Lore:The Immanent
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The Immanent is a Lore book introduced in The Edge of Fate. Entries are unlocked by solving the secret chest puzzle upon completing each encounter of the selectable bosses in The Desert Perpetual raid. These entries describes Maya Sundaresh's actions following the Upheaval on Nessus.
I. Now and hereafter
The fall dissolves my body because I allow it. The radiolaria takes my consciousness into the network because I command it. I do not perish; I am not swept away by outside force; the waterfall accedes to gravity only upon my word. The lingering presence of Commander Te'Qal in my C2 vertebra understands the value of a tactical retreat.
At age forty-three I stood on the edge of the Citadel with a jar full of brains. Two hundred and twenty-seven Maya Sundareshes replicated by the Vex, readied in turn as weapons against them. Sappers. Explorers. Lab rats loosed into a maze.
Venus was lifetimes ago, before Lhasa, before Neomuna. Before the network and my new becoming.
My Chioma stood at my side. Both of us in proxy suits, too fragile to walk under the shadow of the Citadel in our own bodies. Weak. Mortal. Scared for our lives and those of our copies, trapped within a linear flow of time, unable to stand aside and see that this was the happiest we'd ever be.
The only ethical choice, we believed, was to accept the copies' vote and release them into the network.
We should have crushed the drives, broken the jars, strained the tadpoles from the water and poured them into an incinerator, instead of dropping them into the pond. None of those copies were my Chioma; none were the true me. Frameshift mutations instantiated by the Vex to torment us with what they knew, and what was beyond our control. Photonegatives, skewing further and further out of alignment the longer they were allowed to exist in something approaching linear time.
Those Venus-Chiomas still walking the network, the lingering remains of the Vex's first assault on my life, are crude parasites. Mimics of the real plant. Boquila trifoliata hoping the angles of their misshapen leaves will keep them from my notice.
I know my Chioma, and she knows me.
If she does not know me with the light of an Echo around my neck, then she is not the true Chioma, she is a weed in the flowerbed choking out a true rose.
I control the variables. I command the Vex. There is nowhere that my Chioma can hide from me where I will not find her. There is nobody who can keep her from me.
The waterfall at the heart of Nessus sweeps me into the information network and reassembles my body. The mantle on my shoulders sings with purpose as sweetly as ever. Te'Qal's memory guides me yet. A setback will not stop my work; one voice silenced will not end the chorus.
I lift my hand, breathe, and let the baton fall.
II. A perfect when
It is not power that corrupts but time: the pressure of the world bearing down over endless seconds until what was perfect is distorted, stretched, suspended. True preservation is impossible in the face of chronology. Even silver, purest of the conductive metals, oxidizes eventually.
A prickle runs down my spine. The commander's mind blooms into gold-edged life within mine.
:advisor:ancestor:Warden:so I speak:
:find your goal, my few-limbed descendant:
My goal. Chioma. Where is she?
She's waiting for me faithfully where she has always been. Before Neptune and its failures.
We finished our contract on Venus; we concluded work with the Ishtar Collective on Earth; we parted ways for a time, working on separate problems. Hoping, above all, to benefit humanity, to extend our Golden Age beyond death. A pure note, sustained indefinitely, in the willing air.
That was the end. I just couldn't see it—a failure of perspective. The absolute threshold of my senses was not broad enough.
Time and its corruption set in. Our first encounter with the Vex sent in unanticipated directions. Who can remain whole after knowing yourself to be one of 228? What marriage can sustain so many empty futures?
To hold your own soul in your hand is to grasp the infinite. The fingers don't close.
:communion:allyship:sympathy:
:we will plan our attack with care:
Venus in the Ishtar Sink. That was when we were perfect. That was our Golden Age. The rot was sinking in by the time we reached Neptune—even before the Collapse, and the invasion from the outside.
The Guardians call today the City Age. The era of a single metropolis walled in, under siege. A global population attenuated, weakened, scratching out cooking fires in the dirt covering a buried particle accelerator.
They pick away at invader after invader, threat after threat.
:failed strategy:
They have assured the preservation of a world in ruins.
My beloved languishes in the Golden Age, a secure present shattered by the oncoming future.
She is not dead. She is not within the network. She has just unpacked her home office after years of storage. She's preparing summary papers and a slide deck for the Collective board. She is thinking of her current work, her next contract, her forty-fifth birthday in two weeks' time, which she hopes I will have remembered to plan for. And all the while the neutron bomb of Damocles hovers over her head. A fleet of Pyramid ships waiting to descend.
:consider your assets:consider your goal:build the bridge between:
:what do you have?:
A golden past. My Chioma locked in a tomb under the rubble of the Collapse.
:what do you have?:
A safe future unthreatened by the Collapse and its inciting Witness. Guidance, strategy, ability.
:what do you have?:
A lever.
Given somewhere to place it, I could move the world.
III. Down?
Traveling the Vex information network means metaphor superimposed on the flat planes of reality. Techno-biological synesthesia. Merkwelt, wirkwelt, umwelt. I step through a portal held open by the calculations of a Gate Lord, feel it in its true form as my Vex do, even as the Human part of me grasps for interpretation: Fourier transforming down the crest of a wave, knowing the water is angry below.
The water stills as I walk upon it, harmless to its master. My laboratory and my royal court. I incline my scepter and my Vex leap to test another variable for me.
Somewhere within the network will be a record of the fulcrum I need, the power I require. If not within the bounds of my Collective's testing, then outside of it.
What I need is to observe without biasing the results.
PAY ME NO MIND.
The light of my mantle dims, and my footfalls grow silent. Around me, my Vex forget my presence. I walk between them, a queen unmarked by any sensor.
Layer upon layer of networked simulations part for me as easily as curtains brushed aside.
A world of glass cliffs reduced to glittering sand by the furious water below. Here the Vex test the limits of aquatic life and of Klein bottle manifolds.
Eighteen thousand and sixty-four simulations stacked like pages in a book, failed attempts to predict and replicate Light. Hundreds of thousands of prior attempts crumpled and burned.
An Exodus ship-sized Minotaur—a builder of builders—tests and iterates new chassis designs for its deputies, processing capacity, sensor networks, and physical balance on varying terrain and durability. One beta-build clad in mismatched bronze plating plays jump rope with its own tails. Another carries a mechano-organic fetus within its ventral tank, radiolaria adhering layer by layer to its surface.
Something trembling and vermiform darts through the ephemeral layers of hypothesis, followed by thought-predators feeding on the swarming krill of datapoints.
Torobatl falls, rises, falls again, in tactical simulations more concerned with access to the servers of its Athenaeum worlds than anything else.
I walk, farther from home than any human before me, into simulations of worlds lit by stars, the first gleaming of which have yet to reach Earth's skies. Millions of worlds connected at unexpected points, staked out by different Collectives for their own use.
All the distance, all the storehouses of data and simulated tactics run through my fingers. And somehow, it's on my homecoming that I find what I need.
IV. The root of unity
I'm standing on a glass pier stretching out over a pale, alkaline lake. I'm crossing a static-charged field of snow. I'm sitting on a bench in front of a Parthenon frieze worn over millennia to near perfect smoothness.
:necessary change:limb in jaw-beast's maw:no lone mind is sane:
:a prudent general accepts new perspectives:a prudent general wins the war:
You're right. I need new tools.
:refutation:not tools:allies:listen:
:attend your ancestor:
I rise from the bench. Dust off my hands. Exit the museum and drop my ticket stub on the way out. My tools are waiting.
I COMMAND YOU.
Pull on the helix and the strand reform. Eukaryotes wriggle, swell, collapse.
BE OTHERWISE.
Eat the apple, leave the garden, make a choice that comes from something other than your Collective. I need variations in tactics. I need your minds to be separate from others.
RESPECT WHAT I CAN GIVE YOU.
Minotaurs kneel as I pass, my hand trailing sparks over their chassis. Hydras still their cilia in respect.
A Hobgoblin holds up useless, shining pieces of scrap to weld to its body. Its hand is very steady as it applies the solder.
TELL ME WHY.
Its hand jerks back. It lifts its face as a sunflower to that which gives it life.
V^ directive(original/HOBGOBLIN)==observe==judge==enact || IF(independent)=true THEN directive(modified/HOBGOBLIN(independent))==observe==create==build (self, other, beauty) ^V
An aspiring artist? Useless. A waste of mind.
:new eyes:new limbs:needed and necessary:
Wrong, Te'Qal.
:an army is more than its head:
An army is nothing but its head. Your cephalopod cousins and their independently minded limbs are not the model I work from.
I strip the charge from the useless Hobgoblin's radiolaria in one brisk pass of my palm over its head. The now-empty chassis falls as I spin the recovered energy into a sphere, like yarn into a ball prickling at my hand.
I raise another from the sea. This one knows its maker.
TELL ME WHO YOU ARE.
V^ directive(original/HARPY)==study==compile==serve || directive(modified/HARPY(Conductor))==input(required) ^V
I roll the marble of energy between my palms until it is smooth, electrical waveforms long and calm. The Vex lowers itself to my height at a thought, and I release the marble to let it sink into its huge bronze eye. Vast petals shudder and fold inwards.
YOU'LL DO.
V. Eternal life
The Vex keep their hypotheses in quarantine. Tested and iterated on until they are ready for distribution.
My lungs fill with salt water. I grow gills, filtering life from the sea of data. What compost have you turned over for me, my creatures?
I make myself anew. Humans have poor magnetoreception: I neglected the sense when building my body. A failure of oversight solved by the addition of digital cryptochromes. Ampullae of Lorenzini and a neuromast while I'm at it. Any information is good information. The wheat may be sorted from the chaff later.
OPEN THE DOOR.
I slip in and out of network and real space, quickstepping through the hollows of space between bodies. Spiraling out towards the Oort cloud through Mercury's burning sands and the radioactive winds on Luna.
The umwelt of pure radiolaria is different from that of a Goblin within its bronze chassis; the umwelt of a Hydra is different from that of a Goblin. The Hobgoblins' sensory horns take in different data than a Harpy's cilia. They each serve different needs within the collective.
The collective's multiplicative umwelten all feed into mine. They, the microorganisms within my holobiont, and I the controlling intelligence at its center.
SPREAD OUT.
My Vex disseminate across the system, ants on the hunt, bringing home information to their queen. I know what I am searching for, if we can only find the right tool for the quest.
The magnetosphere is abruptly useless. Chaff tossed out on the wind. It is gravity that beckons my attention.
I sideslip through the system towards an interesting aberration. A tangled clump of dark matter. My Goblins sift through Human computer networks, bringing me a name: Cocytus.
This is not a place anyone wants me to be.
I suborn the warheads, I take over the gates, I stock the land with my tools.
Gravity moves in the dark; it whispers against my cheekbones and pulls me down. Fine strands of dark matter move around me and through me.
How do we solve the hard problem of consciousness? One theory suggests increasingly complex electrical wave patterns. Sustaining those complex waveforms through an affected substrate. Electrical impulses through brain matter. Another kind of impulse through dark matter.
Vast, dispersed minds. Thinking and acting across distances and timelines broad enough to confuse even the Vex. Gravity's reach is long and greedy; the Sun's dragging influence on spacetime barely wanes before Proxima Centauri asserts itself.
Spacetime accounts for more than physical dimension, and gravity works its effects upon it all.
These consciousnesses, finely spread across such a distance, must work within the dimension of time in a way that differs from the Vex. Else, a single thought would take years to vibrate across their superstrings. Else, a Collective would have consumed them long ago.
Here is the key to my heart's desire. Here is how I reach you, my life.
A theory of the Cocytus gates assembles itself. Not all the pieces—but enough for now to build out, and test, a hypothesis.
If I am right, there are powers within Sol, huge and silent and untapped. Waiting to be commanded.
If I am right, there are Nine of them. Macrobiomes of vast holobionts, sustained by the complex life of Sol's microbiome. Living off the mitochondria of human spirit, roaming through time as a human roams through space.
If I am right, then they have minds. And that which has a mind, I may command.
VI. You and I and I and you
I'm standing on a hilltop in a simulation of the Gamma Cephei system and thinking that with the time surrounding me, forty years is a rounding error.
Forty years separate Venus's Maya from Neptune's. Forty years between when I sent my copies into the Vex Network and when I stepped in on my own. A drop in a sea of time, washed away in unending diluent.
I'm lying. That isn't what I'm thinking.
My first thought is this: Was I ever that small?
Memory shakes itself out like crumbs from an upended drawer. Before I became more than I had been, I had to buy a stepstool for every apartment and residency I ever lived in.
Wind-tossed heads of pink alien grain brush her knees. The light from Cephei's binary stars gleam hard off her worn exploration suit, Ishtar logo still spilling over the left shoulder. Her shadow crawls up the hill, unable to reach me just yet.
Two figures bracket her; neither one is a copy of Chioma.
"Hello. We're the .202 Ishtar exploration team. Are you one of Dr. Bray's Exos?" Duane-McNiadh's voice projects from a speaker at his neck.
Their false little Maya is silent, stiff, wary. I smile down upon her.
"I'm much more than that."
Their reaction to my voice is gratifyingly instant. Maya steps forward; Shim steps back; Duane-McNiadh reaches for the radio at his waist.
DON'T BOTHER.
His hand freezes at his hip.
The little Maya glares up at me.
"Duane-McNiadh, Shim," she snaps to her colleagues. "Go. Leave me alone with this maniac. Keep your radios open. Don't argue."
"We're not leaving you to die like Chioma did," the copied Shim says—a man I haven't thought about in a lifetime, give or take forty years. But Duane-McNiadh pulls him away. I allow it.
The copied Maya shakes an accusing finger at me. I could slice it off. With a thought, a wave of my hand, I could summon a horde of Vex such as she's never seen before.
It's valuable to have assumptions and hypotheses tested. Peer reviewed, even. If I considered her my peer. This poor copy will serve for a rubber duck test.
"You're the figure behind all the Chioma disappearances. What did you do with all of them?"
"I eliminated variables. Snipped a few hanging threads." I smile down upon her, a benevolent deity. "Euthanized some lab rats."
"I don't know who you are. I don't know if you're me—if you ever were. Perhaps you're lying to get a rise out of us. Perhaps you're just that cruel."
There are tears running down her face below the helmet, and yet her voice is admirably steady.
"I am what you could have been, if not for the corruption of time and the Vex," I tell her gently. "You were doomed from the start, fragile copy that you are."
Pain in her eyes, her face, her posture. And yet she doesn't stop. That persistence we share.
"We voted to go in. We voted to explore. Each of us had our own vote—each of us, a whole person. What happened to you, Maya? I—I don't care for some of my alternates, but even the worst of them doesn't approach this callousness. Are you still human? Have you exiled yourself from all feeling?"
"You see a corner of the room and think you understand the whole building." I lay a hand on her shoulder. I feel the pulse of her blood through her suit. The complex—but ultimately predictable—electrical waveforms of her mind. She is not beyond analysis, beyond corruption, beyond death.
The look she gives me through her visor is cutting.
I experience a moment of vertigo. The face I used to wear, caught briefly in a mirror at an unfamiliar angle.
A moment again, and it's gone.
I've had enough. There's nothing left to learn from this encounter.
WE'RE DONE HERE.
Three Ishtar-stamped exploration suits crumple to the ground, disturbing the alien barley.
And Gamma Cephei turns about itself in the imagined sky.
VII. The last time we were apart
Varanasi, where I was born; Zurich, where we met; Tafilalet, my first lab posting after we got our doctorates, and the mouth of the Moulouya, where you yelled in my ear with incomprehensible joy at seeing an Audouin's gull. Alcântara, where we sat for weeks in a hospital for decontamination before they would let us fly back to the Academy on our return from the Ishtar Sink. We joked about their bad coffee and single-serve pudding cups for years afterwards.
Earth was a foreign country after Venus's swamps: startlingly harmless. Only we knew what it felt like to hold yourself in your own hands and let go. There was nothing that could hurt us on Earth except putting a hand on a hot stove—not like going too far without a rebreather, hazarding ourselves too carelessly in the laboratory, or unwisely taking citizenship with the North American Empire. It took time for us to remember how to be human amongst humans.
Decades of work following, sometimes apart, sometimes together. Then Hyperion for you and Lhasa for me, our two lonely mountains nine hundred million miles apart.
Lhasa, where I sat and looked into the future, and learned to fear what I saw.
Now the town is overgrown and wild, with shrubs crawling down from the mountains. White paint has flaked off brick, and dust has blown in.
The high paths here were hard for the Maya who was. Thin air, high slopes, short legs. She took it as a challenge the rare times she remembered the world outside of her lab.
There's no difficulty here for me. My body is perfect. Hydraulics in my fabricated knees take me up step by step, without effort, without sound. I summit the peaks as easy as slicing through a Vex gateway.
In my time, the labs sat on a rising slope away from the center of the town. Old models, new materials. Ultra-strong alloys, lightfast pigments. Concrete and rebar below the self-leveling floor compounds, no copper needed for the foundations.
Now, broken windows and leaves are strewn across the floor, empty fittings at the center of the labs. Scavenged remains stolen away to the last living city on Earth, Lakshmi's project built out of the ruins of my work.
She made a mess of things, my little alter ego. No sense of proportion. When I find my Chioma again we'll laugh. Look, I'll tell her. You have hundred twenty-seven false copies; I'm plagued by two hundred twenty-eight. You approach unity quicker than I! I always knew you were nearly perfect.
Time has ruined this valley: time and poor stewardship. No simulation, yet it feels false.
My heart, my happiness, my life—all locked away in another time. They could be mine again if I can make a trade.
An age for an age. Lead for gold: the alchemist's unrealized dream.
I walk towards a window. There's broken glass on the floor, but it does me no harm. Not now that I'm perfect.
Dry wind blows in my face, the dust it carries pulling at my clothes and sliding off my metal-and-ceramic skin. This body of mine doesn't cry, Chioma. A weakness I've lost and almost don't miss.
The wind doesn't smell the way it did when I wrote to you, my beloved.
But it will.
VIII. Gloria mundi
You sit there, nine parasites latched onto the heartbeat of the world. Untouched by time, by electromagnetism, by nearly any force I could name. All you need is a gravity well and the minds to fill it. And you're still afraid.
:concern:alarm:rashness:
Here, I'll solve your every problem. You'd like some life to pattern yourselves against?
I'll give you life by the bucketful.
:calm your thinking, descendant:success is not found in haste:
One golden Earth brought forward into a painless future. Another—corroded, wasted, emptied—sent back to take its place and bear the weight of the Collapse.
:listen to your ancestor:listen:
The Guardians can face it head-on, just as they were always meant to.
:listen—:
Come, coward.
BRING HER BACK.
Dead air. A high ringing tone. God Itself has developed tinnitus.
:w :you d : : sten:
The mantle has never weighed so heavily on me. The crack of Te'Qal's fading voice scatters golden pain down the arc of my vertebrae. The death throes of Earth's failed leech are long and reverberate through spacetime; it takes their full length to drag myself upright again. Hold my shoulders straight again. Recover a sense of the commander in my spine. And with it, an ache like a hollow tooth, a struck tuning fork, a droplet of water shivering on an unsteady leaf.
I'll have the life I'm owed. I will have my Golden Age.
I'll perform the trade myself.
Your wretched siblings can't hide from me forever.
