Peter Hamilton - Reality Dysfunction - Emergence

I’m on my way, Father.

The Ly-cilph moved its identity focus between Quinn Dexter and Powel Manani, extending its perception field around all the people in the cramped jungle clearing. It couldn’t quite read individual thoughts, not yet, the complexity of human synaptic discharges would take some time to unravel and catalogue, but their brains’ emotional content was plain enough.

The emotional polarity between Quinn Dexter and Powel Manani was enormous; one triumphant and elated, life loving; the other defeated and withdrawn, willing death to come quickly. It mirrored their religious traits, the diametric opposition.

Right out on the fringe of awareness, the Ly-cilph could detect a minute transmission of energy from Powel Manani into Quinn Dexter. It came from the basic energistic force which pervaded every living cell. This kind of transference was extraordinarily rare in corporeal entities. And Quinn Dexter seemed to be aware of it at some fundamental level, he possessed an energistic sense far superior to that of the priest. To Quinn Dexter the black mass sacrifices were a lot more than an empty ritual of worship, they generated a weighty expectation in his mind, confirming his belief. The Ly-cilph watched the sensation growing inside him, and waited with every perceptive faculty extended eagerly to record the phenomenon.

“When the false lord leads his legions away into oblivion, we will be here,” Quinn said.

“We will be here,” the Ivets repeated.

“When You bring light into the darkness, we will be here.”

“We will be here.”

“When time ends, and space collapses into itself, we will be here.”

“We will be here.”

Quinn reached out with the fission blade. He pushed the tip into Powel Manani’s groin, just above the root of his penis. Skin sizzled as the blade sank in, pubic hair singed and shrivelled. Powel clenched his teeth, neck muscles bulging out like ropes as he struggled against the scream. Quinn began to saw the blade down through the supervisor’s abdomen.

“This is our sacrament to You, Lord,” Quinn said. “We have freed our serpents, we are the beast we were made. We are real. Accept this life as a token of our love and devotion.” The knife reached Powel’s navel, ribbons of blood were pouring out of the wound. Quinn watched the scarlet liquid mat the man’s thick body hair, experiencing a fierce delight. “Give us Your strength, Lord, help us defeat Your enemies.” The dark joy of the serpent beast had never been so good before; he felt intoxicated. Every cell in his body vibrated with euphoria. “Show us, Lord!” he cried. “Speak to us!”

Powel Manani was dying. The Ly-cilph observed the swirl of energistic patterns raging throughout his body. A small discharge crackled into Quinn, where it was hungrily absorbed, raising the Ivet’s mental rapture to greater heights. The remainder of Powel’s life energy dwindled, but its dissipation wasn’t entirely entropic, a minute fraction flowed away through some kind of arcane dimensional twist. The Ly-cilph was fascinated, this ceremony was releasing an incredible wealth of knowledge; it had never attuned itself to an entity’s death so pervasively before in all its terrible length of being.

It inserted itself into the energy flow from Manani’s cells, tracing it between the neat folds of quantum reality, and finding itself emerging in a continuum it had no prior conception of: an energistic vacuum. A void as daunting to it as space was to a naked human. Retaining cohesion in such an environment was inordinately difficult, it had to contract its density to prevent flares of self-energy from streaming away like cometary volatiles. Once it had stabilized its internal structure, the Ly-cilph opened its perception field wide. It wasn’t alone.

Ill-focused swirls of information raced through this foreign void, similar in nature to the Ly-cilph’s own memory facility. They were separate entities, it was sure, though they continually mingled themselves, interpenetrating then diverging. The Ly-cilph observed the alien mentalities cluster around the boundary zone of its identity focus. Delicate wisps of radiation stroked it, bringing a multitude of impossibly jumbled images. It assembled a standardized identity and interpretation message and broadcast it on the same radiation bands they were using. Horrifyingly, instead of responding, the aliens penetrated its boundary.

The Ly-cilph fought to retain its fundamental integrity as its thought routines were violated and subsumed by the incursive alien mentalities. But there were too many of them to block. It started to lose control of its functions; the perception field contracted, access to the vast repository of stored knowledge began to falter, it was unable to move. They began to alter its internal energy structure, opening a wide channel between their empty continuum and spacetime. Patterns started to surge back through the dimensional twist, strands of raw memory using the Ly-cilph as a conduit, seeking a specific physical matrix in which they could operate.

It was a monstrous usurpation, one which contravened the Ly-cilph’s most intrinsic nature. The alien mentalities were forcing it to participate in the flux of events which ordered the universe, to interfere. There was only one option left. It stored itself. Thought processes and immediate memory were loaded into the macro-data lattice. The active functions ceased to exist.

The Ly-cilph would hang in stasis between the two variant continua until it was discovered and re-animated by one of its own kind. The chance of that discovery before the universe ended was infinitesimal, but time was of no consequence to a Ly-cilph. It had done all it could.

Thirty metres away from the Ivets and Powel Manani, Horst Elwes crept through the undergrowth, drawn by the low chanting voices. The trail of broken vines and torn leaves leading away from the dead horse had been absurdly easy to follow even in the last flickers of fading sunlight. It was as though Quinn didn’t care who found them.

Night had fallen with bewildering suddenness after Horst left the track, and the jungle had constricted ominously around him. Blackness assumed the quality of a thin liquid. He was drowning in it.

Then he heard the grating voices, the truculent incantation. The voices of frightened people.

A spark of yellow light bobbed between the trees ahead of him. He pressed himself against a big qualtook trunk, and peered round. Quinn sank the fission blade into Powel Manani’s prostrate body.

Horst gasped, and crossed himself. “Lord, receive Your son—”

The demon sprite flared like a miniature nova between Quinn and Powel, turning the jungle to a lurid crimson all around. It was pulsing in a mockery of organic life. Incandescent webs of vermilion light crawled over Quinn like icy flames.

Horst clung to the tree, beyond both terror and hope. None of the Ivets had even noticed the manifestation. Except for Quinn. Quinn was smiling with orgasmic joy.

When the rapture reached an almost unbearable peak, Quinn heard the voices. They came from inside his head, similar to the fractured whispers which dream chimeras uttered. But these grew louder, entire words rising out of the clamorous babble. He saw light arise before him, a scarlet aureole that cloaked Powel’s body. Right at the heart there was a crevice of absolute darkness.

Quinn stretched out his arms towards the empty tear in space. “My Lord! You are come!”

The multitude of voices came together. “Is the darkness what you crave, Quinn?” they asked in unison.

“Yes, oh yes.”

“We are of the dark, Quinn. Aeons we have spent here, seeking one such as you.”

“I am yours, Lord.”

“Welcome us, Quinn.”

“I do. Bring me the Night, Lord.”