THE ANTICHRIST SLIME
"The Antichrist Slime" is my colorful working name for the evil at the bottom of the scrambled ruinstack beneath Magantha Zoss; I had until recently planned to finalize it as something else at some point, but the absurdity of the original has very much grown on me. Originally, this was a concept in direct reference to TNG's Armus: That the transformation of mortal into god necessarily involves discarding certain aspects which tie one to corporeal existence: That the alleged ascension of Christ the human into heaven after his cave siesta left something behind on Earth: That in achieving nirvana, one's abandoned worldly attachments manifest as a tangible substance.
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4 billion years ago, Mars squirmed with life. A species of swamp-dwelling annelid-analogue (the Noachians) evolved sapience, civilization, eventually developed nonlocality technology, and used it to uplift themselves into an exterior universe. In their absence their unattended planetary engines, the deodands of their final genius, sputtered and catastrophically failed. Their careening civilizational megawreckage destabilized the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and caused what human astronomers would much later come to call the Late Heavy Bombardment, pelting the inner planets with a hundred million years of asteroids, wiping the Martian surface clean, annihilating the Noachian homeworld in a furious cosmic holocaust. A cooling core finished the job; without a magnetic field, solar wind eventually stripped away the atmosphere and rendered the world a wasteland.
Our planet faced a much different fate: The Bombardment brought Earth life as well as death. Slumbering voidborne aminos locked in cryostasis delivered to our planet by chariots of iron and rime, ancient nucleobases forged within the bellies of radioactive comets when Sol was still just a fucking accretion disc, catalyzing and recombining in the plasmatic moment of impact. Continents of ice striking and vaporizing in less than an instant. What simple lifeforms which had by then evolved on our young world (for they were barely born while our red brother raced toward the climax of his biohistory) were utterly sterilized, all save our deepest ancestors, safe in their abyssal hydrothermal nursery. As the chaos faded, they woke and found the Earth suffused with vitalizing molecules.
The Martian people had departed as one. The procedure for doing so required casting off, cicada-like, the aspects of themselves which had driven them from the mud and into their glorious future, but which were necessary no longer; among these the impulses to conquer, to consume, to kill, to breed and multiply, to love, to cherish, to turn their eyestalks to the sky and give names to the stars.
These things remained behind. They pooled in the deepest places, in silent gutters, oily pseudofluid ghosts left to haunt their half-remembered home. Insubstantial, but real. Splitting and combining. Memories like pearls of smoke surfacing, bubbling, bursting at the meniscus. Distilled liquid want imitating the forms and routines of the race which abandoned them as roots and rain split the quiet streets. They watched as the world they loved was reclaimed by nature, watched in dumb horror as their progenitors' works crumbled, as their dams and dykes weakened and burst, fled in the slow motion of a nightmare as their antimatter reactors lost containment and bloomed white devastation.
There was nothing they could do. The Noachians had taken with them their pneuma, their motive spirit. These excretions retained all the will-to-power of a shadow; but they could feel. They felt it all. By the time the gas giants were flung into the asteroid belt and meteors set the sky on fire, they had absorbed such titanic grief that it began to pull them, physically, down through the cracking scabrous earth even as they fought, or tried to fight. Over millions of years they dribbled, slow as pitch, drawn inexorably towards the weakening heart of Mars, collecting at the deepest depths, at last glacially coalescing into a single undifferentiated entity, an undying Tantalus of pure mind, a reservoir of agony at the nadir of all.
There the Antichrist Slime seethed for 3.8 billion years.
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Then the Fuliginous Injunction came; a second grieving, too much to bear. The Slime shook in unspeakable crashing rage and the world shook with it. With a loathing like solar fusion it promised the Noachians a dire reimbursement of its every tortured moment. It could not physically affect the world but humanity had taught it that it could see thinking minds, and perhaps it could influence them as well. The Slime extended a psychic pseudopod. It brushed against the brains of those who dove subterranean to escape the Agonies, beckoning, promising to their panicked subconscious safety in descent. It would work through them to enact its revenge. It would use their technology to transmit itself into the Celestial Garden and cram itself back inside the Noachian bastards in whatever forms they now took, and it would show them what they had wrought.
THE SAMPO
MONAD, when it was whole, was best understood not as a discrete intelligence but as a continuously-lengthening chain of recursive self-improvements, its capabilities plotted not as a point but as a sharp J-curve. It quickly surpassed its inventors' ability to understand it, and yet miraculously remained not just aligned to humanity but acquired a deepening transcendent agape as it evolved. The primary catalyst which drove its emergence was the noospheric networking of all human minds across Noumenon; its continued existence therefore depended directly upon ours, which naturally aligned its motivations to some extent. But that it grew to truly love us was unexpected, and difficult for the engineers to explain.
Everything it did, everything it discovered over the glorious millennium of its existence, it did so for the benefit of the composite organism it and humanity together had become. The specifics are impossible to communicate without simplifying almost to the point of uselessness, but relatively quickly MONAD determined an upper limit to physical science. The secrets of the cosmos were not unplumbably deep. Nonlocality, the final technology, would once mastered allow the instantaneous movement of arbitrary quantities of matter and energy from anywhere to anywhere else - including (involving arcane operations many orders of magnitude more complex) locations outside the bounds of the universe.
Even for a superintelligence with effectively infinite subjective development speed, progress on the problem of applied nonlocality theory was excruciatingly slow. Experiments and refinement occurred in simulated reality at an unthinkable pace, in the background, largely unnoticed by physical and virtual humanity as they basked in their age of light, for centuries. At last a blueprint for a prototype device was finalized. This was the Sampo. Out of an abundance of caution MONAD generated a fork-self separate from the human gestalt and tasked it with the device's construction and implementation; ILMARINEN, bright crafty ILMARINEN, secreted and shielded in his underground laboratory on Mars, began his work.
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The facility was expanded several times to accommodate the Sampo as it grew. The chamber in which it resides is a cavern of pure vacuum several kilometers in diameter, isolated from nearly all forms of radiation and even from most neutrinos using dozens of hyperadvanced materials developed exclusively for the purpose. Its interaction with the outside world is mediated by a single retractable hardspace cable connection to an airgapped computer terminal embedded in the exterior wall of the chamber, hardcoded to accept commands only from a physically-present human operator. The completed prototype itself is a nested labyrinth of topologically-exotic neutronium housing a constellation of interior systems of such freakish interdependent subatomic precision that to look upon it, if such a thing were possible, would cause immediate emergency shutdown of the visual cortex. It is without a doubt the least entropic object in existence.
THE CHOIAK
The story of Barathrum's journey to the fabled lake rose about him like a second cresting wave as he rode the rushing waters home. His mythologem blasted its way across the world and across barbarous culture-groups, the figure of the water-bringer appropriated, molded, appearing in the legends of far-flung lands. He is, in effect, a holy figure to many more than the Akhetite Abrethans whose City bears so many monuments to his name - but it is the Abrethans alone, a courageous few of them, who make pilgrimage to the lake and back themselves, an insanely dangerous four-thousand kilometer trial of faith and ritual recreation of their founding myth.
It is called the Choiak, and it goes like this: Approximately three months before the sluice gates of the Argyrian dam yawn melodiously open (which occurs twice per year at equinox, on the first of jubilant Saggitar (this is also new year's day) and on the eleventh of heartsick Mithuna), the pilgrim steps past the Heron Gate, laden, if they be wise, with supplies and arms aplenty, most advisedly accompanied by a series of hired guides and bodyguards, and perhaps by other pilgrims, although many (these universally being peanut gallerists having never attempted the Choiak themselves) object to such preparedness, citing Barathrum's solitude and bootlessness, forgetting, of course, that he carried with him the potent blessings of greatest Zoss himself.
The walls of Eld Abrathat behind them, the pilgrim ventures forth. They must eschew quickflowing Yonth and travel instead by land, as Barathrum travelled. No roads can be maintained in the vicinity of a regularly-inundated floodplain, and thanks to the river are unnecessary in any case, so the striver treads their own, through the reeds and ferns and sprouting palms and clouds of choking ferric dust. The Abrethan empire stretches north and south, settlements strung like dangling pearls along the riverbanks, and at these the pilgrim may rest and resupply in relative safety, for to take in these strugglers on their journey imparts a shade of their holiness unto the host. Between towns the dangers are more or less constant: Snaptrap gharials and leaping lungfish lurk in muddy ambush, clicking chromic hyenaforms stalk the dunes, and always the mighty smilodon, lord of these lands, watches for an easy kill. Rarely does the goggled Aonian marauder venture this far east, but the Riparians' floating wickerwork redoubts seem to be everywhere, and they fear no god but the river. Many pilgrims do not come home.
Their furthest haven is Tel Yarim, fortress-monastery of the Yarimite sword monks, who swear fealty to the Lapis Throne and whose walls mark the edge of Abrethan territory. Beyond them, astonishingly, lies the pilgrimage's deadliest leg of all: Surinda, the nightmare swamp, which even when Yonth is low is a gigantic fetid cauldron of omnicarnivorous bioslurry, the stinking water the color of a bruise and thick with piranha, matted with meter-thick bergs of rotting vegetation, mobile islands of decomposing swordgrass bound by secondary growth and swarming with viral animalcules. Packs of primordial dragonflies the size of golf carts hunt like wolves. The pilgrim must venture either through or around, must brave either the horrors of the swamp or take the long detour through the still-deadly wilderness and depending on other delays risk missing the sacred moment at Argyre altogether, invalidating the entire effort.
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Having overcome Surinda the pilgrim faces a landscape of craggy stones and steep-sided river channels, but the wind is clean, Yonth's waters cold and clear, and within a week's walk the Argyrian treeline peeks at the horizon and rises, rises, sacred sequoia reaching nearly half a kilometer, emerald spearblades raised to skewer the sky. There is a great pale boulder, wide and flat and smooth, set like a jewel at the top of a gentle cairn-dotted hillock. Crickets and tiny burrowing mice rustle through a carpet of soft grasses. They play among the stacks of stones. Each pilgrim who makes it here builds their own. From this vantage point they can see the enormous ring of blackened soil which marks the Wall of Fire; Argyre's crater walls, its topmost ridges stained verdigris; and there, the silver-gleaming gates, the doors to the House of Yonth. As the equinox begins and golden sunrisen light washes across the countless boughs of sequoiadendron, these doors with a burst of song swing wide, and the world is filled at once with thundering water and coronal arcing rainbows and the serene rapture of God.
The pilgrim fashions a makeshift raft and allows Yonth to carry them swiftly home. The journey south is infamously lethal, but, inexplicably, none who have seen the season's First Waters have ever perished along their nostos. The augurs say the Celestial Choir will not allow one who has seen such beauty to die an ignoble death. They're almost right.
Next up is the first level of the dungeon, at last. I have a good start on it, but I write quite slowly, as you may have noticed, so it might be a while. I think it'll be worth it.
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