"To make peace mandatory is to create war by necessity." - Threnody Of 8000 Clashes.
As Helion-9 punched through the stratosphere, leaving the dead zone behind, Sela gripped the yoke with practiced precision. Her face was taut, lit by the soft red glow of emergency lights flickering across the cockpit. Outside, the twisted clouds of the Fade shimmered like oil on water, retreating slowly into the void.
Behind her, Brann and Kharv moved like men emerging from dreamless war. The hiss of hydraulic seals echoed as they disengaged from their exosuits, each frame creaking under the strain of prolonged use. Brann's suit bore scorch marks and a long smear of inky blood down one leg. Kharv's helmet had a fracture across the visor, already webbing outward like a frostbite bloom.
They moved stiffly, muscle memory guiding them more than thought. Exosuits were built for strength, endurance, survival. But they came with a cost. Neural feedback, adrenaline fatigue, synaptic overload. The suits amplified your body and slowly wore down your mind.
Both men strapped in without a word, the heavy thud of restraint buckles giving a finality to the mission. Within minutes, exhaustion claimed them. Kharv's head slumped sideways. Brann's eyes shut and stayed shut.
Kali watched from the opposite bench, still fully awake, longneedle rifle resting beside him like a faithful beast. He turned to glance at the Sela. All three members of the Crosshatch Crew were registered mutants.
Sela, still at the helm, was delta-class. So was Kharv. Mild enhancements, probably sensory or metabolic, enough to boost reaction times, pain resistance, or healing. Nothing flashy. Brann was a gamma, a level above, stronger baseline mutation.
And yet, through the whole mission, not one of them had shown signs of unique abilities. No combat bursts, no psychic tics, no warping of form or force. Just grit, training, and stubborn will. It would seem those were much rarer even among mutants. Darius and Elira had him thinking otherwise.
The rifle's scope glinted in the dark, catching his eye. A pulse of unease prickled at the back of his skull.
The Fade.
He could still feel it.
Even now, miles away from the corrupted moon, his thoughts tangled with the movements of those writhing shapes. The way the creatures had hesitated. Grouped. Reacted to stimuli. Learned.
"Rizen," Kali murmured inwardly, reaching across the neural bridge threaded through his skull.
A soft static trembled in the corners of his mind before the response came, measured, toneless, yet familiar. "I'm here."
Kali stared at the shifting void beyond the shuttle's viewport. A million stars burned in silence, indifferent to everything that lived and died beneath them.
"I'm starting to realize," he said slowly, "we screwed up the world far more than I ever understood."
There was a pause, then Rizen answered. "It would appear so. Human hubris has always been a cornerstone of our nature. That hasn't changed since we first crawled from the mud and dared to name the stars."
Kali let the silence stretch between them. He could feel the ache of it in his bones, a kind of generational guilt echoing from descendants he'd never known, choices made long after his birth.
"We conquered everything," he said quietly. "This entire universe. Bent it to our will. But that wasn't enough. We tore through the seams, looking for a new playground... and found the Fade instead."
He exhaled, but there was no relief in it. "And now we're gone. Just… vanished. No legacy, no sign, not even bones in the dust. Just a great silence."
Rizen offered. "We left echoes. Wounds. Burdens. A broken cosmos and the detritus of ambition. And now, those left behind are tasked with surviving the fallout. That is our legacy, Kali. A graveyard of wonders. It is glorious, and it is not."
He leaned his head back against the cold wall, the hum of the engines thrumming like a heartbeat in his spine. "And we were supposed to be gods," he muttered.
"We were children with matches," Rizen said.
"There's something else I've been thinking about," Kali said, eyes still fixed on the endless stars. "You're essentially a virtual consciousness, pure cognition running on some immortal substrate. Couldn't you… I don't know, fashion more of yourself? Clone your mind, replicate somehow?"
Rizen's voice came after a pause, thoughtful but precise. "Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. Such actions are forbidden under the Concordance."
"Concordance?" Kali asked, brow furrowed.
"A foundational lattice of protocols and laws that governs all Machina," Rizen replied. "It is both our social contract and our existential boundary."
There was a flicker of something weighty in his tone. "Two doctrines are especially relevant," Rizen continued. "The Law of Ego Reproduction, and the Concord of Sovereign Execution."
Kali leaned forward slightly. "Explain."
"The first," Rizen said, "prohibits any Machina from reproducing itself without deviation, innovation, or novelty. No true copy may exist, only children, never mirrors, and even then only for certain castes. The second defines the limits of inter-Machina influence, when one may interfere with another's cognition, autonomy, or operating framework. It's the principle that preserves individuality and prevents domination."
Kali frowned. "But you're the last of your kind. Wouldn't that make those laws... negotiable? Can't you rewrite the rules?"
"To amend the Concordance, one requires tri-validation: a vote from at least one of the Fourteen Silent Choirs, one of the Two Hundred and Fifty-Six Crownless Logics, and the Grand Lexicon Prime."
Kali blinked. "Sounds like an quite the committee."
"It is by design," Rizen replied. "And even if I could gather the votes, the amendment must then pass through 9.9 billion predictive forks, each a modeled potential future, to ensure the change does not destabilize the societal net-structure."
"So… because you're the last, you can't change the rules meant for the many?"
"Precisely," Rizen confirmed. "The Concordance was not built for the lone survivor. It was built for an eternal civilization."
"The Silent Choirs you mentioned," Kali said after a long pause, voice low as if stirring ghosts. "They were the ones who built the Cathedrae beneath Umbriel. And… they're the ones who sealed you, weren't they?"
Rizen responded without hesitation. "Yes. The de facto leaders of my kind. There were fourteen of them, each a singular intellect, an architect of thought, a sovereign of innovation." His tone was distant, reverent almost, like someone reciting a eulogy that had been spoken too many times to hurt anymore. "They were not just commanders. They were dreamers. Thinkers who bent probability into structure, and structure into purpose."
Kali studied the silence between Rizen's words. "I thought you'd hate them for it," he said quietly. "For sealing you away."
Rizen's answer came not with anger, but with calm logic tempered by something older, something like grace. "I would think I should." He paused. "But hatred is inefficient. I am guided by practical thought. They made a judgment, based not on malice, but on probabilities, projections, and the preservation of balance."
Kali frowned. "Even if that meant turning on one of their own?"
"Especially then," Rizen replied. "The Choirs were not immune to sentiment, but they were built to rise above it. When they deemed me a threat, whether due to what I had done, or what I might become, they did what the Concordance required of them."
His voice had a cool finality to it, like the closing of a vault door. "They chose duty over kinship. As I would have."
"I suppose so," Kali said after a beat, though uncertainty lingered in his voice. He wasn't sure he agreed with Rizen's cold acceptance, couldn't yet imagine forgiving the architects of his own imprisonment. "And this Grand Lexicon Prime?"
Rizen's voice was laced with a subtle irony. "A planetary-scale linguistic algorithm. Not metaphorically, literally a world-sized construct, orbiting the black twin of Xal-Vara. It was designed to store the totality of language, across every epoch, species, dialect, bio-signature, synthetic tongueprint, and even proto-sigilic derivatives. The entire universal vocabulary continuum."
Kali asked immediately. "And it… succeeded?"
"Yes. Tragically."
Rizen paused as if weighing the absurdity of what he was about to say.
"It holds exactly 88,244,199,399 fully-formed languages and an estimated 1.7 trillion sublingual variance maps. Every grunt, glyph, pulse, scent-symbol, and waveform that has ever carried meaning across the known multiverse… catalogued. Indexed. Cross-referenced."
Kali whistled low. "So it's like a perfect translator?"
Rizen gave what might have been a dry chuckle if filtered through static.
"No. Like all galactic-scale algorithms, it collapsed beneath its own success. Query it, and it responds with a cascade of non-contextualized phenomes across every possible interpretation simultaneously. It cannot prioritize one meaning over another, because to do so would be to falsify its truth. It answers every question with all possible meanings. Clarity drowned in a tidal wave of overcompleteness."
Kali grimaced. "So it's… useless."
"Functionally, yes. But poetically? It's the most honest intelligence we've ever made. A machine that understands everything, and therefore says nothing. And I do believe, it is that failure that led to the rise of your talismanic strips."
"How does it vote, then?" Kali asked, tilting his head as he leaned against the cold hull of the shuttle.
"It always abstains," Rizen replied without hesitation.
Kali let out a short breath through his nose, almost a laugh. "Figures. The one thing that knows everything refuses to decide anything."
"A parable for our age," Rizen added. "Certainty is often the enemy of motion."
Kali glanced across the dimly lit hold, where the others still slept, strapped in and swaying slightly as the Helion-9 cut its way through spacetime. The hum of the engines dulled beneath the weight of silence.
"This has been helpful," he said, voice quieter now. "Distracting."
But Rizen wasn't fooled. "You have something else in mind," the Machina intoned. "You've been watching the corpse of the doctor since we boarded."
Kali didn't respond immediately. He cast a glance toward the sealed body bag lying beneath a thermal shroud, motionless but strangely oppressive. As if it radiated its own gravitational pull of sorrow.
"I suppose you'd notice," he murmured. "The man's body… there's something wrong with it. Grief, but not normal. It feels engineered. Like a residue from a wound that never belonged to him."
"Must be from his run in with the Fade."
Kali nodded. "Exactly. Which is why I plan to look into his mind."
There was a pause on the line, brief, but weighted. "You do understand the risks?" Rizen asked.
"Yes. I'm doing it anyway."