Dysphoria- Rise Read online

  HYMN OF THE MULTIVERSE 6

  Terra Whiteman 2018

  All rights reserved

  To Ernest, Erin, Mick, Tyler and my loving husband, Hank.

  Thank you all so much for your support.

  “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

  — Carl Sagan

  O

  WHISPERS

  Leid Koseling—;

  I AWAKENED WITH A HOLE CARVED out of me.

  I’d fallen asleep in apprehension, knowing the nightmares would return. There were always two versions, yet both concluded with sable-stone corpses splayed across a sea of yellow grass.

  But the bodies weren’t familiar. The field was not from my home.

  The scenery was Exodian, undeniably, but no place where I had ever been. My subconscious caught a glimpse of a large construct, obscured by shadows, looming in the red horizon. Every corpse crawled toward it with faces twisted in eternal horror, all captured in a disturbing still-frame moment. Some of them had wings, some did not. The dream always concluded there and although I was never among the corpses, I woke with a rapid-fire pulse and it took ages to catch my breath. And so I seldom slept.

  Adrial was growing concerned.

  Tonight he found me combing attica for whatever fancied my idle mind; this time it was a rare biotoxin that precipitated from mesosponges on Sigma-7. I could not be where Qaira was, but learning about the world he was on helped me pretend.

  Attica, our multiversal library, storing everything we’ve learned and surveyed throughout the thirteen known universes. It had been so long since I’d updated my archive that it was easy to get lost in all the exploration.

  “Leid.”

  My flinch was visible. When I removed the visor Adrial’s demeanor was far gentler than his tone. “You should be asleep.”

  He folded his arms. “Funny, I was about to say the same thing.”

  “I’m not tired,” I lied. I was exhausted, but not exhausted enough to relive the nightmare. Adrial didn’t know about them; that’d only give him another reason to worry about me. After all, I was the first of our kind to come out of expiration relatively lucid. There was no telling what might happen now.

  “You haven’t slept for days.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  Adrial sighed with frustration and it made my heart sing. Just like old times, except now he was no longer my guardian, but a king. His dark brown eyes weighed me with incredulity, and then he glanced at the logs. “Sigma-7, again?”

  “Always.”

  “He’s due back in a week.”

  “I know.”

  Adrial nodded and turned to leave. “Try to sleep.”

  I fitted the visor over my eyes and laid back in the chair. “Soon.”

  *

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned, the world around me slowly filling in like ink spreading across paper. I was not where my dream had told me.

  Crimson light pierced my retinas like pinpricks. I stepped away from the Exodian cliffs. Here marked the edge of our world. One more step and I’d have taken the plunge.

  Zira decided that I had taken too long to answer him and repeated his question.

  “Taking a walk,” I said, even-toned. Honestly I had no idea what I was doing. This was why I didn’t like to sleep.

  He studied me, suspicious. “It’s barely morning.”

  Outwardly Zira appeared concerned. The enmity behind his orange, blazing eyes told me otherwise. He regarded me with cool stoicism; a reminder that we had not parted on good terms. His king was dead and he was forced to play nice. Personal feelings held no place within the Court of Enigmus.

  Or, at least, that was what we told ourselves.

  “Where I go is not your concern,” I warned, turning my back and looking out into the hazy abyss.

  “I thought you were about to jump.”

  That may have been true. I didn’t know. “Interesting. Were you here to observe?”

  “If I wanted you to jump, I wouldn’t have said anything.”

  “I’m not going to jump. You can leave now.”

  “First meal is being served,” he said, visibly scathed. “Adrial sent me to tell you.”

  I nodded, saying nothing. Zira faded in my peripherals.

  My shoulders sagged as I watched the thin thread of blue light trail from the cliff, disappearing into the red-tinged mist across the gorge. It was pulled tight like a chord, waving intermittently, plucked from the unknown.

  It was clear that no one could see it but me. I returned to this world—to all worlds—with new eyes, capable of seeing spectrums and their subsequent anomalies otherwise undetectable to my kin. It was difficult to focus on anything when everything hit you simultaneously.

  The chord tasted bitter and salty, like blood.

  I retreated from the cliff, trying to scrape the taste off my tongue with my teeth, all the while ignoring the gentle hum of the thread begging me to return. There was more to our world than we knew—;

  It had taken my metamorphosis to realize it.

  I

  ALL THE FINE PRINT

  Qaira Eltruan—;

  THIS WHOLE SCHOLAR THING wasn’t such a bad gig. The five year stint with the Tagwarkian System Alliance had flown by. I left in three days.

  Sigma-7 was a satellite discovered by the TSA in the outskirts of their massive thirteen-planet solar system. It was currently being surveyed by several corporations in the Alliance, and I’d been tasked with providing information about its chemical and physical characteristics. That was a job virtually any scholar could do (anything on this planet was identifiable by attica) but I was also required to help design a more efficient method of nuclear transmutation and, if possible, build the equipment necessary.

  The atmosphere on Sigma-7 was not kind to Tagwarkian physiology. It required a ten percent increase of one particular gas to render the air non-toxic. That could be accomplished organically by spending a ton of resources on agriculture of certain fauna and that was indeed the long-term plan to keep the atmosphere stabilized thereafter, but no one wanted to wait five or six hundred years for fluffy plant things to make the air breathable enough to develop a colony. What the TSA had so far in the way of fission power reactors and magnetic confinement devices made it too cost-worthy for any corporations to bother investing in.

  That had been the easiest part; I’d finished the latter portion of our agreement in the first year.

  The remaining four had been spent in an enclosure on Sigma-7 with a group of Tagwarkian specialists as their personal planetary encyclopedia. Each day I accompanied the team out into open terrain as they researched the landscape and brought back samples to study. I archived any findings into attica and made sure they didn’t wander into anything lethal. Hopefully Leid had enjoyed the poisonous mesosponge update that had nearly killed my group last week.

  I didn’t have to wear a protective suit, but did anyway just to fit in. It was easier to blend in than catch all the uncomfortable glances from the team. Like most intelligent apex species, Tagwarkians were bipedal and had binocular vision, but that was where the similarities between us ended. Each individual had varying degrees of heterochromia and their skin looked like it was dipped in shiny, blue dust. They had no hair and their fingers were frighteningly long. They were a shorter race, the tallest of the group barely reaching my elbow.

  Surprisingly they had some of the best broadcasted audio serials that I’d ever listened to. There wasn’t much to do between explorations and I filled the void with a collection of stories they had brought and stored in the enclosure’s drives. It helped me understand their culture, but I steered clear of the romance serials because the t
hought of Tagwarkians fucking was vomit-inducing. I’d archived several of my favorite serials to show Adrial when I returned.

  The science was my only prize and I kept to myself. I knew the names of the team members but little else because I didn’t care. At first they had tried to ask me all kinds of questions and I’d spent the better part of two years dodging potential contract violations until they got the hint and left me alone. They should have read all of the fine print.

  I spent most of the morning riding in their survey craft toward a new excavation site. Half the team stayed behind to monitor the levels of the instrument I’d helped build to convert the inner atmosphere. I’d cautioned them that changing an aspect of an environment could potentially have consequences unforeseen without further investigation, but they lacked any foresight. All they knew was that they were growing too big for their inner solar system and needed more space. That was a noble risk, I supposed.

  This was a low-risk expedition so weapons weren’t warranted. Probes sent several days before had detected the usual red, grass-blotched rocky terrain, with herds of screaming cow things and oblong, glass-looking trees that probably weren’t trees at all. This planet had gone largely undiscovered but attica was able to tell me what everything was composed of. It was enough information to determine what might kill Tagwarkians, at least.

  The sky was a wash of pink and blue. A pulsar blinked in the horizon, far enough out to only irradiate us a little. A converted atmosphere would filter most of it. For now my team could only be outside their craft and enclosure for eight hours at a time before having to de-radiate in the infirmary. For me it was like snorting stimulants; sometimes I had to resist the urge to take off my suit.

  We arrived onsite at midday. Probes had detected strong electromagnetism coming from the crevice. Force fields often meant metal, which was precious to beings like Tagwarkians. Watching them work was boring and I spent my time leant against a glass tree a little ways from the crevice, combing through attica. I would have listened to a serial but they asked me to analyze something every ten minutes so I couldn’t concentrate.

  My eyes trailed a probe as it made its rounds across the perimeter. It was a little metallic sphere, no larger than my hand, soaring over glass treetops. The rhythmic red pulse of its beacon was hypnotic and I tuned out, watching, until it disappeared south.

  And then something exploded from the crevice.

  The team was screaming. A few of them were scrambling up the escarpment as a cloud of black dust billowed from beneath them. I took a few steps forward, trying to determine the situation. Had their drill malfunctioned? Had something inside the crevice collapsed?

  Attica picked up the signature before I could see it on the normal light spectrum. There was a giant mass of heat moving within the dust cloud. The EM field around us had spiked.

  Out bounded a giant mole-thing with scales, and horns; blue shocks flittering between them like two-pronged conductors. A member of the team was locked in its jaws and it shook him violently, raining blood across the ground.

  I hesitated, unable to believe my fucking eyes.

  The force field our probes had detected wasn’t from a deposit of metals; it was from a burrow of electric marsupials. There was no way I could have warned the team of it, as we’d gone the entire length of our visit having never come across this sort of fauna.

  The electric dragon-mole emitted a blinding flash.

  I winced and looked away.

  All the Tagwarkians screaming at each other over the comm-link went silent. Only static. The team members scrambling up from the crevice collapsed, clutching their heads. The creature scooped another into its jaws and chewed her up. They had no weapons (a risk-free expedition, fuck me) and were left without any way of defending themselves. After five years of work, this whole project would end in a matter of minutes.

  I was forced to make a difficult decision then—one that needed a lot more time than I was afforded.

  I ripped off the suit and sprinted toward the scene, shouting in Tagwarkian to get to their surveyor and stay back. My wings ripped from my shoulders, scythes from my wrists, and I lifted off in blur.

  I hit the creature with the force of my shoulder. It was half the size of our enclosure, but that meant nothing to me. It slammed against the crevice slope on its side and I landed atop it, piercing it six times with both of my scythes. Its blood was hot and acrid, splattering across my uniform, singeing the fabric. Moments later, it died.

  I archived its information into attica; this wouldn’t happen again.

  The silence was jarring and I looked over my shoulder, noticing the fifteen surviving members of the team staring at me, all frozen in place. A probe flew circles above the scene, recording a perfect shot of me standing next to the dead monstrosity.

  Fuck.

  II

  SUBSEQUENT AFFAIRS

  Pariah Andosyni—;

  I WAS LAST TO ARRIVE at the assembly on purpose. We only used it for one thing, and lately that one thing was Qaira.

  My entrance into the hall was met with shouting as my noble and Qaira engaged in a heated argument. They were stationed on opposite ends of the oblong obsidian table, out of their seats, as if placing all their weight on the table’s surface would declare them the winner.

  I suppressed a wince and took my seat with the others, who stared resignedly at the ensuing squabble. Yahweh and I shared a look, and he smirked.

  “I don’t get it,” Qaira snarled. “You’re acting like I should have just stood there and watched everyone get chewed up.”

  Adrial matched Qaira’s expression with equal fire. “Scholars do not engage in battle. That’s the first rule.” He played me the feed from attica through both Qaira’s archive and what the Tagwarkians had managed to capture via their probes. As I caught up, my eyebrows raised.

  Qaira noticed the shift in my demeanor and shot me an icy, side-long glance. To counter my noble’s side of the argument, he streamed us the glowing reviews that he’d garnished from Sigma-1, the Tagwarkian home planet.

  “The only reason I haven’t kicked your shit all over Enigmus is because of that,” spat Adrial. “You showed them what we really are, Qaira. They can’t know what we’re capable of.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because you looked just as frightening as the thing you saved them from! The Court of Enigmus’s image is one of cosmic academia, not—”

  Qaira laughed under his breath. “Being a god killer, right.”

  “It scares lessers. Not to mention we might attract the wrong attention.”

  We were known as cosmic librarians, archivists and teachers. Our entire society revolved around educating lesser, intelligent species of advancement through contractual agreements. Our true motive was to use these contracts to document and log multiversal information into our subconscious database, attica. The more worlds and people we helped, the more came knocking, and the more information we gathered.

  Information that may eventually lead to what we really wanted to know. What were we? Why were we?

  “I’m surprised you didn’t just stand by and let them die,” said Zira. “You spent half the time watching their entertainment broadcasts instead of doing any research.”

  “Get out of my archive.”

  Zira frowned. “You clearly didn’t care for their well-being. Why did you do it?”

  Qaira hesitated, looking between Zira and Adrial. “A successful contract is better than what would have happened had I stood by our terms. It needs a revision. The PR is a lot better if they know we can protect them, if it ever comes to that. You think having some apathetic, unfeeling entity standing there watching you get your face carved in is a good image? That’s fucking nuts.”

  Qaira was the wildcard in our deck. My noble went easy on him—too easy sometimes—but from what I’d gathered there was a lot of history between them. He, like me, was a guardian, but Adrial almost treated him as an equal.

  Yahweh had told me a bit
of it; something about Qaira once being the derelict leader of an extinct race and a subsequent war between the celestials on The Atrium, Yahweh’s original home. There was a lot of backstory from when I’d joined. Nobody liked to talk about it and I didn’t ask.

  “I tend to agree,” said Aela, my noble’s other guardian. They shared a look, and Adrial’s expression softened. Her electric-blue eyes trailed across the members of the table. A shock of blonde hair fell over her ear, across her cheek, and she wiped it away. “Knowing of our power would garner respect, not fear. The problem here is that Qaira’s just frightening in general.”

  “Thanks,” muttered Qaira.

  “There’s an elegant way of revealing our scythes, then?” said Adrial, incredulous.

  “We are what we are,” said Aela. “We should use our traits to our advantage, not hide them. No one else hides their traits.”

  “No one else can weave through universes like curtains,” said Leid, sucking on a cigarette.

  Everyone looked toward her. When our Queen spoke, we listened.

  “Take the clause out altogether. It should be up to our discretion whether or not to use force.”

  “You’re very predictable, do you know that?” sighed Adrial.

  Leid leaned back in her chair, studying her counterpart. She was seated cross-legged, a laced sundress decorated with flowery print hung loosely on her form. Her long, black hair was twisted in a braid, swept across her shoulder. She twitched a knee-length, black boot. Her demeanor was like no queen that I had ever seen. “Had I not violated that term, twice, neither you nor Qaira would be at this table arguing ethics.”

  Qaira’s scowl slowly turned into a grin, realizing he was winning over the court. Although Adrial was King, Leid Queen, we were a democracy for the most part.

  No one said anything. The following seconds felt like an hour.