John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

The great yawning gulf of sleep tugged at him. Wait. Had he programmed his nanomachine lining to keep him alive while he slept? For a panicky moment (and how strange it was to feel true panic again, now that his emotion buffers were erased!) Phaethon wondered if he had accidentally erased the sending and receiving system that allowed him to communicate with his nanomachinery suit lining. But no; the circuits had merely been indexed through an automatic secretarial program which was now erased. His suit-lining functions were still intact, even if he no longer had automatic help to manipulate them.

Then, unconsciousness.

And, at last, a clear dream came.

It was a nightmare.

In the dream, he saw a black sun rising over an airless wasteland of fused and broken rock, craters ringed with jaws like broken glass. The ground had been fused by powerful radiation. Dry riverbeds scarred the land. On the too-near horizon, volcanoes produced by prodigious gravitic tides, and massive core turbulence, vented flaming gas and molten metal with pressure enough to send particles into orbit. And yet there was something familiar about this surface, something too regular and too symmetrical to be natural. Two lines of black pyramids, geometrically straight, ran in double ranks to the horizon and beyond.

The black sun was surrounded by a disk of gas, which it wore like some mockery of Saturn's many-colored rings of ice. A mockery, for this accretion disk was a ring of hazy fire and snarled gray dust, trembling with electrical discharges whenever atoms were stripped of their outer electron shells as they plunged toward the surface of the black sun and were torn apart by tidal forces. Nucleonic particles, traveling at near-light speeds and striking the surface obliquely, were sheared in two; half the particle falling into blackness and the other half liberated as pure radiation. Subatomic particles, when they were sheared in two by similar forces at the surface, broke up into their short-lived and very strange constituents, things not normally seen in nature, magnetic monopoles and half-quarks.

The surface itself was not visible, except as a silhouette against the corona created by these radiation discharges. And the continuous shower of energy from this corona was Doppler-shifted far into blood-red as it straggled to escape the immense gravity well.

But it was not a surface; it was an event horizon. The object looming in the sky was a singularity. It was a black hole in space; crushed beyond the density of neutronium by its own mass.

In the dream, he (or, rather, whatever dream-persona he was playing) stooped to scrape the blasted surface of the wasteland with his hand. Beneath a thin and bloody layer of crust he had found the adamantium surface of a hull. All around him, the landscape took on a new aspect. What had seemed volcanoes were piled debris accumulating around broken air locks; what had seemed dry riverbeds to his left and right now were the crusted tracks where railguns once had rested; the regular lines of stumps and outcroppings became the accumulators, antennae, and docking rings of the star-colony hull on which he stood.

The bits of crust in his fingers were dried blood. Tiny fragments of bone and dried gore and brain-stuff trickled through his fingers, mummified by vacuum and radiation. This packed substance, the dry residue of uncounted millions of corpses, went all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see.

Where the crust of blood was pulled up, shone a segment of hull. In the hull was a thought-port. He had held a jack from his gauntlet to that port, seeking whatever local ship-mind record might have survived.

The record unfolded, and the dream changed to images of horror. He saw a great city in space, peopled with philosophers and savants from the Fifth Era, an elegant and adventurous race, strolling along wide boulevards, leaning from the tiers of graceful cafes and thought-shops, minds entwined in a well-choreographed harmony of several Compositions, one for each of the neuroforms, Warlocks, Cerebellines, Invariants, and Basics.

Then he saw the lights go dark, the air fall still. Nanomachine substances, pouring like black oil, came out from walls, bubbling up from floors. Some of the well-dressed savants threw themselves into the surface willingly; others with grim resignation; others were pushed.

Bald men in white robes and armor, Invariants all, armed themselves with cutting-torches and modified communication lasers, and made a last stand in a sea of rising black filth. The black material formed clouds and waves of swarming semiorganic material to overwhelm them; the men fought calmly, with machine-like precision, and, at the moment when defeat became mathematically certain, with no change of expression or sign of fear, they methodically turned their weapons against themselves and slew each other.

The black corruption spread. It flooded streets; it reached into windows; it sought out hiding places.

Lovers embracing were drenched by waves of the substance, and clung to each other as they sank, their flesh dissolving, their limbs and faces melting into each other. Mothers with babies in their arms tried to shield their infants as black waves swallowed them, and one watched in horror as the little child, limbs waving, was absorbed back into her own melting flesh. Whoever was thrown into the substance began to dissolve, limbs and organs floating free as they were assimilated, snake nests of wires reaching into their severed heads, thrusting with spasmodic jerks up the holes in their torn necks, till the material bonded to their brains.

The black substance grew more active and more clever in its attacks the more victims it absorbed. The most intimate knowledge of captured loved ones was used to deceive those still at large into touching the black goo. Private data systems were overwhelmed and their secrets plundered. If one group member in a composition was caught, he found, to his horror, his unguarded thoughts betraying his fellows.

The city soon was entirely bathed in blackness. In this ocean of material, human brains floated, helpless and disembodied, the balls of their eyes still connected by nerve fibers to their forebrains. The brains were opening and unraveling. Layer by layer of cortex material, still intact, was now interconnecting all the disembodied people with strands and webs of nervous tissue, to form one huge homogenous mass.

Black tentacles reached from the substance, rose and formed the twin lines of black pyramids on the dark side of the space city, the side facing the singularity, and created a series of noumenal thought-antennae. Now, above the apex of each pyramid, in orbit there hovered a rapidly spinning ring of crystallized neutronium pseudomatter, rotating at near-light speed. Gravitic distortions appeared at the hubs of each disk. The pyramids hummed with power; in the dream, he heard a million screams of utmost panic and despair; and the thought-information, the living souls, of all those helpless people, was beamed through those disk hubs and then down into the event horizon of the black hole.

Whatever is sent into a black hole does not emerge again.

In the dream, one who seemed to be himself now turned, overwhelmed in fear and horror, and opened deep channels in his mind. He uttered the secret commands, the codes and combinations needed to open wide space in the mentality to hold his message, to warn other colonies and planets, as many people as he could at once.

But it was all in vain. The blood he had touched had contaminated his glove and hand and nervous system. His thoughts were twisted into strange shapes. With dark exaltations he rejoiced at how he had been tricked, how he was now to be absorbed. He smiled, as his flesh dissolved into the black muck at his feet, to think of how his attempted warning, broadcast so far and wide, would carry viruses destroying the very ones he had, a moment before, desired to save.