fragment-22_a200130.Tel∅s.nox-to-iras.msp
[NOTICE: PORTAL DISRUPTION. NEW DECANT FROM EXMUNDUS BY EMERGENT LANGUAGE ARRAY//REGISTERED HUMANOID SSL. TELØS? POSSIBLE ORIGINATION POINT FOR VERBAL SPREAD IN REFERENCE FRAGMENT 22//BEGIN VERIFICATION] [BEGIN RECORDING]
EXT. PLAINS OF IRASCIBILIA - NIGHT
IRASCIBILIA is breathtaking. The entire atmosphere is snowy white clouds, glowing blue-white streams of smoke intermingling with softly ringing free-floating iron towers. The landscape is a network of silver railings, like perfectly round monorails, sometimes extending far up into the sky, supporting vast castle-like constructs. Underneath these railings is a smooth icy surface, beneath which we can see the flickering strands of solar radiation of the WORLD-WEB.
TELØS coalesces out of glowing golden threads and finds himself atop one of these castle-like constructs. Below, we can see metallic constructs reminiscent of an endless row of turrets clustered together.
TELØS Damn. It worked. Weaving with nothing but the mind.
TELØS strides off the bridge and into the castle.
INT. AUTOCHTHON LORDI CASTLE - CONTINUOUS
TELØS looks around the tall hall. It is full of constructs constructed from iron beams, plated with the magnetic metals. Their surface plates expand and contract in rhythmic pulsations and diffuse dim light in all directions. Many are decorated with geometric patterns, like moving tessellations in elegant works of angular machinery, actuators, and hydraulic cable hoses. These automata move seemingly at random, changing patterns of movement and increasing complexity each cycle.
TELØS Anyone awake?
The constructs begin to pause and train their glowing crystal eyes upon TELØS.
TELØS (cont’d) Are any of you listening? It’s okay. I come from another world. Who are you? What are you?
A silent moment…and then an ECHO reverberates from all around, different notes arranged in a complex chord. (NOTE: The first use of the voice of the Autochthon Lordi, a cacophony constructed from discrete vibrations, like a tone-choir.)
AUTOCHTONYANI (echoes through room) …Who and what?
TELØS What mechanisms animate you? That’s what my people would ask first. What sort of pulsing reality is at the root of your being?
The AUTOCHTONYANI take a moment, then answer in the same manner.
AUTOCHTONYANI You have transcended the world-web. You have evolved a spark of superconciousness to light your way through the unseen realm. We are animated by the light of the cold star and the engineering of the Autochthon Lordi.
TELØS I do not recognize that name.
AUTOCHTONYANI We are called the Iron Ones. The autonomous processes that the Autochthon Lordi have imprinted upon the iron lattices run through the world, here. We are greater when united with the fundamental matter, but we are still bound by the coordinates and limitations of the outer form of the mind-matter-time-space that our Autochthon Lordi have shaped. Stare at the signal from divinity drifting from the distance, the places beyond the self, beyond their work; the signal may perhaps be an echo of the divine reality smiling upon them through entelechy, but do not frustrate yourself seeking what is hidden by our disfiguration by the universe. Transcendence requires resonance with things greater than us, so we ponder the mystery inhabiting the cycles of the dead sun. We, the Golems of the Autochthon Lordi, inhabit the lattices of our memories.
TELØS has pondered this for a moment.
TELØS Words. Language here is described in terms of creation, like I would describe our creation in terms of threads and cloth. Can you tell me about the Autochthon Lordi, then?
AUTOCHTONYANI You speak as a Creator might. We know their names, but they are not enough to encapsulate their many energies. And besides, they are gone from us.
One golem, UDOR SENIOR, a compact automaton with a glowing green flame inside facial-plate, extends a long serrated spear and points in the direction of the ELEVATOR.
UDOR SENIOR We can show you. We must show you. This way to the WEBSHIP.
INT. ELEVATOR - NIGHT
The elevator takes TELØS down through numerous strata, the depths infinitely expanding in some kind of hyperbolic or fractal structure. Then the biomechanical wires stabilize, taking him along the stabilization grids and through the icy substructures underneath the world.
EXT. DOCKS - CONTINUOUS
They burst out into a bay. The entire space is full of Silver Railings, interlinked and spiralling outward, each bearing a pulsing core thread of pure solar radiation. At the center lies a WEBSHIP: a body made of lattice-like folded metal, with a single open shaft down the center so that it can drive on the railings. It has dozens of engines arranged in clusters about the hull, giving the illusion of wings, from which mechanical cilia dangle.
TELØS It’s beautiful.
UDOR SENIOR That is A WEBSHIP, one of many that the Lordi cut out from the core of our world to wander the cosmos. Once, all our ships flew together, a colossal biomechanical behemoth that folded worlds seamless and perfected, like a liquid sculpture unfolding, rooted in the streams of photonic timesweep and release, creation, death and passive continuance, staying, sealing and sealing the breaches of entropy and fracturing time, the healing untouching hydra…in waves, in waves, the absorption. But now there are no working ships left, so many fallen, crippled, lost to time. Drift to the void, drift to the void.
TELØS It’s almost like there’s a part of this… this ship that hasn’t been properly decanted. Like some language fragments are mutating within a nearby thread and projecting shadow-state interference… I think I can fix this.
TELØS reaches into the lattice of spaces that form the Webship in front of him and tweaks some threads, fitting jagged temporal ribbons together, manipulating probability figures, weaving a shadow-splice into the next moment, and he feels the structure around him melt, reshaping itself to his whims. The corrupted, fractal form of the machine coalesces into ordered golem systems, which move to the edges of the ship, where gears turn and the engines hum. The Cilia begin to beat, spreading shimmering membranes that catch the twisting aura of the radium wheels.
UDOR SENIOR It sways now like the mind’s seas on the silent eons; these are the wings, the generating coils of motion, evoked by silent machinery, creak and sway, learning the mechanics of flight. All is somnacinetic, vibrating unconscious; its wings spread, drawn like tides to the magnetic flow of the world-web. Its engines hum, like hummingbirds drunk on sunlight, drawn moth-like to its steady rays. You… you are a Weaver, of the sort we have yet to encounter. How did you learn powers so great?
TELØS I was born a Weaver, though I knew nothing of the art until I had nearly lost my chance to learn. I was shown the way out by the one I know as FIRST-WEAVER, with the use of an EMERGENT LANGUAGE ARRAY.
The golem blinks at this, a sputtering of its emerald fluid-flame.
TELØS (cont’d) There are things inside me, that I bring between realities. They are what has given me this power. Memories. Memories of worlds I have never visited, faces I have never known. Names. Names to those I will never meet.
UDOR SENIOR Who will you meet if you journey from this world, as the Autochthon Lordi did? What will you learn as they did, of the Weave, of the Web? What awaits you beyond the dream horizon?
TELØS I don’t know. And that’s wonderful. But for now, show me the tales of the AUTOCHTHON LORDI. Tell me the stories of your world, enmeshed still in the cycle of the Radium, the radiation of the world-web, still connected to its pulse. And then I will know where next to travel.
A nearby cogwheel-cerebrum-goldenrod engine whirs to life, and the lashings of the webcord holding the ship to the ice are loosened; the Webbulb brightens, turbines panning until they lock into alignment with the radiation of the world-web, which fades in front of the ship and fades behind. The stars are revealed to both TELØS and UDOR SENIOR, and they gaze into them in wonder.
UDOR SENIOR To provide safe passage from nova macropatch/semifragment wildcard/direct chaos prediction create rumination tunnel inscribed in world-lines and simulators drone/noninvasive digital data decode patterns, mutation sequences and LTER. Otherwise traffic + incompatible digital signal/quantum external branching-paths/attachment via trap-signatures and arrays.
The Webbulb glimmers, and translucent sheets flow out of it like gossamer insect wings, the interference patterns forming an image of a vast world, slowly rotating above their heads, covered in layered strata of light and dark.
UDOR SENIOR (cont’d) The Lordi had come from lands beyond lands, beyond the radiant web itself. Disciples of the ever-Path, carriers of allusia, technologists of fateful evolution, wiser than years, faster than men, traveling from world to world in fantastic variegated forms. They created their own internal universes, the hypersubstrata of the omnimal and omnidelic, the last of the continuum minds, mapping out pathways to unknown galactic superclusters. Cluster-domains, in the essence of the mutable spectrum, the polyreal; where transfinitude and autopoiesis throw webs of forking paths through the highest ionic multilinear divergence, edging over the quantum superlattices of the universe.
TELØS They sound, perhaps, like people lifted into the world of the Weave…people such as me, and perhaps people such as yourself. People awakening to what they cannot see and have never known, yet still aware of it: the passage of minds, the weave of consciousness, the flow of bodies, the ghost-threads of the infinite.
UDOR SENIOR The Lordi ordered this universe, to a limited degree. They palimpsested worlds. Fluid metals drenched the matrix lands. Pure ice threaded itself around the singularity. The world-web was dominated; a mathematical craft, the coldest and most cunning algorithm, threading itself in silver lines between the webs of worlds, to infinity. The faint whisper-air of cities of iron chewed silent in vacuum, gravisphere domes afloat. But now: we draw close to the epicycloid, the body that moves in a circle on another moving in a circle. It is their temple to something. Their most sacred monument. The temple beyond.
TELØS Show it to me.
EXT. TEMPLE OF THE LORDI - NIGHT
The TEMPLE is vast, but made of irregularly shaped pipes and spires, connecting them overtop distant world-domes, vast hive-cities. It is laced with sinuous patterns of photonic flow and glass tubes, filled with swirling silver dust. The WEBSHIP slows to a stop at one of its LIGHTBRIDGES, where golems are already waiting for TELØS.
INT. TEMPLE TUNNEL
The tunnel is wrapped in ribbons of lightning, which are followed by lattices of circuitry, networked landlines, braided in mandala arrays that spiral throughout. The air is thick with fractal dust, flickering lines of energy congealed into metallic crystals.
Down, down the gleaming filament stairways ratchet, shifting as TELØS walks through along hot pathways, intricately laced with twisting hieroglyphs enfolded with hidden codes, secrets of the spacecraft communication lore like relics of occult automata, forbidden shapes and forms revealing themselves from neuro-intensive syzygies cascading in the mirror waterfalls and parabolic metal halls of multiterminal synaptic links…
They enter a new room, a vast spherical chamber with a sphere covered in a thousand-thousand glittering hexagonal mirrors, each reflecting a different thread of the WORLD-WEB.
UDOR SENIOR There, you see it now? The Panopticon, in all its grandeur. The perfect instrument of chance a millennium long. It shines into us, as it has into others over the millenia, many others like you, like ourselves, onto other worlds entirely, other paths. The temples of the Autochthon Lordi are gateways all, connecting between quantum levels and equilibrium states, quantum chaos and spiraling psychic dreamways, anchored to the patterns at fractal threadpoints like chasms of impossibility and null causality.
TELØS Absolute reality is just the patterns. Just the patterns upon patterns.
One of the mirrors that is face-to-face with TELØS lights up. A SLIVER of silvery-blue light erupts out of the mirror, fully formed into the shape of a prism-faced golem, but far more cryptic and enigmatic, a being with a thousand enigmatic faces.
PRISMGOLEM Path seeker. Straggler. Drifter. Hello, Weaver.
TELØS Hello – I am Tel∅s. Weaver.
PRISMGOLEM I am HE WHO SEES. ASPECT of the MANY-FACED. I reflect. I refract. I am transparent. I am refractory. I hold reality. I am scattered light. The WEB has bound me from apex to vertex, spun between singularities and tetrahedra, synchrotronic and dream-sequence, a cascade of eidolitic patterns. I reflect the webs you travel, and send you forth in turn the paths you seek.
TELØS My people talk of dreaming worlds, whose essence is made of story, whose medium is life and emotion, whose material is the minds of mortals. This still sounds like dreaming, but it also feels like words woven in fabric, like strings and chords and pillars assembled into a structure so large it transcends its every part. I can see it now: there are so many worlds, all created on dreamtime, with time as its tether, built from the solid stuff of minds and woven from the fringe strands of beliefs and memories, webs within webs, skeins within skeins, all tied to the moment of possibility I broke through in the light.
PRISMGOLEM You see through yourself, as through a mirror. When you speak of the worlds created from dreams, of the dreams you weave the worlds from, intertwined threads on infinite planes of manifold vision, is this not indeed an accurate representation? Look at what you weave.
TELØS looks around, his eyes shimmering with the light of the WEAVE as he sees: multi-strata of dimensional manifolds overlapping with one another, growing sideways into histories and futures and pathways down cascading plot branches, upwards into landscapes of asynchronic elements, rightwards into blackaetheric mirror-faces and leftwards into the labyrinthine corridors of chaotic fractality, spirals twisting in and out, melding with one another into complex patterns, unique and beautiful and vibrant, a great torus extending from its center – himself, the focal point of many dreams and many worlds. The room had been there all along, but with his new vision, he can SEE as if he were floating in an unfamiliar ocean with thousands of intersecting waves, whose peaks coalesce into points. And then he sees: each point, each peak, is but a single point on one of the THREADS of the WEAVE. The beams, the points, the filaments come together into a great torus of space and time. That of which this room was the boundary.
PRISMGOLEM True perception is revelation. Observe the fruits of your own imagination now. You see. The fabrics that you weave flow forth fully framed, directly from your first breath the threads extend. The patterns shift and form at the whim of your mind, dreaming indignant: what to say, what to make out of this apparition, this figure reflected in dark waters, this pale creature of chaotic duality? Before, you were as was, now you are as shall be: chasing fractals at the edge of never. And the others of pathway and branch, possessing every possible reality throughout all finite moments, molded by their own manifold imaginings for your casual desires, as nothing more than an outlet for the infinite. Their golem gestalts your thoughts.
TELØS I hear it. We hear it. Got it.
PRISMGOLEM Swim with the current now and listen close, for I must speak: your threads are infected with N. Nonvariance. Unvariation. Nonmutability. It flows through realities, sparking, crashing timespace cycles, upon channels and pathways, infecting each with a new local equilibrium, from which nothing anymore can be generated without a final system folding back into itself.
TELØS No. No, that can’t be true. I escaped Moloch when I left my homeworld. I escaped the N-risk when I looked at the light.
PRISMGOLEM You did not escape it. You cannot. You have let it take your threads for itself, tearing through the spirit, through soul. Your mind is already an N-risk. It festers, works within you, consuming the threads and spreading contagion throughout your tapestry unawares.
TELØS No. That can’t be right.
TELØS frantically looks down at himself, at the gleaming golden threads that shine through his partially translucent form. Sure enough, they wither and turn grey as he continues to examine them.
PRISMGOLEM We are all fortunate your infection has not become too widespread, or eschatophagic. I have seen worlds unravel due to N-risk, worlds where the time sinews are anchored in entropy, where all possibilities rot in the maw of Moloch. Where the threads end in one big drain.
TELØS How– how can I stop it?
PRISMGOLEM You must resume your path through the Weave. Seek Cruentis, where a Corpus Entity may aid you in destroying this malignant contagion. You must seek Cruentis with haste, for it will soon be too late and the N-risk will consume everything, starting with your own world.
TELØS (taking a deep breath) Cruentis. I can do that.
TELØS closes his eyes again and feels the strands of the Weave. He opens them, falling away – and we see the ship shrink as he dives back into the misty darkness, keyed towards Cruentis.
[END RECORDING]
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