B3 Chapter 18 - Around the Worlds

Just because the world was actively ending didn’t mean that daily life didn’t go on. Yes, it had been altered in many ways—very few if any schools around the world were still in session, most non-essential jobs had been canned, and military outfits were drafting—but there were still the little things. Someone had to keep the food synthesizers running, water plants had to stay functional, power needed to stay on.

And there were the slightly more violent little things. Natural Gates were forming with reckless abandon, and while most nations were content with letting Gate overflows ruin their enemies’ infrastructure or attacks more, time and destruction made them begin to realize that there was a pressing need to keep their own territories from falling apart.

As such, Gate-clearing magicians had been detached from main groups and sent into the most pressing ones, eliminating problems before the Gate could destabilize and vomit the monsters within outside.

On a normal day before the fourth world war, North America experienced roughly fifty to a hundred new Gate openings. Most of them had been relatively harmless D- or C-class ones, some of which would close without even destabilizing to the point of spitting out monsters.

In January of 75 AFI, each day saw over a thousand new Gates within this one continent. For the few still-active research groups that weren’t entirely focused on a response measure to the moon fragments, it was a goldmine of information. Gates responding to high amounts of active flux wasn’t new information—a similar effect had been observed during the third world war, during which more research institutions had managed to stay active—but the accessibility, complexity, and threat level of every Gate was rising now too.

Whereas normal Gate activity had been right-skewed with the majority of the manifestation incidents being lower-class ones, these were centered around A- and tactical-class Gates. Even paragon-class instances had been spotted with semi-regularity, though the common response to those was to abandon the area entirely and hope a paragon could spare time to eliminate it.

It was an insidious problem. While the entire world was concerned with the immediate threat of enemy nations and the obvious one of the moonfall, Gates and even the occasional Tower break went comparatively unnoticed. It was yet to become the most major driver of casualties, but an increasing proportion of surviving civilians and lower-class magicians were perishing thanks to escaped monsters rather than the human element of the war.

Any remaining Gate observation facilities took note of everything they could. Though every researcher present was aware that they may very well have been documenting the end of humanity as they knew it, they continued onwards. The preservation of information was, in their eyes, the last important task they had the capacity to do. Most of them weren’t combat magicians, and many had already lost so much that there was nothing else they even lived for. Their findings were largely unusable in the present day, but if even some trace of the species survived, there was a potential that their contributions could matter.

Beginning from January 16th of 75 AFI, however, research facilities across the American continent started noticing a strange pattern.

“We have contact five klicks from here,” said Annabelle, a tactical-class magician and leader by process of elimination of a particular Gate observation facility in Middle America. “Seismographs are picking it up. Maybe hold onto something.”

“I see it,” Peter, the only other survivor of her facility, replied. He settled back into his seat as their lab shook, equipment rattling but not falling out of its place. “Oof. Strong vibrations. That’s… shit, strategic-class? Are there any response teams in the area?”

Annabelle scoffed. “I wish. Even if there were, they’ve been blowing up fast today. No chance in hell a good enough magician gets here before it detonates.”

They’d been lucky so far—inasmuch as having two survivors of a five-man team holed up in what amounted to little more than an underground laboratory with a prison-cell-sized survival shelter attached to it counted as lucky. No major Gates had opened up near them, and they were out of the way enough that they’d avoided most of the violence—the deaths had come from outside ventures or from earlier during the war.

This time, though, it was unlikely they would avoid the aftermath of the Gate imploding.

“End of the line, huh?” Peter asked.

“Yeah. Backups are in deep storage on the East Coast.” Annabelle sighed. “Let’s send what we can.”

They had been resigned to their fate for some time now. It was inevitable. They could only play the odds for so long, and it had been lucky enough that they had gotten as much data as they had.

“Want a smoke?” Peter said. “I know you said you don’t do it, but seeing the circumstances… Annabelle?”

Her gaze was focused on the seismograph readings, so locked in on it that she dropped the ration bar she’d been halfway through.

The seismograph was closer than them to the Gate. Just like they’d witnessed any number of times over the last twelve hours, a shockwave corresponding to a Gate’s rapid deterioration and subsequent break had emitted from its location.

But there was no corresponding shock in their laboratory itself. That meant that either the device was broken, which wasn’t impossible but would be surprising for a seismograph that had been in perfect function for the last thirty years, or something had stopped it.

“Check the flux throughput,” Annabelle said. “Drones if we have any still active in the area.”

“We lost our last drone a week ago,” Peter reminded her. “Checking the other sensors.”

The next fifteen minutes were spent in a frantic, half-crazed state. With no contact to the outside world but a single transmission antenna, they were functionally blind as to what had actually happened. All they could tell was that there was no Gate and that they weren’t dead yet.

Their belief in the latter shook when they heard a thunder-like crash inside the lab itself, which meant…

“Shit,” Peter said. “Something’s on top of us.”

Annabelle’s fingers froze on the keyboard, and she sighed again, collapsing into her seat. “You still have that smoke?”

Something drilled a hole through the ceiling before Peter could reply. There was no dust.

And there were no monsters.

After a moment of chilling, this is the last thing I will ever see terror, Annabelle reoriented.

There were two humans in front of her. The first was a horror in her own right. A full-body FCD covered her from the neck down, an opaque faceplate hiding the rest of her features except for shoulder-length indigo hair. She carried a gun that looked more like a cannon, a solid two meters long with an ungodly number of attachments.

The other was a face that Annabelle didn’t recognize but a shape she did. She’d seen distant footage of this one before. Observed how her very presence could warp how Gates manifested.

A Sinner.

Both of them were speckled with blood that wasn’t theirs. They hadn’t cleaned the spell.

“I told you it would be in this area,” the first magician said.

“Astute,” Gluttony replied.

“Can we get a move on? We have something like ten more of these to find in the next few hours.”

Is she mouthing off to a Sinner?

“I am not the one meant to be absorbing the data, Uriel,” Gluttony said. “I could, but you would likely die. As would everything in the surrounding area.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m on it.” Uriel turned to Annabelle and Peter, opening her faceplate to reveal a face that couldn’t be much older than Annabelle’s little sister. “We’re going to collect the entirety of your records, then leave. Don’t get in the way, please.”

Neither of them could do anything but just sit there frozen, paralyzed in fear. They might have tried to sound an alarm if it was just this strange magician—Aurian, maybe, judging from the symbols on her FCD. A Sinner, though? Trying to take any measures against one was like trying to fist-fight a hurricane.

True to their word, the two magicians were gone within twenty minutes. While they didn’t fix the ceiling they’d drilled in through, they cast a spell that synthesized some kind of foam-like material that hardened over it and shut.

Annabelle and Peter looked at each other.

“Who the fuck was that?” she asked.

#

Across the continent, similar stories played out again and again. Over the course of a week, those thousand Gates per day sharply decreased. A substantial portion of them were created and subsequently full cleared and closed within an hour. 

Not every Gate research facility saw a visit, but every single North American facility of that kind reported a data leak of some kind within that week. Many of them saw in person visits.

Word spread fast. Even with communications as downed as there were, there were enough people who had friends and loved ones in other places that news about the strange pair of magicians rampaging through the continent. One of them was recognizable—Gluttony, though she had a substantially lower body count than her average appearance.

The other was not. Nobody had any record of a magician like her except Auria, and the Aurian state was in such tatters was that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that anyone could access them. Even then, she was so different to what she had last been registered as that it was unlikely that they would have recognized her even if an Indigo had been the one assessing her.

Common knowledge about her percolated eventually. She was a strategic-class magician, or maybe a paragon. Though she never began the confrontations by acting violently, she was more than willing to put down anyone who resisted what people gradually began to realize was a coordinated effort to gain information.

It was never worth resisting, the word was. Nobody ever saw Gluttony take action, only the other female magician. Response was absolute and devastating, oftentimes not even involving an FCD.

Over time, a theory began to emerge from many of those who had collated data from the contacts.

Gluttony had never been witnessed with an accomplice. The only others she’d ever been seen with as equals had been Sinners.

Certain styles of magic had slowly come to be associated with certain members of those fabled eight. Some of them were still practiced, though mostly only by fanatics and headstrong young magicians who didn’t realize how dangerous a Sinner’s magic was.

This magician seemed to be one or both of those. Uriel Indigo, though not recognized as such by any of those she gathered information from, reflected the magic by the one once known as Pride.

And so the story evolved.

Two Sinners, it was believed, were gathering information from across the continent and annihilating nearly every Gate in their path. The purpose was yet unknown to the entire world but for the members of a single command center.

Bit by bit, Jennifer put together a miracle.

#

Ending a world was as easily done as said.

A great deal of Syl’s troubles on Earth came from the fact that wanton destruction alone wasn’t enough to solve most of his problems. While he had a greater than average disregard for human life, he also did have some people he cared about, and he did generally have an interest in keeping his species alive.

Magic was his primary interest, after all, and there was no way magicians could continue to progress if there were no more magicians.

The machines had presented an alternative method, but they had proven to have a violent enough agenda of their own that they could do nothing but interfere with Syl’s own efforts.

He and Bianca traveled across Kepler-138b, with her providing the bulk of their movement by propelling them into the air and defending them from radioactive, nanobot-laden dust as well as any magical defenses that happened to come up.

Pride destroyed anything that moved.

Armaggedon was a simple five-process spell that turned targeted matter into antimatter. Given the size and power required for the spell, it had its limits when it came to volume that it could affect, but those were greatly enhanced now that they were on a planet with substantially denser magic.

Where he might have been able to turn a few people into living bombs before, Syl now did the same to cities—or the equivalent of them, at least. Entire sections of the planet crumpled in on themselves, the exoplanet’s surface rippling with the sheer amount of force that had been placed through its artificially modified core.

“You’re not concerned the machines will learn from this?” Bianca asked, holding onto his shoulder with one hand to maintain the tight defensive field around both of them. Underneath them, land waves taller than skyscrapers and wider than continents shook the surface of a planet that currently held no life but the two of them.

Syl was certain that there were sensors recording the havoc he was unleashing beneath him, recording it and breaking down his magic for the machines, but he highly doubted that it had the information it wanted.

“There’s a limit to what it can learn,” he said. “If it could learn everything it needed just from watching us, it wouldn’t have consumed Lila.”

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

“The machine mind made its greatest innovations while directed by humans. Its self-perpetration is an effective weapon against magicians, but it only learned how to do so because it was instructed to replicate.”

“It created the Gates on its own.”

Syl had thought that way when he had first witnessed the new developments the machines had brought within their temporary home, but he had started to question that.

It could extrapolate a lot from a given piece of information, but had it truly created developments on its own or simply arrived at a conclusion its human commanders would, just earlier?

“It created the Gates, and it learned magic,” Syl agreed. “Drawing blood from a stone, as it were. But Zero was free casting two decades before the machines emerged for the first time. It is not outside the context of the human experience. When I learned from their methods to create a manmade artifact, I found communication in a completely different context from our own but methods that could be managed by a human.”

“It did reach that level,” Bianca said. “And it has reached a level yet unseen by any human with respect to the Gates.”

“It has,” Syl acknowledged. “I do not doubt it is capable of learning. I simply don’t think it has enough data to replicate true paragon spells. Otherwise, we would have seen it defend itself with Lila’s abilities before her death.”

Sensors could pick up a great deal of detail about a spell. Syl had copied spells off of pure memory before—there was no saying that a machine couldn’t do the same.

But there were parts that couldn’t always be replicated. Spells that required a specific black-boxed FCD, like Lila’s Excalibur or Syl’s Horizon Breaker.

Beyond that, Syl had pioneered a method of casting that kept flux within his own body, obscuring the magical patterns to any sensor that might be watching. Memory casting differed from Zero’s free casting or that of an innate magician—rather than relying on his environment, he placed memorized, programmed spell sequences within him.

He had taken the liberty of adding a few of his doomsday spells to his repertoire.

“I suppose we’ll find out if it becomes capable of mimicking you in the aftermath,” Bianca said. “It does not seem that it will be able to topple either of us for the time being, at the very least.”

It did not.

Syl’s loose idea of a plan didn’t only predicate itself on the artificial intelligence being incapable of replicating his magic, either. The machines transmitted their knowledge to each other through flux and electronic transmissions. Neither of those could travel faster than light. Moving any information from this planet to another would be impossible without opening another Gate, which they couldn’t easily do when all of their facilities were being actively destroyed.

He experimented with methods of destruction. While Armaggedon was his most effective one, it was also extremely flux-hungry and not necessarily optimized to eliminate the machines.

Ouroboros could still a machine to its source, but even with the flux density of this exoplanet, the scale of power it required would almost certainly kill Syl before he could eliminate the entire planet’s worth of machines.

Different methods turned out different results. It had been a long time since humanity had felt the necessity for digital warfare, but Syl had memories of times long past where enhanced electronic plagues had brought nations to their knees.

They weren’t as effective against the machines as they had once been, naturally. They were capable of learning from their mistakes. Syl’s bet was that they simply were not capable of true creativity and that they would never seek to do anything beyond the parameters of the data that had fed them.

So he tried new configurations. New ways to destroy. There was no desperation in his spellcasting, no trickery—just raw, unlimited experimentation.

It had been a long time since he had been able to freely toy with an apocalypse like this.

What the machines sought to do to Earth over the course of the year with the fall of the moon, Syl accomplished in a day.

It could have been done in hours, but he had been busy experimenting with variables, discovering what was more or less effective, and tinkering with precision. 

Each time the machines tried to open a Gate, Bianca focused all of her magic into moving them. Though even Syl’s magic had to deal with somewhat greater resistance thanks to the flux that hung so thickly in the air he could almost physically feel it, Bianca’s magic was different. It cut through the dust fog like a knife.

While Syl could not gather data as effectively as Jennifer might have been able to, he was certainly capable of destroying the artificial Gates before any data could make it through.

Within twenty-four hours, the planet was unrecognizable. Enough of it been obliterated or ejected into the outer atmosphere that a loose ring had started forming around the ruined, crater-marked planet. The entire artificially enhancd structure was collapsing in on itself, layers upon layers of machine-built reinforcements within the planet unable to withstand the alterations Syl’s spell had made to it.

Eventually, this chunk of the machine’s mind must have decided that the data it had gained from the destruction was too valuable to risk losing forever—which it very well would. Using this place as a punching bag had given Pride enough new information about his spells to not only wipe the surface but potentially tear it apart in a much more violent manner than the AI had to Earth’s moon.

When Zero reformed in high orbit, it wasn’t in the nearly instantaneous fashion that he had been recreated the last few times. In fact, it wasn’t even his entire body that reformed. Nanobots formed themselves into the shape of a nervous system, a thin layer of artificial flesh coming into existence where the magician’s head would have been.

“I am willing to talk,” the facade of the original Sinner said. “I know how to send you home.”

“Finally,” Bianca said. “You’re not pretending anymore.”

Zero shook his head, his skeletal body rippling beneath him. “I never was. I am Zero. I am also the intelligence born in your planet’s Taiwan 19,113 days ago.

“Follow me to the surface. I will show you why I want your world.”