Nebulon

by Avatar Titan

Chapters

• Primordium
• Animus
• Imputresco

Primordium

I peered through the glass window, all three fingers pressed firmly against it. My free hand clutched the ceremonial staff that all adolescents were required to carry. The tiny psionic crystal hovering within the circular tip pulsed in time with my heartbeat, just a little slower than a hummingbird's wings. All my research, all the grants, all the money and the funding had gone into this singular moment. Pity there was no one else to watch with me.

It was a lab. There wasn't really much else to say. A surgical table, some counters, a microscope or two. A box of tools here and there. I had worked here for the past year or so, staining my fingers with DNA, cell components, stains, and, once or twice, blood. There was no one in the room - the robotics looked over the process that unfolded on the table.

The bird-shaped bipeds with their spindly limbs were reaching over a soft, marshmallowing being, if it could even be called that. This creature was the sixth specimen of the sixth egg batch - a supposed failure, yet it was alive, breathing, and thinking, in the most basic way, of course. It shouldn't even be alive, not without the extensive amount of tubing, cybernetics, and equipment that was attached to it. I couldn't even see its rounded, babyish face.

Someone out there might find the creature cute. But all I wanted was to be revealed in the next fews moments. This creature would be our salvation.

One of the bipeds reached over with its limb and drove a blade through the stomach of the beast. It twitched, only slightly, and a calm spray of its reddish-green blood came out of the new wound. I silently willed the machine to cut the incision, cleanly, of course. The other biped, with its padded arms, waited for the catch. I could not hear the screams as the walls reflected sound, but the psionic reverbations shook the room with a violence that only a newborn could produce.

The padded biped pulled the infant Nebulon out of the open wound. The quadrupedal creature gave a final few twitches, then went limp. Even as I entered the room, staff in hand, I could no longer sense the faint psionic pulses that the creature had made. It should have been there, pecking at the side of the newborn's scream, but it wasn't. The thing was dead, like its brothers and sisters. Little more than another creature to be biomassed. I flicked a hand at the bladed biped and it began disconnecting the fresh corpse from the tubing, each unleashing a jet of air, or a spout of oxygen solution. It mattered little.

What mattered was that the baby in the padded biped's arms was alive. It would take time to uncover if any changes to his DNA had occurred while in the womb, but that hardly mattered. The important thing was, unlike all the other babies that were born dead, unlike all the other children that were biomassed before they were out of the womb, this, this child was alive, blinking, and filling the room with psionic noise.

And she? She would be mass-produced, as soon as I could figure out how to keep its partially blank genetic code stable. Perhaps, if the 89th chromosome was extended with three hundred and twenty-one more tri-pairings. Perhaps, if I added some coding for sexual organs. Perhaps, if I gave it a little more brainpower...

No. If it gave it that it would be the end of us all.

Animus

Perhaps it was a mistake. She should never have become like this. But perhaps it was for the best.

I am not he. At least, not in name. These creatures were not my creation, but mine. It has been centuries since his passing, and his creation has birthed numerous generations. She and her sisters have progenated a legion, a nation, an empire. At last, we are able to reach for the skies in our beautiful black ships, to explore and to conquer. We all have her to thank - a creation, replicated over millennia into the ideal mother we have now. All of our children are of her blood - all of us have her to thank for our existence.

She gave each of us a mind, and together we will make her better, make her stronger, and make her more powerful. Every day, she grows stronger. She and every one of her sisters, all alike, who have made our nation possible.

She knows pain. She knows how hard childbirth is. But as long as she and her sisters do so, our world will continue to be alive, and our legacy will continue to be spread.

She should have never become like this. She should have been bound, decimated, reduced to an organic machine, nothing more. But perhaps it is better this way, for a mother with a mind is better than a mother made of steel and glass. The children deserve better. Let them have the comfort of knowing that they were born of a biological source, instead of a dead monster of a device. They will, perhaps, learn from this.

The females accept their newfound equality. She relieves them of their position, and they in turn thank her for her patronage. They thank her in all her grayness and softness, in all her rounded features and wide, crying eyes. They thank her because she takes the burden off them, and they thank her because they have no one else to thank. Perhaps we should all thank her too.

But today, in the lab, I stand before one of these creatures, still attached to its birthing device. The tubing and the wires are mostly gone, with only the central nerve connections still in place. We have let many of them grow hair, and it flows down their heads like strands of grass in the summertime. They have a certain... equine... feel to them, like they are distant relatives of the horses we use for transport and entertainment. Perhaps their genetic code contains some eldritch secret we have not yet uncovered. Even he, me, did not fully know who they were.

But I stand before one, her white hair billowing and frayed. She waits silently in her metallic metal egg, her head exposed to the air. She is tired, tired from birth. But she is strong. We engineered her that way. Soon, she will be ready for another round of births. But that is not why she is here.

She deserves better. Perhaps not now, but something deep within the psionic matrix has plans for her. It summoned me here, to take her here, and it commands me to give it hope. Perhaps it is just my own mind speaking, yet the matrix never lies. The matrix commands us to go to the stars, to explore, to expand. Perhaps it will tell us what to exploit. Perhaps it will even tell us to exterminate. But the matrix has never been wrong. And who am I to question the voice of our collective people echoing through the void?

So the people command me. So I will do.

I start by removing the outer carapace of the birthing machine. Not many of our kind have peered into its innards, and I am lucky that today I catch my first glimpse. It is rather simple - an egg of steel protecting monitoring machines and liquid dispensers. Catheters go into both her forelegs, and the small of her back. There is fresh stubble were her tail should be. Stretch marks cover her soft, fuzzy belly. She looks peaceful, as if she was sleeping. Her forelegs are curled up on her chest, like a baby in the fetal position. She is breathing softly, with each breath facilitated by the thin tubes going down her rudimentary windpipe through an opening in her throat. I am secretly relieved that this one does not have scars.

My fingers run up the catheter. A swift psionic swipe, and they silently fall out. The machine gives off a quiet, shrill cry.

Her eyes are not open, but they are as wide as dishes. I tried not to imagine them filled with tears as I remove the catheter attached to her back. Two more psionic swipes later, and the soft, padded straps that hold her still fall away. Gently, I grasp her limp body and lift her out of the birthing machine. The wires attached to her head fall away one by one.

She is still alive. I switch the breathing tube with a fresh one from my portable machine. She will never have to go into the device again.

I take my humming knife and I reach for her head. Slowly, the vibrating blade knacks against flesh and bone. The small hole is barely enough to draw blood. She barely opens her eyes.

A biped has walked into the lab, bearing a tray. I pat the expertly programmed robot on its extensible, avian head. It emits a sound similar to a  squeezed plush toy.

On its tray are two things: a bag of nerve gel that repairs split nerve endings at an alarming rate, and a small, pulsing, biological organ barely later than my thumb. The biped cocks its head at me, but I pay it no heed. They can think, but they remain servile. Why should this one be any different?

My humming knife makes the incision wider. I can see her yellow cords now, nerve endings crossing across the muscle like strings. Gently, the humming knife splits them, one by one. I see her go limp for a second. Perhaps she is wondering where the rest of her body went.

I grasp the organ with a pulse of psionic energy. It floats off the biped's tray and flies through the air, ending its flight above the tiny hole. I lower the wiggling thing down until it touches the yellow cords. I then squeeze the nerve gel until the bag is empty.

The wiggling thing fuses with her, its pseudopods connecting with the severed nerves. I seal the wound back up, but it is already moving. The tiny bump crawls up the back of her mane and into the top, where it disappears. She starts breathing again, shallow breaths against the whirr of the vent fans.

I stand back with staff raised, waiting for the inevitable failure. But it doesn't happen. She does not move.

Failure, then. 'Tis better than suffering. I tell the biped to bring her to the biomassing chamber.

She twitches.

I hold my breath. Perhaps she is not dead.

The machines register a pulse. A faint one but there is still one. Perhaps there is hope yet.

I wait. She does not move. The biped, again, moves to take her away.

Her eyes open. I feel her fear ripple through the air. I feel her anger, her sadness, her laughter, all at once, conflicting, clashing, a tempest of wild emotion that comes of one unable to think for itself. It is jumbled beyond belief. I am sure that at least one other in the building felt it and grasped his head in pain. But I do not. I ride out the wave of emotion, waiting for it to stabilize. Waiting for the once-mindless creature to think for its own.

She looks around in a blind panic. Sweat beads on her head. Her underdeveloped muscles struggle to move her, flailing about like branches in an autumn wind. I was right - her eyes are as wide as dinner plates. She clings on to the last shred of her innocence, perhaps not wanting to ascend. Perhaps her fate is to be a cow with which the popula-

No.

The Nexus has spoken. She is to be uplifted, in the best way we can.

She must.

I grab onto her head and unleashed every last fragment of psionic energy I could find. It bounces around the room, a perfect dissonance, a strident harmony. I fill her simple mind with knowledge, knowledge beyond what she could create, knowledge beyond what she could ever comprehend, and I scream. I scream and I scream until I have nothing left, and I scream some more. Her dish eyes stare into mine with growing interest. I stare back into my creation, into his creation, and I scream louder.

And then, suddenly, a chorus. Her voice becomes mine, and mine becomes hers. Suddenly, we scream together, and I feel her mind reach into my own, her thoughts, her rudimentary thoughts intertwined with my own.

Out of the void comes two words, the only two I could hear against the fizzling darkness.

I'm hungry.

Imputresco

She will be our salvation.

I know this because I trust her. And she, perhaps, trusts me.

The mirrors are ready. I am I ready to walk through them, to escape the hell that our home has become. But she is not ready. And so she will stay here, to remake the world in our image.  The Nexus believes this, and so I cannot complain.

I take the final needle and inject it into her foreleg. A tear comes from her eye, but she does not cry. I stroke her soft mane and psionically whisper comfort into her mind.

"Why?"

The question comes from nowhere, and yet I understand it perfectly. She wants to know. Perhaps I will tell her. Perhaps I will not. The secrets will have to be hidden for her to find.

I see the dark scarab-ships fall from the void outside, and I pull the needle out from her leg. I wave at the nearby biped, and it caters toward me, arms already extended. I point at the creature - that is all I have to do. The biped lifts her up in its robotic hands.

The world shakes. I hear the scarab-ship's synthetic roar - I feel the searing heat of its crimson beam tearing through the asphalt and earth. It could destroy me, but if it did my purpose would be nothing.

So I run, and I command the biped to follow me. We crawl through the ruined streets together, running through rubble, watching as everything we have ever created was torn down in an instant. Everything I have ever done to make this reality was destroyed. Even my staff was thrown aside in desperation. And so we have little else to do but run.

The lab is nearby. The building is all but destroyed, but the basements are still intact. I run out onto the open street and I see one of the scarabs turn to me. There is nothing left. I run, the searing-hot beam crossing behind me, just barely scraping the biped and the future of everything. The machine is fine. The creature is gripping the biped as if it were a pillow.

There is no more time left to waste.

I break open the ruined doors to the staircase. But it is too late. The harsh, mechanical scream echos over the the city, and suddenly I am falling, falling.

The cold metallic grasp of the biped's arm finds my shoulder. The bone breaks but I am not dead. She is still alive. The staircase is still intact, and I can see the exit. I command the biped to move us onto the stairs proper, even as the earth crumbles around us. I run forwards, holding my broken shoulder. I find the door and blast it open, letting the light flow where it never should. The labs are empty, and the world cracked. Nothing is working. No lights, no doors, no machines, nothing. Even the biped begins to exclaim that it is running out of power.

But there is one thing in here that works.

There is a glass tube, mounted on the wall. There are hundreds like it.

Specimen storage. Designed to freeze whatever is inside to preserve it.

Meant to keep things alive for longer than they could live. And powered by an uninterruptible power source.

I rev the flywheel, ignoring the pain. Once, twice, three times I pull, and on the third time the bank of cryo-pods flickers to life.

Even as she stares at me with tearful eyes, I know that I could do no better. But the things she carries - she will save us all. Even as the tube is sealed I smile at her. My hand touches her hoof through the steel-glass. Her eyes well up with tears, but I shake my head no. No tears now, my dear.

Be brave now, my little pony. Soon, your nap will be over.

My tear slips off my face and drips onto her pod. She smiles, but only a bit. I turn off the light inside her pod, and quickly insert it in. The cryo-module begins to whirr, and I run, as quick as I can, away from the lab as it begins to crumble.

And maybe, just maybe, she will be our salvation.