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Blog Archive
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▼
2024
(151)
-
▼
September
(11)
- New York Minute by Stephen Aryan (reviewed by Mihi...
- Chapter Excerpt: World Walkers by Neal Asher
- Book review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
- The Sword of Kaigen & Where Loyalties Lie - Specia...
- The Sword of Kaigen & Where Loyalties Lie - Specia...
- Book review: Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi
- Review: QUEEN OF DREAMS by Kit Rocha
- Review: The Ending Fire by Saara El-Arifi
- Book review: Fool's Promise by Angela Boord (Etere...
- Author Interview: Yaroslav Barsukov, the Author of...
- SPFBO X Finalist Announcement: Here's our Champion
-
▼
September
(11)
The Fenris – Past
His skull
continued to fill. Data was laid down in semi-organic substrates, of which so
much of his body consisted, added throughout a million years of biotechnology
and controlled evolution. But the data was just a lens through which he looked
at the world, with the excitement of a child. Grasping his power and huge
breadth of understanding, he became eager to take his place in the world. The
loading continued to fill in detail about his kind, finishing with the Great
Project. The audacity and high aims of this astounded him. Only on his world
could something so ambitious have been attempted. Then, on checking timescales
and his inception date, he realized that the experiment must have already
concluded. He waited, anxious to be born into his new life to see the results.
Nothing
happened.
Hours and
hours passed, during which he kept pushing his concentration back to the feed
to learn more, and it became clear he should not have been conscious for so
long inside the cyst. Using his enhanced senses, he gazed beyond the birthing
cyst as far as possible, but could detect no movement. Something was wrong. He
began to squirm in the gel, to flex his limbs and stretch out one arm to the
wall of the cyst, but still nothing out there responded. Finally, examining
himself through the lens of that knowledge, he saw that he was way beyond the
point when all his tubes and wires should have automatically disconnected. He
had to do something more. Now knowing the extreme durability of his body, he
began pulling out tubes. The sudden pain had him frantically searching internal
control until he could shut it down and concentrate on healing processes that
for him could be conscious. The gel darkened with a network of his black blood.
He closed off broken capillaries, sealed entry points to his gut and other organs,
closed up splits through dense muscle, and then switched over the detail to
autonomics. Soon he had freed himself of all but the data and neurochem feeds
into his skull. As yet, he didn’t feel confident enough to remove them, but the
pipes and wires had plenty of slack, so he could free himself further in
another way.
He reached
out with one long arm – still far from attaining its full growth – and prodded
the cyst wall again. It was tough stuff but not resistant to the sharpness of
the claw he extruded from the end of his finger. With a jerk, he stabbed
through it, feeling guilty about damaging the cyst. He then drew the claw down,
slicing through the membrane. The gel bulged out, and the whole bubble of it,
with him at the centre, slid out of the cyst, as he would have done in a
natural birth. He hit the floor in a squat, the gel splashing around him then
blobbing up with the pseudo-life of a Newtonian fluid. He squeezed out tears,
blinked, and cleared the stuff from his eyes, then looked up at the flaccid
cyst above, with the connections to his skull running up into it. He next
snorted gel from his nostrils and, in a series of convulsions, expelled it from
his lungs. He took his first breath. The air had a strange taint and seemed
overly warm, but how could he be sure of what it should be, with these being
his first breaths? Looking along the row of cysts, his among them, he saw that
all the others hung like figs dried out on their tree, yet with angular
structures caught inside. Much of their gel contents had pooled on the floor
below and dried out to turn crusty like scabs. Amid these lay thousands of
small objects of a regular shape. Focusing his superb vision on the nearest, he
recognized red insect chrysalises. Now he realized that something was very
wrong. He sniffed, raised analysis through his implanted database and attached
the chemical signatures to a word: putrefaction. Then he heard a droning sound.
A black mist arose at the far end of the birthing chamber, and he felt the
first flies landing on his skin and biting.
The Fenris
brushed them away. He understood their biotech purpose was to update the
biology of his kind, to inoculate him against new threats, but the dry
factuality of his upload told him he couldn’t trust them to be functioning
correctly. He came unsteadily to his feet, seeing the larger cloud of flies
boiling towards him, and he feared how their programming might be defective.
They might all want to impart their information, and thousands upon thousands
of bites and the ensuing updates could very well kill him. With little choice
now, he reached up and pulled the connections out of his skull. Intense pain
hit. He closed this off, and then the blood vessels spilled their contents down
his face. Leaving the wounds to autonomics again, he headed away from the swarm
towards the clean lock door at the other end of the chamber. A touch to the
central pad opened it for him – like all the devices of his world, it responded
to his DNA – and he entered the lock. As the first door closed behind him, he
belligerently crushed every fly he could find before opening the next door.
Stepping out, his foot crunched on something and he moved aside, peering down.
It was a skeleton.
He
recognized the bone structure of a female of his kind. As an adult, she had of
course been three times his height and her bones had a bluish cast, glinting
with the nacre of inlaid bio-electrics. The oddity of her presence here was no
more baffling than finding that the inocular flies had managed to penetrate the
layers of security into the birthing chamber. He recognized other oddities too.
Nothing remained of her but bones. Besides the death of a fenris being an
improbability, the decay of a fenris body would take an age due to all the
protective biotech. That the body had remained here indicated no one else had
been around to clear it up either. And now he looked more closely, he could see
that some of the bone had turned to powder. Horrifying speculations arose about
what he might find beyond this place, and then a flash of anger. He kicked a
bone, skittering it across the floor. How unfair to be faced with this as a
newborn!
The dry
factual drone of his knowledge, stifling his youthful mind, did not allow the
anger to last. He scanned around him. This circular room had semi-organic
ducts, for data and materials, growing up the walls as well as branching across
the domed ceiling. The trunks and branches were dull and flaking in places, and
the technology here appeared to be dead. Yet the clean lock behind had worked
smoothly. Fenris technology rarely broke down; when it did, other tech swiftly
repaired it – it wasn’t often that a fenris had to intervene. Returning his
attention to the skeleton, he now understood the breakdown here was the reason
it had been left, since cleaning biomechs should have removed it, for
submission to the requisite authorities or disposal. But why was this corpse so
decayed, while the decay in the birthing chamber had been more recent? Just a
moment’s thought rendered the answer. Fenris were not born regularly. He’d
mistakenly applied the label of ‘birthing chamber’ to the hall beyond that
lock, when it was in fact a storage chamber for prebirth fenris. The place
should have been kept at absolute zero, with the likes of himself removed to
another place for defrosting and birth. The system had obviously failed a long
time after the death of the fenris here, letting in the flies and allowing the
temperature to rise. He had survived the thawing process, while thousands of
others had not. The fact the system had retained enough integrity to provide
his mental loading must have been a matter of luck. His whole existence was.
The Fenris
abruptly headed for the next door and found it did not react to him. Undoing
its manual lock helped, but the door was stuck to its seal, so he dug his claws
into the edge of that and heaved. The thing resisted until his arms were
burning, then it finally opened with a tearing sound. Had he been an adult, it
wouldn’t have challenged him at all. He stepped out into a long tube curling up
to his left and right, oblate and twisted, with the walls lichen patterned. A
map of his world arose for his inspection and, with his other senses also
giving him the shape of his surroundings in a sphere a kilometre across, he
perfectly located himself.
He turned
right and began walking, carefully studying his immediate surroundings. There
was no sign of any other dead but, a few hundred metres along, blue beetle
cleaner bots crawled along the walls. If there had been remains here, they’d
long since been removed. He needed to know what had happened, and that need
boiled up into a surge of energy. He broke into a run and felt the joy of that
movement, with the map and dry knowledge providing a destination where he might
find answers. After branching numerous times, the tube eventually came out onto
the surface of his world, and there opened a transparent band, with a view of
the outside. He slowed to a walk, annoyed by the childish exuberance that had
driven him to run, and annoyed by the adult knowledge implanted in his mind.
The tube ran across a metallic landscape, seemingly assembled out of numerous
blocks. This was what he had expected to see, but not the great scar of
wreckage before him, with collapsed structures and skeletal frameworks slewing
in from the right and converging ahead.
He kept
walking, until he came to a safety door and looked through its window. The tube
had been severed and more tangled wreckage lay beyond. Scanning further ahead
with his inner senses, he saw the continuation of the tube after a hundred
metres and pressed a hand against the opening pad. He received a warning
straight into his biotech, though, and quickly withdrew it. The mix of air out
there was lacking in oxygen, and he didn’t know why. Another thing he really
needed to find out. He hyperventilated, understanding this would be all he’d
need, since the distance wasn’t too far; he had no reason to switch his body
over to hypoxic. He opened the door. A blast of equalizing air pressure hit him
and it was freezing cold. Breath held, he walked along the bonelike beams and
slabs that were like dragon scales. A building had fallen here, collapsing the
tube, while deep pits delved down into a mass of fenris structure. It had the
appearance of some titanic creature twisted through hard technological
wreckage, and long decayed. He paused and scanned around, lost in the intensity
of this new input.
Cirrus
clouds frosted the deep blue sky – white above, then darkened to yellows and
browns over the sunset. He walked out to the edge of a slab and leapt onto
another, peering ahead to his destination. There he saw the five-kilometre
black thorn of a tower rising from a spread of giant, nodular, fungal masses.
At least that still stood. Just like the tube he’d walked along, and everything
that lay below, the thing had grown, guided by harder technologies. Similar
biotechnology covered the entire surface of the world – an ecosystem turned to
fenris utility, and only scraps of old evolved biology left. But now he had no
idea how much of it remained intact.
Finally,
reaching the continuation of the tube and a second safety door, he entered and
breathed again. Dry knowledge raised a wave of dread, for the lack of oxygen
out there seemed unlikely to be a local phenomenon. The child walked on,
absorbing the wonder of a world that was new to him.
The tube
finally turned up into the tower, acquiring slab steps suitable for the long
stride of his kind. The Fenris climbed them, made aware again of his diminutive
size, but also of the growing hunger that would feed his growth. On the way up,
he passed entrances into globular chambers whose outer faces were transparent
to the sky, almost like eyeballs. A few of these were shattered and closed off
by doors, while others somewhere in the tower lay open, with frequent frigid
breezes blowing through. He found himself panting at the lack of oxygen as the
biotech in the building struggled to keep it to the optimum. The chambers grew
smaller as he climbed higher, and the circumference of the tower tightened.
Finally he came out into the data transmission peak.
The tall
room, with its ceiling closing to a vanishing point, seemed wholly occupied by
standing sheets of glass and filmier substances too, all bound together with
hard, fleshy biotech. The transparent walls gave him a view across his world,
where the scars of wreckage formed curious, regular curves. Here and there he
saw the glint of powered lights, but also fires that must be fed by
biotech-generated oxygen. Up above, stars speckled the now night-time sky, a
backdrop to the giant orbital structures also hanging there. One, like an
ancient combustion engine a hundred kilometres across, he recognized. It was
one of the engines that had driven the Great Project. The moon rose like a city
dome on the horizon, with its ring system hooked up above it.
He walked
through the room, the glass sheets sliding out of his path, until he reached a
console. This doughnut of material held a pseudo-matter interface at its
centre, which seemed to shimmer in and out of reality, but the hand-shaped
imprint in the middle of it remained perfectly stable. The Fenris reached down,
painfully aware of how his small hand wouldn’t fit it. Now he’d find out what
had happened to his world, and to his people. And about the Great Project.
In the far
past, his kind had gone to their moon and explored it thoroughly. They went on
to explore their solar system and took their shots at the stars. Interstellar
exploration continued, but their race then divided into two factions: those who
had their eyes on the stars, and those who began to examine, and gain access
to, the seeming infinitude of worlds parallel to their own. They discovered the
multiverse. The latter remained in the vicinity of their world and retained
much of their biological and mental history, in their forms and their
technology. The former changed beyond easy conception, adapting to vacuum and
the vast reaches of time that interstellar travel involved. The Fenris was of
the multiverse kind.
In the
multiverse, the fenris explored worlds that seemed to be shadows of theirs – or
reflections in mirrors, facing in towards their own world. These stretched into
infinity, with infinitesimal differences between each accumulating, until they
became utterly alien places, occupied by alien cultures or no cultures at all.
Oddly, those on the nearest reflections had also discovered the multiverse, but
no effort had been made to explore it beyond that. His kind made contact with
their mirrored kind on those closest worlds and began technological and
material exchanges. Some conflicts ensued too, but his kind always seemed to
come out on top. Their shadows appeared to lack substance, will and energy.
So they held
dominion over many worlds and discovered flaws in the reflecting, shadow world
model too. Drastic changes, or twists, in their laws of physics became
apparent, and the symmetry of it all seemed to have broken. Overall it was as
if, stretching out from their world, reality steadily degraded. Dirty mirrors,
one researcher called it. Their growing understanding of the multiverse and
these worlds then raised something concerning, and ultimately depressing:
reality returned to its original form.
If they made
changes in closer worlds, over periods of months and years those changes
dissolved, swept away. The world concerned would return to being a weak
reflection of their own. The theoreticians got to work on this, while the
mathematicians and other scientists shaped and proved their model. Their own
world they described as nodal; it was the only one on which drastic changes
could be enacted, then these would be reflected. Any drastic changes on shadow
worlds eventually came to nothing. Their ‘nodal’ world was, in essence, the
only one where true free will existed. Why? There was no ‘why’, just the
reality. To test this, they caused an atomic blast on a shadow world,
destroying an island. Much was the furore on that world about the incident.
Then the fenris tracked the changes over the ensuing months: the disappearance
of information about it, the rapid drop of radioactivity on the island, and the
return of its life and shape. Five years later, no one on that world had any
memory of the incident. During this time the nodal fenris also brought shadow
fenris to their world and it soon became evident they were sickening, growing
increasingly confused and thin, until they started dying and fading completely.
It seemed at first that they couldn’t exist in the harsh clarity of the nodal
world. Only later did the nodal fenris discover these individuals alive again,
back on their shadow worlds, some with vague memories of travelling and others
with none at all.
The shadow
worlds weren’t real and nobody there had any choices or ability to decide their
future. The nodal world stood as the central model they followed poorly. This
stabbed at something deep within the fenris concerning free will. It had arisen
a million years in their past, during tens of thousands of years of
authoritarian rule, when they’d lived under regimes with every thought and
action monitored and controlled. Hideous wars and slaughter, and the adaptation
of their own biology, had arisen to release them from that. Now it seemed they
were the unwilling autocrats, and their every action dictated those of an
infinitude of shadows. And so, because they were the ones who could bring about
change, the Great Project was conceived, becoming the focus of their race.
What if the
shadow, reflected worlds could be unlinked from their nodal world? What if they
could be freed to navigate their own course? The fenris turned their powerful
science to the task of severing these chains. Making engines that would feed
off the power of their sun, and a million other suns, they aimed to dice up the
parallels in their multiverse network. They would fold reality around those
other worlds and free their brethren from this unintentional dominion. Some
raised concerns and pointed to those places in the multiverse where parallel
worlds ceased to be reflections, and where the laws of physics appeared broken.
Could these be the detritus of previous attempts to do the same? Their concerns
were ignored by the bulk of the race, though, and the objectors took what they
needed and headed out to their interstellar kin. The great engines were rigged
for this task, while a particular fenris was gestated in a womb cyst, and grew
to the point where he could be stored. This was where he’d been just before the
engines were turned on. And now he was born.
I am the
Fenris.
The truth of that statement tore at his
insides, while his secondhand knowledge didn’t give him the experience to know
how to grieve, as he watched the rest of the history play out. The engines came
on, and he saw their sun, as well as the many others, wink out of their
existence. The sky turned black but the fenris survived with their technology
intact. They found themselves caught in their own cyst of reality, much like
the cyst he’d been frozen inside, even as their atmosphere itself froze and
snowed down over them. Survival for perhaps millions of years remained assured,
for they could burn the matter of their world to that end. But what then? With
an expiration point to their existence in sight, and their world closed off
from the greater multiverse, they fell into despair. Many began to die – mostly
through choice and deliberate neglect. However, a small clique of scientists
worked on something radical that would require sacrificing a massive amount of
energy to entropy. They began to alter the engines in orbit to create a
pseudo-matter tool that would be able to penetrate their enclosed reality.
Fenris
continued to die, with many now sacrificing their resources to this new
project. Four thousand years passed, while much of the life, biotech and even
atmosphere of their world expired, and the race diminished. Finally, the
engines were ready for the next step. But remaining fenris, clinging to life,
baulked at turning the things on again. Autocracy arrived in the form of a
science council, an echo of their despised history of societal repression. War
ensued in an agreed form but, as the council began to lose, it acted
independently and turned the engines on anyway. It was sacrificial and
suicidal, because the plan had been to put the remaining population into
hibernation. The Fenris observed the engines reach out a claw to penetrate the
reality cyst around his world, and he shuddered at how this reflected his own
birth. The massive drain sucked life and energy out of the world, freezing
fenris where they stood, or fought, and dropped them to the ground dead.
Massive feedback loops wrought destruction, as did the fall of some of the
engines, with world technology failing. Then, like a wonder, the sun rose, but
it was over the death of a race. Remaining technology, and the world, absorbed
energy from this new continuum and began to rebuild, with many failures along
the way. It was one of those failures that had allowed him to be born.
‘I am
Fenris,’ he said out loud. And this was indeed the case. He could find no trace
of any other living member of his kind on his world. He was now the entirety of
his race.
World Walkers. Published in 2024 in the United States by Pyr®, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 221 River Street, Ninth Floor, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030. Copyright © 2024 by Neal Asher. First published 2024 by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.
Order World Walker over HERE
OFFICIAL BOOK BLURB: He can jump between worlds. But can he save his own?
As a totalitarian Inspectorate tightens its grip, one man discovers the power to slip through the gaps and traverse alternate universes. World Walkersby Neal Asher is an exhilarating standalone novel set within the Owner Trilogy.
Ottanger is a rebel and mutant on an Earth governed by a ruthless Committee. But after its Inspectorate experiments on him, Ottanger realizes the mutation allows him to reach alternate worlds. The multiverse is revealed in all its glory and terror—and he understands that he can finally flee his timeline.
Then Ottanger meets the Fenris, an evolved human, visiting his Earth from the far future. He’d engineered the original world walking mutation, so those altered could escape the Committee’s nightmarish regime. Yet this only worked for a few, and millions continued to suffer. And Ottanger sees that that Committee will become unstoppable if not destroyed.
However, the Fenris has drawn yet another threat to Ottanger’s Earth. With the power of its trillion linked minds, it craves world-walking biotech and will do anything to get it. As conflict looms at home, and war threatens the multiverse—the Fenris, Ottanger and his companions must prepare for a galaxy-altering battle. . .
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