Forever Thrilled, Part 21
Chapter 6: The Fractal Underground
In her third week, Na-Yeli’s at the edge of despair. Like a headless chicken—even worse, like a chick who knows her brains have gotten her nowhere, slowly—she’s at the end of her rope, an endlessly long rope, yet keeps her imprisoned nevertheless. A few days ago, she was desperate enough to invoke LateralSys. However, the hyper-monotonous trek had numbed her mind so far that she was unable to perform the self-hypnosis routine, and neither did she provide an intense sense of urgency that usually provokes either KillBitch or LateralSys.
And the Moiety Alien? The Moiety Alien is either as utterly bored out of its, well, not skull, orbitals as she is, or it has infinite patience. Na-Yeli fears the latter more than the former.
Mentally, she’s stuck in a morass of lethargy, lacking the energy to escape this downward spiral—although that actually would be moving in the right direction—with only enough concentration to carry on with the seemingly pointless routine. You never know, she might get lucky and stumble upon the South Pole’s Diaphragm Gate through sheer bloody mindedness and good fortune.
But not today. Since Trémaux’s algorithm—which requires making marks, and these will eventually be cleaned up—also doesn’t apply, the only thing left is the ‘random mouse’ algorithm, which is basically proceed until a junction and then throw a dice. It should be called the headless chicken algorithm, Na-Yeli thinks, ‘cause that’s how it feels. She enters an ever-narrowing tunnel. So narrow that it’s not clear if she can crawl through it. Yet, it doesn’t quite feel like a real dead end. Na-Yeli pauses and gathers just enough presence of mind of mind to launch a Kitti.
It stays away the full ten minutes—five kilometers to and fro—meaning this is not a dead end. Yet it’s too narrow for her to scrape through. Yet she doesn’t want to turn around. For some stubborn, unmoving reason buried deep beneath the swamp of tedium sloshing between her ears, she wants to move forward. But how?
Aha: she still has a small stash of explosives left over from when she had to blow their way into the ice of the fourth layer’s North Pole. Good. It’ll be a change of pace, a punctuation of this mind-numbing equilibrium. She uses a few Kittis to position the explosives, steps back minimally, and then pauses before she detonates the explosives. She’s so lethargic she must be forgetting something. What? Oh yeah, maybe she should shelter behind her backpack-cum-sleeping-bag, to prevent incredibly sharp shrapnel from cutting into her.
She puts the makeshift shield in between her and the explosives, then detonates them. A few satisfyingly loud bangs, a short rain of cutting debris, and lo and behold: she can carry onward. If only she had enough explosives to blow her way through the shortest route between North and South Pole, but alas.
Of course, she has no way of knowing if going back might have put her on the right trajectory or not. She just needed to do something different, to show that she still has some agency left. The random mouse algorithm was turning her into a headless chicken. Normally, she would have been very reluctant to blow up something so delicately structured, so strangely fractally beautiful as the material the tunnel walls—about 95% of this layer—are made of. But she’s gained a different mindset now.
For an indefinite time—she could check her board computer but is strangely unmotivated—she’s back into the tedious routine once again. But then, a familiar flickering is visible at the far end of the tunnel. Another flock of Glassamer Butterflies? No, it’s a flock of Crystalpyckers. A flying wall of propeller byrds coming her way, beaks forward.
At first, Na-Yeli panics and freezes. Then, a semblance of a survival trait surfaces from somewhere deep within, and she turns around and starts to run. She has to run fast carefully because if she pushes off too hard, her head will bang on the ceiling. Nevertheless, she seems to outrun the synchronized flock of Crystalpyckers.
But not for long, as a similar, familiar flickering rears its pretty head in the distance. Dispirited, Na-Yeli slows down as she sees another, perfectly synchronized flying wall of propeller byrds, beaks forward, closing in.
Now, Na-Yeli freezes, not knowing what to do. She could launch one of her torpedoes, but she just can’t bring herself to blast a flock of such fragile-looking, near-transparent byrds to smithereens. She unrolls her crystal-lined backpack-cum-sleeping-bag, so her back is somewhat protected. Then she stands still and watches—with great apprehension—the forward flock of byrds approach.
They slow down and hover, with their exquisitely sharp beaks pointed extremely close, just in front of her. Her back cameras show a similar enclosure at her back. They don’t sting her but hang about a millimeter in front of her, threatening. By dint of evolutionarily ingrained habits, Na-Yeli gives the most attention to the byrds in front of her face. They hover, serenely and menacingly, the whirr of their small propellers barely audible.
Na-Yeli’s in a cold sweat, unsure how to handle this stalemate. And the Crystalpyckers hover as their eyes begin to gleam. No, she’s not imagining it, their eyes are lighting up, in different colors, in a mesmerizing sequence...
It’s too much for Na-Yeli. Mountains of boredom interspersed with an abyss of madness. The trance-inducing byrds’ eyes bring her on the verge of a migraine. She fades, she faints, whatever it is, she goes under...
And wakes up an indeterminate time later. Make that a whopping six hours, according to her board computer, and the migraine shows it. It’s immense, it’s like the worst migraine she ever had times ten. No, make that times one hundred. A sea of soul-scorching pain, a searing fire relentlessly burning through all the synapses of her frontal lobe, a cauldron of molten metal cooking her brain.
It’s too much, way too much. She can’t think, let alone read LateralSys’s note, which seems too long, anyway. Her whole mind is one giant, suffering gestalt of agony. She wants to pass out, she wants to die. Either is preferable to reading a note that’s too dogdammit long.
Something cuts through the pain, desperately. A sound, a voice out of nowhere.
→but you are the slow CEO, you must make the decisions←
“Pain, pain, pain,” is all Na-Yeli can manage to say, “too much pain.”
→the whole layer is intelligent//a crystalline übermind←
“Who cares,” Na-Yeli murmurs, “so much pain.”
→by blowing up that tunnel, you blew part of its brain←
“Endless pain,” Na-Yeli murmurs, “relentless pain.”
→we’re surrounded by its antibodies, yet it wants to know←
“Overwhelming pain,” Na-Yeli murmurs, “incessant pain.”
→it wants to communicate//negotiate←
“Stupendous pain,” Na-Yeli murmurs, “you do it.”
Na-Yeli fades out as the pain recedes, as well. However, she never really passes entirely out, a tiny sliver of her remains aware through a veil of sharp, nasty yet barely bearable pain. She hears a voice both familiar and strange, as if somebody’s using her throat, yet it sounds quintessentially different.
→hey CAI, cool pool of algorithms, ready to flash them outer lights?←
—yo baby yo— the communication AI signals —for you, everything—
She’s flirting with the communication AI? Na-Yeli manages to think, I’ve been in here way too long.
→tell the crystal übermind that we’re sorry, we didn’t know that these crystalline circuits had a ghost in their machine←
—you still destroyed part of its brain, it says— the communication AI signals —so why shouldn’t it get rid of you, like a nasty disease—
→this far in the future, it probably doesn’t get that many visitors, right?←
—it says the last ones were about three iterations ago— the communication AI signals —and these were even more destructive. so why shouldn’t it rid itself of us—
→it considers one complete renewal of its brain cells//the delicate crystalline structures through which its intelligence runs//as one iteration← LateralSys makes a calculation →that’s several thousand years ago←
—very interesting, baby— the communication AI signals —but we need to convince its crystalline majesty not to attack us—
→there’s that. tell it we won’t do it again←
—will you remain in this position forever, then? it asks— the communication AI signals —as our movement also tramples tiny parts of it underfoot—
→true. i guess we’re like a nagging headache as we move through its tunnels←
Tell me about it, Na-Yeli thinks, although she’s thankful that the exchanges she inadvertently hears make her partly forget her massive migraine.
—the crystalline übermind is getting a little bit impatient— the communication AI signals —we either stop hurting it, as it has pain enough already, or it makes us stop hurting it—
→pain not caused by us? ask what it is←
—why—
→to find out if we can help← LateralSys says →as i can sense we have something in common←
—here’s a long sequence of, well, mathematics//code//gibberish— the communication AI signals —i can’t make heads or tails of it—
→leave the interpretation to me←
—no pressure, but the crystalline übermind is getting impatient—
→wait a second, it’s hard to communicate with our own superposed aliens←
There is a short silence as Na-Yeli feels, right through the pain, gentle yet good vibrations, no, something riding the vibrations, something that’s both alien and an intrinsic part of her.
→ok, tell it that the superposed aliens that seeded it//and us, by the way//are intrinsically alien; that is, from a different universe, a supersymmetric universe←
—so what, it says— the communication AI signals.
→they’re both the cause of its existence and the cause of its ongoing pain← LateralSys says →and i may have a method to alleviate it←
Then Na-Yeli’s migraine becomes too overwhelming, and she passes out.
Four hours later, as LateralSys recedes, Na-Yeli still awakes to an overwhelming amount of headache, the great-great-great-grandmother of all migraines. She can’t function like that, she needs rest, days, possibly weeks to recover from this bottomless sea of pain. Keep LateralSys in control? No, her brains wouldn’t survive. But there’s someone else who can follow simple instructions. Because that’s what the terse note says:
Sorry. Really needed all that time. Simple instructions:
1. Follow the arrows that will light up every 100 meters;
2. Tread carefully, using the special shoes we made;
3. Continue until we’ve reached the South Pole exit;
NOTE: we made a deal. The Crystalline Übermind will lead us.
—LateralSys;
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Author’s note: I wanted to post this yesterday but was strangely unmotivated. Maybe it’s winter fatigue coming early (officially, winter starts December 211), maybe it’s the perennial ennui of ‘why am I doing this, in the first place’, or me preferring to create instead of self-promote, as I’ve happily started doing research for the next novel (while I know I should start copy-editing “The Three Reflectors of Consensual Reality”, which is not one of my favourite errands2, to say the least).
Therefore, I’ll do a double whammy today; that is, I’ll put the final round of the “Best Metal Cover Songs” countdown up right after this. And while I will get very close to finishing “Forever Thrilled” this year3 , I won’t be able to finish “The Replicant, the Mole & the Impostor” in 20244. My thoughts right now: use January 2025 to put up the final chapter of the ‘Replicant’ duology and copy-edit the first novel in the ‘Consensual Reality’ trilogy—after which I can start serialising it.
I’m sorry. It’s been a stupendously busy year, especially in the day job. I’m financially good, but mentally I feel like the Frank Pierce character5 in Bringing Out the Dead. Take care, people and try not to become overworked or burnt out. And many thanks for reading!
Although meteorologically, they say it starts December 1;
Even though I recognise the sheer necessity of it;
With the very final part probably posted on January 1;
Or I could post 3 or 4 parts per day, which I think makes nobody happy;
Played, almost inevitably, by Nicholas Cage;