A Wall of Tentacles
Na-Yeli wakes up from a deep, dreamless sleep. At least not any dreams she can remember after the constant nightmares preceding them. She feels great for the first time since, well, a virtual eternity. She feels like she’s got a chance to make it. Out of here, that is.
The Moiety Alien looks better, too, its asymmetry ratio increased to 46/154. It seems to try to get airborne but is falling back every time it rises a few centimeters. Na-Yeli gestures to it not to bother and stay down on the insulating tent-cum-blanket. Then she connects a few makeshift ropes to it, shape-shifts a pair of skates under her soles, and starts skating south.
To her surprise, towing her alien friend requires little effort—it must be feather-light already. A few kilometers farther, the ice becomes rougher and increasingly covered with snow. Almost subconsciously, Na-Yeli’s skates transform into skis. She has to work harder now, but not that much harder. And she’s in such a good mood she barely notices. If she would see signs of the good old megafauna in the upcoming tundra or the more remote temperate zone, her day would be perfect. But the only signs of life, as they leave the permafrost and Na-Yeli continues onwards carrying the Moiety Alien in an oversized rucksack-cum-baby-sling, are moss and the very odd, normally-sized insect.
Unlike last time, Na-Yeli & Co are not attacked by some huge, spiked hedgehog, rock spiders, or other outsized animals. To Na-Yeli, that would have felt like a welcome home party. Apart from the missing megafauna, Na-Yeli did spot some small critters but didn’t pay too much attention to them. Things don’t seem to have changed that much. The mini-Sun is still overhead and, according to Na-Yeli’s measurements, still follows the same 24-hour-6-minute orbit rolling against the outer barrier straight over the equator. It does seem to have a kind of flickering halo at its bottom half, though. Na-Yeli needs to get closer to determine what that is.
But right now, Na-Yeli is not in a hurry. The amount of time they lost in the Core—twice, as they had to return—will be so huge that an extra couple of days in this layer won’t make much—if any—difference at all. While she isn’t easily bored—she could observe a new environment for ages—she keeps to her promise to keep the hypersounders updated by voicing her observations and having the communication AI translate it to the virtual aliens who, she’ll gladly admit, did greatly help them get through the abject horrors of the Strange Hail. And does Na-Yeli imagine it, or does the communication AI sound almost friendly now that she’s using it regularly? KillBitch and LateralSys must be laughing their asses off, she thinks, because it’s almost as if I’m becoming a real CEO.
She’s tired faster than she expected—one night of good sleep wasn’t enough, and carrying the Moiety Alien takes more of a toll than she estimated—and now that they’re entering the temperate zone, where there could be high-quality soil, she’s thinking about taking a break.
With the Moiety Alien quickly getting better—as far as she can tell and understand from her friend and the 86/114 ratio of its orbitals—and Na-Yeli taking the time to replenish as much of her vital supplements in the first stretch of the temperate region, she decides to call it a night. Not in the last place because of the oncoming terminator, regular like the last time they were here.
The next morning, she feels good enough to try a gliding flight facilitated by the 0.25 G gravitational field. The Moiety Alien is already hovering overhead as if in waiting. ‘Do you feel better now?’ She gestures in the makeshift sign language they’ve developed and to which she prefers to stick to, despite consecutive offers—each subsequent one sounding more sincere than the other—from the communication AI to ‘immensely improve it.’
“When we get out of here in one piece,” Na-Yeli promised the communication AI, “then I’ll make sure you’re leading the team to crack that particular language barrier. But right now—how do I say this—it’s something between the two of us.”
—so you don’t love me anymore— the communication AI signals.
“I beg your pardon?” Na-Yeli says, taken aback.
—it’s this woefully indirect way with which you humans mangle communication— it signals —you call ‘humor’—
Is the communication AI trying to make a joke? Na-Yeli never thought she’d see the day. She does feel great—even better than yesterday—and the Moiety Alien seems to have returned to its usual, unflappable self. A large amount of her stocks—including sufficient elements to produce vitamins, minerals, proteins, and more—has been replenished, her water reserves refreshed (so that she’s less likely to think they taste like recycled waste), and her energy reserves are above 90%, so why not take to the sky? If only to see if the Moiety Alien flies normally, she tells herself, and yes, I love to do it.
But there’s one thing she promised herself to do when the Moiety Alien has recovered; that is, trust her with the one-way encrypted files she received from the alter-Universal aliens at the Core, and tell it to deliver it to Earth space in case she doesn’t make it through. It takes quite some time and effort to convey all that in the rudimentary gesture-cum-movement language they developed. Still, at some point, the Moiety Alien takes her miniaturized cache, somehow linking it to the invisible string—or are they force fields?—that hold its eight orbitals together. In exchange, it offers her a cache of its own—obviously for her to take to its kindred in case the Moiety Alien doesn’t make it through—and an instruction to send out a warning sign, which should get her in touch with the closest Moiety Alien after she’s escaped the Enigmatic Object.
Once the transaction is done, tears form in Na-Yeli’s eyes. This is the ultimate gesture of trust, even more important than saving each other’s life. Of course, the Moiety Alien’s cache could contain gibberish, but deep in her soul, she’s convinced otherwise.
Having taken care of that, she spreads her arms as wings shape-shift around them, takes a sprint, and, with a little help from her ion thruster, gets airborne on an updraft. After all the unrelenting stress in the previous layers, this is almost too easy. Yet she enjoys the moment for what it is—stress relief, a semblance of normality, elation. The Moiety Alien’s up in the air, as well. Its eight orbitals now all seem equally sized, and the slight bobbing it displays as Na-Yeli looks in its direction is its closest analog of a thumbs-up.
Now that her friend seems to have returned to health, she can explore the landscape below. They’re still in the more temperate region, heading for the subtropics. The first thing that stands out is the lack of extensive, dense forests. Plenty of open grassland scattered with bushes and the odd, singular tree. More steppe than woodland in the temperate region, and—as far as she can see—more savannah than rainforest in the upcoming subtropics—nothing like the thick jungle they went through on their way in.
Also, there is no sign of giant animals. While she’s disappointed that there are no signs of the good old megafauna, there seem to be no huge predators or other animals that have taken their place. She’s spotted a few critters, but they’re few and far in between. Yet the grasslands seem fertile enough, there should be food aplenty for the odd herbivore. It makes her wonder where in time they are, the future or the past?
The past seems unlikely, especially when looking at the situation in the previous two layers. It’s easy to imagine that the strangelet balls of the ‘Too Strange to Let’ era have broken down into the ‘Strange Hail’ through which they had to pass—with sheer terror in their hearts—twice. She can’t imagine a scenario where these centimeter-to-nanometer fragments would spontaneously reunite into perfect, hollow spheres. She’s seen some bizarre phenomena inside the Enigmatic Object, but ‘reverse entropy’ isn’t one of them.
On top of that, it also seems likely that the three Doom Bells would gradually wear down into granulated powder over time, heating the whole layer up in the process—Na-Yeli suspects they were driven both by gravitational frame dragging and the fast-rotating magnetic field of the SEKO at the center. While larger pieces of bronze might coalesce over time, it would have to be a truly improbable coincidence for that coalescence to lead to three approximately same-sized globes. Especially if the temperature remains above the alloy’s melting point.
So her working hypothesis is that time has moved forward, meaning that the megafauna of the old Berserker Forest most probably has died out. Inwardly, she sheds a little tear for them but can’t reminisce about the good old times forever. She has to deal with what this layer has evolved into now.
Not only does the megafauna seem gone, but also the lush forests—both tropical and temperate—that sustained them. There don’t seem to be many animals at all right now. It feels like something is missing. Where has all that biomass gone? Maybe it’s concentrated in the tropics?
But as they approach the equator, the lush subtropical savannah makes way for desert. What happened to the thick, dense jungle? Na-Yeli thinks, and the magnificent Trebuchet Tree? Right now, there’s nothing but sand and ...
... a steep wall rising up almost all the way to the forbidding ceiling.
It’s the same color as the desert sand, so in a trompe l’œil way, Na-Yeli thought the mountain wall was horizontal, the desert stretching south beyond the equator. But it’s not extending south, it’s climbing up. She has to look carefully a few times, as the optical illusion is a persistent one, but it does indeed go up with a stupendously steep slope.
Definitely the oddity in this space, this astoundingly high ridge—or is it a very thin, very steep mountain?—stack on the equator. To her best estimation, it rises more than ten kilometers from the tropical desert planes. It has to be artificial, as there are no tectonics here. And even tectonics pushing up a ridge so steep, so high, and precisely on the equator... It defies belief and beggars description. Yet it’s there, right before her eyes.
At the very top, the sharp edge of the equator-spanning rift, there appears to be an accumulation of thin tendrils with a yellowish sheen, like a halo of angel hair. From this remote viewpoint, they seem to reach almost all the way to the ceiling, Na-Yeli thinks, so why doesn’t the mini-Sun burn them up?
Speaking of the devil, she takes a look in its direction, adapting her filters to reduce the glare. The thin tendrils seem to move out of the way as the mini-Sun passes, glowing with a golden sheen—the lower aureola she witnessed earlier. A kind of super plant that grew up all the way to the sun, Na-Yeli wonders, that somehow made the soil follow its roots as it grew up, up and up? It doesn’t make sense. But now that her curiosity is genuinely piqued, she wants to take a closer look.
As if to help her, there is a strong updraft near the equator. Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien had to quickly cross a strong downdraught when they traveled from the savannah of the subtropics into the tropical desert. The whole tropical airspace is one huge Hadley cell, Na-Yeli thinks, which pushes all incoming rain clouds to the subtropics. She’s still unsure if this world is still transforming or has settled into a weird equilibrium.
Nevertheless, that massive updraft does come in handy. Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien do stay well away from the equatorial ridge—about four hundred meters—as they slowly spiral up to the very top. From closer up, the ridge’s wall appears artificial, as if stacked up by massive roots or tree trunks, cemented with clay the same ochre color as the desert sand. Peculiarer and peculiarer, Na-Yeli thinks, and those glowing ‘angel hair’ tendrils are yet to come.
One thing Na-Yeli has gotten used to is the fact that the air doesn’t get thinner at higher altitudes. Because the layers are enclosed between impenetrable barriers, they are closed systems, meaning the air pressure equalizes over time. On top of that, the gravitational pull of the naked singularity at this distance would have been too weak to keep such a thick atmosphere anyway, Na-Yeli muses, so I’m happy with the way it is.
This means flying is easy at any altitude, as Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien go through yet another upward spiral. At the moment, they’re flying away from the breathtaking ridge, and the next turn should get them moving towards the golden tendrils. They turn around to see that these shining tentacles are very long indeed. A dozen meters or so thick at their base, then tapering into thin lashes, exactly how thin is hard to tell.
Then, a loud whiplash cracks the sky, and Na-Yeli feels an intense pain in her right arm. One of the golden tendrils has lashed out to her and caught her by the right wing. Now it’s trying to reel her in. The shock of the pain is too much for Na-Yeli and the slow CEO faints. Immediately, KillBitch comes to the fore.
As she’s being reeled in like an insect by a monumentally oversized anteater, KillBitch forgets about flying. She has to cut herself free first. More whiplashes crack the sky as other shining tentacles try to hit the Moiety Alien, but its orbitals shrink and expand faster than the tendrils can ensnare them. In the meantime, KillBitch refurbishes her left wing into a molecular sharp knife and cuts through the loops of tendril around her right wing. She hurts herself in the process but can’t be picky, as time is of the essence.
Just before she’s drawn into the nest of tendrils at the ridge’s very summit, she cuts and wrestles herself free. Without further ado, she lets herself drop, streamlining her exoskin in the process to stay out of reach from the next tendril. It doesn’t come, as the Moiety Alien draws all the attention to itself with a number of tantalizing maneuvers. Even as every nearby tentacle tries to whip it, none succeed as its orbitals zip and zap out of reach faster than they can lash out.
Once sure she’s fallen out of reach, KillBitch reforms her wings, finding she can’t support her right one. The pain signals from that arm are drowned in a sea of adrenalin. Asymmetrical gliding it will be then, as it must, as KillBitch uses her ion thruster to get back up into the upper, southbound draught of the equatorial Hadley cell. She uses that to get out of the tropical area—it doesn’t seem wise to land in a desert—and even manages to hold on as they approach the temperate region from which they came.
The Moiety Alien accompanies her as she makes a careful landing. Down to earth in one piece, KillBitch retreats, leaving the slow CEO to deal with the aftermath.
Author’s note: sometimes, I get a few extra hours off in the working day, and right now I’m using them to keep catching up with the two serialisations (Forever Thrilled and The Replicant, the Mole & the Impostor). No worries, as I’m also working on a new essay and intend to get a few reviews and short stories (I’m also behind on these), as well.
Many thanks for reading and stay tuned!