The Subsector Project

Caomer Subsector – Peclene – M–.—

  Time: For most beings, an eternal struggle, a limitation which cannot be circumvented. Even the Necron empire, supposedly freed from the price of their flesh, were degraded by their long hibernation. For the Unmoored, time was not a struggle, far from it, time was salvation.

Perhaps they had been just as vulnerable to the ravages of impermanence once. Age, community, biology, all seemed to ring a bell in the distant memories of their recording matrix. They could go check, it would not be difficult to ride the timeline back to the moment of technological transcendence, but such a journey would be arduous, and a retread of things they’d already seen.

When one has all the time in the universe, the idea of walking a path twice becomes anathema. They mused, sitting on the bridge of the craft, staring at the planet turning slowly in front of them through the elegant, alien prism of the bridge viewport. It was an arid, plateau-covered vista, with swirling white clouds in the upper atmosphere making subtle tangles and sheets with each passing day. Each new pattern was the result of a million swirling factors they ached to study, each pushing air in contorted waves around the troposphere.

It was truly exhilarating, simultaneously unremarkable on a galactic scale, yet a sight that could never bore them given the sheer magnitude of data. Indeed, they could sit in quiet contemplation like this for years, decades, millennia. Of course, they already had, and hadn’t, for all time and no time at all.

Equally, they had also never been to this planet, and had never even left the system they’d begun their study of the xenocraft, let alone lived uncounted impossible timelines since its discovery. They were also on the other side of the galaxy, and in another galaxy, and had been dead for tens of millions of years. They were at the end of the universe, in the impossible darkness which came next, their ship the only light in the pitched night of entropy, hanging like a blade above their every sensation and stimulus.

They were fractured across all time and all space, picking and choosing when and where they wanted to exist at any given moment. From the first time they enabled the temporal drive, to the last instant it could conceivably exist, space-time was their domain.

Yet the Unmoored couldn’t remember the last time it had seen another member of its race as more than distant shoals of racing lights. Memories faded, the bonded cognition of the vessel and its own cogitators were insufficient to keep all the lifetimes the entity had lived in accessible formats. It couldn’t remember the last time it had left the ship, or the last time it spoke, or the last time it saw its own reflection.

Perhaps something reflective exists on this bridge. It cast about momentarily, feeling its neck grind, like stones moving against stones, pistons unused to anything but stillness. It was cephelated, it realized. An important datapoint.

It had been a scientist once- that much even the interminable distance of time could not wipe away. Before its ascension beyond the confines of all mortal ken, it had served as-

The Unmoored paused. It realized it couldn’t remember. A vague word floated at the edge of its understanding: Magos. A name? A title? A race?

It felt a sensation rising in its body, a dull pounding in its withered torso where flesh fused to metallic insides. Sensation of any kind was rare, unique, it hadn’t been felt in a long time. But also, always. It reminded itself. It worked hard to keep the crushing duality of its thoughts from other timestreams, the constant stream of information from other versions of itself, separated.

Yet, its body had not been built for this, its brain had not been built for this despite repeated attempts and careful engineering. The Unmoored had thought itself to be ready to activate the device, but with creeping horror, began to realize how totally wrong it had been.

Words flooded back as the Unmoored stared down at the world before it. A strange sensation rose within it, unlike anything it had experienced in decades, horror.

Is this Mars? Where am I? When am I? A backup system engaged, flooding their brain with thoughts and memories which snapped back into place like they’d always been there. Simultaneously, the viewport flickered as the drive dashed time and space together, responding to the jumbled thoughts racing through its mind.

Mars. There it was, wreathed in the sparkling webs of orbital structures. Yet they were wrong, they were building golden fleets of vast warships unlike they had ever seen. A blink, and Mars was wreathed in dust and smoke. Again and it burned with fire, ringed by warships. Another, and the Unmoored was back over the planet it had first seen.

Not Mars.

Sweat glands had been one of the first things excised to upgrade its body, yet the Unmoored could feel a prickle on what swathes of skin remained to it, part of its torso and left arm. It had no way to know how long it had been on the xenos ship, if indeed such a referential timeframe had any meaning whatsoever.

For how many millennia have I wandered? How could such a thing be used by the Omnessiah in his war against the archenemy? How many times have I had these same thoughts, only for them to be stripped away by the flow of infinite knowledge?

The Unmoored- Magos, it was a Magos, of that it was sure, gripped the strange, angular arms of its command throne. It needed to control, to command. It needed to drown out the voices, the inputs, the other versions of itself which still threatened to overwhelm it. Timelines clashed in its brain, splashing colors and sounds like waves over its brain.

It strained, for a minute, for two, for ten million years, for five seconds. It felt an organ pop with a burst of synthetic lubricant. One of its eye lenses shattered with the effort, and its sense of touch burned as it rerouted power to cogitators with one singular goal, one command to drown out all the rest and assure its survival.

Land.

A single phrase, fortified with all the cognition it could muster. A blink, and the globe of arid mesas vanished, replaced by the external view of the same world from the ground itself. Red soil reminded the Magos of home, undergrowth bloomed from the sandy loam and vast trees creaked and wavered overhead.

With a cry of triumph, the Magos threw itself from the throne. In an instant, the myriad possible realities it had been existing within were shattered. Like a rubber band, cognition snapped back into a singular body, feeling its servos grinding, damaged and barely able to move.

“Attend.” It growled, unable to make more than a passing vocalization, its vox-voice gravely and weak with disuse. If any of its servitors heard its voice, they did not respond. The Magos dragged itself upright, observing its surroundings for the first time in an age.

The xenos ship was identical to the careful schematics it had stored in its emergency memory banks: a single crystalline throne, ringed by smaller stations of unimportant purpose. The command throne had been interfaced with a vast bank of cogitators, spliced into the ship’s power supply, intended to help the Magos parse the information from its test of the temporal drive. Yet all were now in ruin, rusted and covered in dust, their enigmatic alloys crumbling to oxidation long before that should have been possible.

Nearby, a series of anachronistic rust-brown splotches marred the crystal of the decking below. A brief analysis told the Magos what it already knew- its servitor complement had not abandoned it, but merely stood until the timestream had decayed them, then rendered their inorganic components to dust. Tens of thousands of years, at least. Another important datapoint.

The Magos could feel its skin prickling again, fear. It was unexpectedly weak, damaged, as time had reaped damage upon its body as well. Not so severely as the servitors, nor nearly the millions of years experienced by its cogitators, but even now it felt secondary systems failing for lack of lubricant, lack of power, lack of everything.

For a moment, it considered returning to the throne, trying to return to Mars. Yet the ship seemed to have some affinity for this planet, and given the Magos’s degraded state, it was unlikely it could restart the drive without burning itself out.

Coldly, the Magos pushed away the weakness of its flesh, and regarded the state of its machinery. The data was clear, too much time had passed, too much degradation had been sustained.

There was no hope for its survival, at least, not in this form. It began to shunt data, to rearrange its cognition. With a shaking hand, it removed the crystal datashard from a deep pocket of its robe. Interfacing with the forbidden xenotech, the clawed metallic hand thrumming with static. Nothing stays lost forever. It mused, even as its body began to shut down.

There, alone on an alien world, the ship sat. Nothing moved in its crystalline halls, unchanging and eternal as the rise and set of the sun.

Forever was no object, eternity no barrier. All was just a matter of time.