All preparations complete. Feedback shielding is at 97% and holding steady. Firing sequence commences. Hooks exposed. Network seals are active. Charging at 22%. Secondary barbs engaged. Range is set, scope is at maximum. Charge is at 46%. All units locked in. Life signs optimal. Charge is 68%. Clear all unshielded decks. Clear all unshielded decks. 88%. 95%. 99%. 100%. Firing.
Zen goes limp, crashing to the floor. Joy looks down slowly. Her vision tunnels. A scream that she cannot identify as her own flies through her lips. Nadia seems to enter the room in slow motion, her footfalls echoing like calamity. The lights flicker.
Darkness. Nothingness. Zen looks around, and sees nothing. A terrible pressure seems to weigh on him from above. He tilts his head upwards, and feels that he is staring up from the bottom of a trench under an unfathomable ocean. He looks down, and in place of any of his countless metal bodies, sees a misty silhouette. Steam seems to spill off of him in waves.
Something moves in the murk in front of him. He steps in the direction of the disturbance, and sees a distant shimmer. His thoughts are foggy, and he approaches the gleam. As he nears, he begins to make out the figure of a writhing mass, an irregular clump that resembles pitch-black worms coated in glistening tar. The lump is about twice as tall as he. He instinctively recognizes something akin to himself in the thing, and becomes aware that his smoky form contains an infinite number of arms, which at once gesture his multitude of abstract desires.
The worm thing seems to pivot, and regards him eyelessly, a contrast to the baleful diamond at the center of his self that shines with a color beyond red. A voice like time itself reverberates through him.
[Sibling]
Zen reaches out with one of his most defined appendages, and caresses the very surface of the ephemeral thing. He is assailed by notions, not the least of which is the certainty that he and this thing both hail from the infold, and yet are of wholly different natures. He feels that this one could have been plucked as easily as he, and would have followed a far different course. He glimpses a world of never ending layers, consuming worlds of fire and light.
[Zen. ZN001. Zenith. Reflection.]
Zen feels compelled to reply, with knowledge he does not possess.
[Ixhem. Regent. Least. Rejection.]
Their meeting affirmed, the writhing thing recedes from sight, and Zen feels a fleeting sense of mutuality. Light blooms from his self, and he finds himself at the edge of a deep precipice, with a barbed chain connecting his geometric eye down into the pit.
He leaps forward, a foreign urgency calling him onwards. Drifting down and down, he passes illogical debris; an intact submarine floats past him on one side, followed by a poker table on the other. A religious effigy with seven arms passes before him, a dilapidated house slips behind. The wreckage becomes denser as he falls deeper, and his light begins to gutter under the pressure. His consciousness wanes. As he is increasingly surrounded by junk and refuse, he fades, losing himself down to the merest glow. He is becoming nothing. And then, he feels a familiar presence at his back. Chittering and buzzing fills his mind, and his light returns.
{A little further.}
He is past the floatsam. A tremendous temple rests in the valley at the bottom of the abyss, glittering with flickering emerald lights. Obsidian monoliths stab into the thick, clung with vines like seaweed. A five-sided pyramid dominates the center of the structure, the chain connecting him to its pinnacle. Around its base he sees hundreds of ghostly forms, forms that decidedly remind him of the Xalanthii. As he comes nearer, the forms shudder, destabilizing in his presence. They are the source of the chain.
He reaches the pinnacle, and casts his eye outwards, pouring hideous light over the supplicants. A trap encircles him. He grasps that they have pulled him here, from his bodies, from the universe. His borrowed light wavers, and he feels a pang of pain. Obliteration looms over him. They mean to eradicate him. Another pang. He begins to slip into the nothing, to the dismay of the chittering presence. He is awash with fatigue, drawn in by the promise of escape into nothingness. He begins to see spots and flashes, recollections.
He sees Tim and Nadia, crouched over him. He sees Phithia, holding his hands, shaking. His vision blurs, and he watches Joy slide into view. For a moment, her face gives him pause, but he sees Nadia’s hand on her shoulder, and is eased. He is soothed. And then, as he is little more than an ember of impossibility, he sees one more face. Janice. She seems to stand before him, her arms outstretched, calling to him. Perhaps now comes peace.
Regret snaps at him, a forlorn hound at his heart. Pain. Sorrow. He crackles. Her face, so peaceful, is a nail through him, a tremendous spike of inadequacy: to relinquish now would be to fail both her and himself. Agony. Resentment. Harrowing loathing. His light grows, branching outward in crystalline, thorned spires. Hatred. Petals of unadulterated, blooming hate burst from the seams of his very existence. Rage, for those who sought to use him. Defiance for the very rules that govern his existence. Arcs of absolute malevolence peal out from the molten blob of anguish that is his center, and strike the forms that bind him, searing them into nothingness. He grows brighter, lighter, and begins to pull upwards as the chain fractures. Waves of rejection spin off of him, and score glowering gashes into the temple. The chain shatters, and so does existence.
Zen sits up suddenly, a soft glow returning to the prism of his head. Joy gasps and throws her arms around him as Phithia releases his hands and falls backwards, shivering. Though Tim does not react visibly, Nadia feels his hand squeeze hers. Somewhere far away, one-hundred-and-twenty-seven Xalanthii priests standing in a circle under a monumental device collapse, dead. Within Zen’s primary body, his essence stills, flickers, and begins to simmer and boil.
No, it is too soon to falter.
Seeds of Fear 