migrate in the Cascade? I asked the celestorian. Because they are returning, they told me.Ohulumon started forgetting words. Couldn’t understand ideas. First complex then any at all. Smaller and smaller. Soon they were hanging onto my ship instead of the other way around, an infant on the wing. Before long I was drifting in a cloud of embryos that began bonding, fertilizing each other in the cradle of the cosmos. The new from the old.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I wound up in the debt books of a Wrot named Trekia Avantis. Wasn’t the first time I’d owed a favor to one of them. I expected something dangerous, reckless, maybe even stupid as part of their request. I went out to the Commune of Avantis’s temple and spoke to their priestess. All she handed me was a sealed soul box, a truncated hexahedron made of silver wood and engraved with all kinds of faces–human faces, Glatchian faces, Morobian, Dexikai, Lamorae, all of them with an expression of someone in awe. Or panic.The lens telemetry sent me way out past the Agora Quadrant, past the Gipsum Formations, beyond Gates of Hellis. Way out there. It was a rogue planet, the size of a gas giant but solid. Pharaoh charms around my necks to help with the extra gravity, I stepped off into a forest. Something in the atmosphere amplified the star light. The trees didn’t have leaves. The things were black, legs and roots encrusted into the bark. Symbiotic and asleep here away from all the daylight in the universe. They hummed. A soft, discordant sound echoed by the box between my hands.There was no path. Space unfolded before me, telescoping down a lane, like looking through a set of mirrors until I had them all aligned, an ever repeating promenade of of silver and silhouette trunks stretching out from me . There at the end was a single stump, a tree felled long ago.Obsidian, rent in two at the base and joined at the top, it stood no higher than my hip. I stepped before it and the leaves that weren’t stirred in their slumber. Weak astral light coalesce at my feet like witnesses called forth. The faces on the soul box closed their mouths and watched me as I set it on the burned stump. Then a hush save that hum. Something clicked and turned inside the box. It began to open. Never before or since in my life have I felt such a strong instinct to look away. That whatever was in there was not for me.The return to my ship was orphic. I never once looked back.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I must confess Adaxerxes is one of my more frequent stops. No shame if you’ve never heard of it. You buy an atlas from a Ugrian outpost and it’ll have the names of everything else in the quadrant. Just not that.Nothing remarkable there. Adxerxians don’t like to advertise. Small fellas, maybe sixty centimeters. Mostly alpine mountains watered with acid rain. PH of the whole planet is skewed that way. Couple friends there always like to make fun of my poncho when I visit. Ship gets a deep clean just from the ambient phosphoric acid. I like to chew chalk walking around to cut down on the effects. People call out to me on the street saying “Grimgag” which roughly translates to “he with a busy jaw.”Patina clouds drizzle copper sulfate coloring all the cooking fires turquoise. The locals like the catch spiced. I’ve grown a taste for it over the years but Kenigan likes to poke fun at how much I need to drink to cut heat.Behind the village are the Xerdika Mountains. Razor thin peaks tall enough to brush the limits of space. Only thing up there are the herjack spores. In what passes for summer on Adaxerxes you can see the capsules burst. The spores aloft are a flotilla of gold and bronze. Some drift down into the valley smelling as sweet as pepper flora. I remember the first time. Kenegin’s brother, Kehigai, woke me up at midnight, didn’t tell me where we were going, handed me a pack and started marching. We climbed so high the air got thin. Kehigai finally sat us down on an outcropping. The unhurried dawn started creeping up on us. Herjacks behind us started popping and the binary sunrise kissed the horizon. Frozen acid in the air turned the sky aqua-marine. Rays like fingers reach out and all of a sudden we’re in a glowing world. The spores dancing in the new day sun.When communes or Wrots or anyone asks why I’m on Adaxerxes so much, I tell them it’s an obligation. I do my best to make it as dry as possible. Maybe that way those precious sunrises can still belong to Kenegin and her family thousands of years from now.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Nebula Regina. It’s a colorful and vibrant quadrant. If you want to get to the Magi, that’s your only door. Odo Lenses can't penetrate the helium and hydrogen so you have to go slow. Visibility is blind and your sensors are worse. Intuition is your best friend in there. And fear.Local wisdom credits all the lost pilgrim ships to pirates, marauders, and occultists hiding in those elemental folds. I don’t think many people realize the Regina has claimed as many of them as the pilgrims reaching for their precious Magi.I’ve only made the run three times over the millennia. It’s quiet inside the nebula, undulating waves of background radiation, static, and paranoia. There’s something to your left, but of course there isn’t. Behind you is the faintest of pings on the sensors, but it’s only a glitch. You hear voices in the static on your coms, and strange feelings come through if you tap the psychic stream. Then comes the Second Fold.Regina has two layers. The first is easy enough if you don’t lose your nerve. Between is a gap of maybe six hundred kilometers. Star light, UV, infrared, gamma, can't get through. The only time I can turn my radio on and not even static plays. You’re on your own for the next part. Grey and brown, it falls like rain down from Linear Y; a wall of silt in a river and you’re one unlucky fish.You push through and then you feel nothing. A numbness. You step down inside the veil, your self awareness leaves you. You’re a body in a tin can with a few extra tricks floating through dark sludge. And you’re not alone. Asteroids pass by in the murky space littered with vitro-plastic shrapnel. Flotsam and jetsam. From the craters something grows. They’re shapes mostly. Large, amorphous things. Bulbous and tendrilled.The commune on Zai claims they’re part of the Magi’s garden. Magi don’t have a garden. On the other side of Regina is a dusty planet full of fossils piled high with the bones of pilgrims, the skulls of their mystics saints at the base.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]There’s a data scrawl wrapped in a dried skin binding beside my bed. The first dreams in there are pitiful things. I’ve tried selling them but no mediums will pay. I thought of hanging them up as tourist curios, but then again they were dreams of ugly things.There’s a couple gaps in the data scrawl. I sometimes wonder what they’ve birthed. Unfettered to my head, they’ve gone off, radiating away in the void. Get enough of that gathered in one place and things start to climb through from the other side. I’ve seen a couple doorways open. Iridescent holes in space. Sometimes it’s a curtain, a hatch, a mouth, a wound. Anything that can let something pass through.Then they come crawling out. Little pieces here and there, but I can tell they belong to something bigger on the other side. It just can’t quite fit through. Maybe if they had more time, but the breaches shut quick. It cuts off parts of them. Wriggling, squirming, they pupate into smaller critters. Ticks.You see them on the bodies of stars with a Wrot Worm gestating inside. You can see the lines of Hod getting sucked out of the Star Womb if you use a coronagraph. Milk-white bleeding from a proto-god. The communes hate to see it, of course. I was on Yuush-Vidal when they tried to cleanse their Wrot. They took off their skin, washing themselves in oils and ashes. The stuff set like stone, growing harder around their bodies, seeping into their muscles and lungs. Soon I was standing in a field of columns. Like a cloud, their Will and Agency gathered overhead. Some wind born out of fate carried out to their star covered in those dream-born ticks. You can’t hear in space, but everything vibrated. The entire solar system whited out as the Wrot awake and scattered the ticks.One caught a ride on my ship, probing through the vitro-plastic steel of the hull into my sarcophagus. I woke right before I latched on, eyes and mandibles, in my face. Then that iron ball from Calradio started glowing. The tick screams, starts ripping itself apart. Ain’t no blood and guts inside, just more light until that too was gone.

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]It’s hard to forget the thin turquoise atmosphere there.  It was so thin the stars would wink bleary eyed in the daylight. Or what passed for it in that place. All the oxygen on the Calradia moons has been used by the wandering factories on the surface. Large machinaliths plow the rusty soil leaving entrenchments twenty kilometers wide across the lunar surface. Unmoving white metal bones claw out from beneath the burnished clay, the skeletal sisters of the roaming behemoths who pass by those graves, grinding, clattering, leaving.From a distance I would watch them against the setting lights of the neutron star, the system’s only claim to a sun. Ether-Shrikes would camp in the hovels of those giant remains. I feel sorry for those immortal bastards. One was a survivor of the Gashian Plague judging from the scars on her face, but that was long before my time. Not enough O2 for a fire so we huddled around a pit of exothermic acid during the frosty 16 hour nights. The Shrikes would tell stories. One said Calradia was a marvelous planet in the previous age.  In the distance, whatever powered those escarpments exhausted itself. It fell, like a man into his grave. Thirty leagues away, my teeth shook in my skull, and a haboob of blood red sand writhed out from under the collapsing titan. You can see those dust clouds from orbit along with the craters that pocket the surface, massive and symmetrical. The mountains have beveled edges, the valleys machined grooves. Hollow shadows drag after the escarpments as they trawl the surface below. Millions of them. Dust and echoes in pale steel sunset.I once went back out of curiosity years later. The Moon was gone. Nothing more than a wrought ball of cold iron no bigger than two fists. What little had held those roaming machine-scapes to the ground had at last given them up to the stars. In the centuries since, I’ve never found any of them out in the void. I keep the iron ball on my ship. Not sure why. Maybe because I know it doesn’t really belong to me. Maybe I’m holding onto it because someday, somewhere out there, I can give it.