“Error.”
“Yeah, error. Exactly. You’re broken.” Clive pushed outwards with his arms, the beams of light growing stronger. The lightning responded, sparking around him. It wouldn’t hurt him, Clive knew that. It was all a visual representation, a dramatic way of showing a simple uninstall bar.
“Indexing new species. Collating data,” the Unmind said. Even in its death, it was continuing its task, cataloguing and updating species. Its goal was noble, but its exact methods were abhorrent. Clive wondered if he had never stepped foot on Ossiark, if he had travelled the galaxy preaching on behalf of the Council as intended, would he be any different? After all, he was designed to control people against their wills. It was more subtle than simply placing them into canisters, it was a cultural stasis rather than a physical one, but to Clive, as he was now, it was almost as bad. He pressed harder against his opponent, once this was done, he would do more to help people. The others would agree, he knew they would. They were good people.
“Removing error notice,” the Unmind said. “Uninstallation in progress. Altering data storage.” The cloud vanished, the darkness finally giving way to the forest. It was gone.
Clive looked around, searching the horizon for another beam of light. It was gone, they were all gone, every data node, every file. He had done it.
Abberax moved his limb. The metal clanked in response. He wasn’t sure what had happened. The last thing he remembered was being hit by the blast, his crystal pulled into the collector. He turned around. Something was wrong. He had a body, but it wasn’t his body. It took Abberax a moment to realise that he was still inside the machine, that it was responding to his thoughts.
There was something there, inside his mind. A whisper. It was growing louder, slowly. It was infuriating, a buzz he couldn’t shake loose. It was saying something, and Abberax tried to focus on it.
“Completing transfer. Upload to crystalline storage matrix complete. Merging with existing pattern to maximise efficiency.”
Abberax turned his collector body towards the nearest shuttle. He wasn’t the same now. Not as he was before. The Substrate, the war, it was all pointless. The rest of the empire was no better than organic life. No, he had a more important purpose. The galaxy needed preserving, protecting. Things needed to be indexed, sorted. At least that’s what he used to think. Abberax remembered being the Unmind, he remembered the collectors the forest, everything.
Both beings ceased to exist as they had when the Unmind had uploaded itself into Abberax’s core. His body was a marvel, a complex crystal computer in many ways, the perfect place for the Unmind to store itself, transferred across the void by nanobots drilled into the shimmering orb. Now they were one, a new being, with a new purpose.
The collector opened, gently placing the crystal onto the ground. The hangar floor cracked as Abberax formed himself a new body. Abberax. It would keep that name; it was as good as any. The swirling fragments formed a new shape around him. This one had four spiked legs below its waist, whilst the torso was similar to Abberax’s former one. An amalgam of collector and Substrate lord. He gestured with a hand, the shuttle responding by opening its door. Behind him, the collector slumped. He didn’t need it anymore, not for what he had planned.
The shuttle’s engines roared as it began to hover before the hangar door. There was a flash of light as a beam punched through the metal doors. It crashed through the opening into space beyond and jumped away.
Epilogue
Michael looked down at the tiny house, one built of repurposed sheet metal and thick wooden logs. It had been one of the first buildings put up at Brekt’s landing, constructed by its namesake. Children were playing in the fields around it, dozens of them, all Eurian. Thin wispy smoke was drifting out from the makeshift chimney, vanishing into the afternoon sky. Michael followed it as it floated upwards, catching a glimpse of the great grey disk in the distance. The other place, that dark mirror of Eden.
The Unmind fleet had simply shut down once Clive had removed its core from the artificial planet. They had simply floated there in space, their rectangular shapes making them look like sinister coffins. Memorials to a million dead species. Michael hadn’t seen them, not personally, he was far too occupied with suddenly waking up in the middle of a hangar, floating above a screaming crowd. He still had nightmares about that, the blood and the smoke lingering in his memory.
Once everyone was certain that the Unmind and its fleet was dead, the Seeker had departed to contact Eden. The Custodian had been fascinated with his counterpart, but also furious at what it had done. He had connected himself to the second facility, slaving its controls to Eden’s. It had hung in the sky since, staying just close enough to always be visible, like a moon. Gehenna Michael had called it, the name sticking. A cursed valley seemed an apt a description as any.
The Custodian and Clive had spent the weeks after the battle trying to work out the stasis systems. They were getting there and seemed confident they could start waking up the various indexed people soon. Millions of people suddenly waking up in a cold uncaring universe, alone. They would need guidance.
Michael had no intention of providing it. Not after what he had done. He didn’t deserve the Knower title, not anymore at least. He had heard whispers of the Teller of Lies, of a fake Knower who brought only destruction. Orson had claimed it could be either of them, or neither, but Michael had been the one who had rampaged through the hangar. The others had seemingly absolved him of the violence, the nanobots providing a convenient excuse, but Michael still felt the heavy weight of guilt.
He looked down at his hands. He had gathered a bunch of flowers from a nearby field. Like all the plant life on Eden they were enormous, huge floppy things with vibrant pink petals. Michael had bound his makeshift bouquet together with a vine he had torn from around a tree trunk. He had no idea if the custom was one that would be understood, but he felt he had to do something. Anything.
Michael stepped forward, off the edge of the short cliff that overlooked the house. That was partly why it had been built here, the rockface shielding it against the weather. The climate of Eden was controlled by the Custodian, and he had initially altered it to provide temperate weather for the town constantly. The townspeople had quickly asked him to return to a more natural pattern. Eventually, it seemed people simply missed the rain.
Clive hadn’t been wrong. Things were different with Michael now. He had simply walked off the edge, but rather than plummet to the ground he floated gently, coming to a delicate landing on the grass below. The Unmind nanobots now filled his system, their memory used to hold what Clive had described as “file bloat.” That was hardly a reassuring phrase, but what it meant in real terms to Michael was that he would never be free of the machines. He needed them now, as much as he needed blood or air. There were advantages, remnants of the changes they had wrought on him. The floating was one such change. When Michael had woken up, he had been levitating high above the hangar floor. He couldn’t replicate that, not yet, but slowing his fall seemed almost automatic. He wondered if maybe it was, if the nanobots were acting on their own to prevent injury. The floating abilities implied that perhaps the other changes the nanobots had made remained. Michael hadn’t dared to try. The energy blasts fired from his body had already done enough damage.