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Synopsis
A ragtag band of musicians is all that stands in the way between an army of giant mechas and humanity's total destruction in the second book of this big-hearted, technicolor space opera trilogy by one of the most exciting voices in science fiction, Alex White.
Ultra-glam enby pop star Ardent Violet thought they could catch a break and enjoy some time with their new boyfriend August Kitko after defeating the giant mechas hellbent on humanity's destruction. However, Ardent didn't count on their mecha allies summoning a host of extraterrestrials to defend Earth.
Between the diplomatic entanglements of the newly-arrived alien Coalition, and a mysterious all-powerful AI establishing a base within their solar system, there's no rest for the wicked.
When August makes a discovery that could turn the tide of the war, Ardent Violet finds themself back in the spotlight for an encore!
The Starmetal Symphony
August Kitko and the Mechas from Space
Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye
For more from Alex White, check out:
The Salvagers
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe
A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy
The Worst of All Possible Worlds
Release date: December 3, 2024
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 464
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Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye
Alex White
Ardent Violet has experienced a lot of incredible things in their short, beautiful life: dozens of worlds and twice as many lovers, packed arenas chanting their name like the beating of a thunderous heart, swarms of mind-eating automatons trying to kill them, then trying to save them, then briefly trying to kill them again before absconding with their agent. That’s leaving aside all the giant mecha battles and trepanation of the past month and a half.
These last five years have exceeded even liberal estimates of strangeness.
Ardent’s morning has been a blessedly tame one, consisting of having amazing reunion sex with their jazz-pianist-turned-Conduit boyfriend, August Kitko, then popping over to a hardened government facility in the Colorado Rocky Mountains to hang out with the hulking sentient machines who saved humanity.
You know, normal people stuff.
Ardent stands in an old American Empire vehicle bay large enough to park a battleship, a relic of the dark days at the end of the Capital Age. The United Worlds forces have gutted and restored enough of the base to house the four Traitor Vanguards who turned on their siblings. In the poor lighting and makeshift facilities, their starmetal armor takes on a dramatic cast like performers on a stage, three of them standing over a wounded kneeling comrade.
Ardent squints at the tableau of arranged mechas, searching for life inside the four keening Vanguards. The bay hums with their song, resonating Ardent’s bones with infrasonic bass. The aquamarine lines along Cascade’s bronze carapace shift and flow just beneath the surface, but there’s no motor activity. Jotunn remains silent as the grave, the carbon-dark angles of its form devouring the light. Its thousands of drones have stacked themselves nearby in crop circles, each larger than a storage drum and heavier than a house. Falchion, bloodred and sinister, looms over the trio with its predatory gaze locked upon some distant object Ardent can’t see.
Greymalkin kneels before them, the emerald light from its eyes washing its black-and-white armor plates. Gleaming palladium seams seal the battle scars, an advanced tech only the Vanguards understand.
Ardent’s boyfriend is inside its chest, communing with the monster.
“It’s been a while since Greymalkin ate him.” Ardent brushes a few strands of errant hair behind their ear. “Are we supposed to do something, or…”
The woman beside them crosses her arms. Elzahia Tazi, a United Worlds government handler for the Conduits, sports a tight beige suit over her dark skin, cornrows and fingernails luxed a pastel blue. Those boots might be business casual, but she could definitely step on someone’s neck.
She’s essentially Ardent’s parole officer.
They watch her, trying to determine if she’s annoyed or not. “Miss Tazi—”
“I heard you.” Her French lilt devours the h sound as her gaze snaps onto them. “Be quiet.”
Ardent rolls their eyes as soon as she’s not looking.
“Hey, uh, am I broadcasting?” Greymalkin’s eyes flash in time with Gus Kitko’s rough voice.
“We hear you, Mister Kitko,” Tazi replies, raising a hand.
“Right. Good. Okay.” He takes a breath. “Greymalkin says it’s been, um, calling allies.”
Allies?
Tazi glances to Ardent. “What does he mean?”
Ardent shrugs, then cups their hands and shouts to the Vanguards. “What, like other human colonies?”
“Greymalkin and I have been discussing it for the past five minutes,” Gus replies, “and I’m really not sure how to explain what’s about to happen.”
“Try, Kitko,” Tazi says.
Her Ganglion computer chirps from a pendant around her neck, and she snaps her fingers to bring up the UI. A hologram of a fresh-faced, masculine lieutenant with pale skin appears before her. They exchange militaristic greetings, but Ardent can’t hear the man’s side of the conversation.
“Check it again…” Tazi says, beginning to pace. “Check all of them again…”
“What’s happening?” Ardent says.
Tazi pauses before answering, as if weighing whether to trust Ardent. “The Ghost Loop in Monaco just activated.”
She snaps her fingers, and her polished nails flash in acknowledgment. A little camera drone zips out from behind her, projecting an image above itself.
The Monaco that emerges in hologram is nothing like the diamond on the emerald sea where Ardent first met Gus. It’s a carved-up wasteland with the very mountains chopped down to make room for an intricate palladium superstructure. The buildings surrounding it have all been razed or stripped to the girders. Broken hulls of starliners and yachts litter the nearby SuperPort Hercule, their carcasses picked clean by a swarm of Gilded Ghosts. A lot of rich people aren’t going to get their old starships back.
The “loop” rests at the center like a great, glittering conch shell, its tightening spiral bristling with metal spines. Misty azure light courses beneath its surface, and Ardent can almost feel its energy building through the projection. How many ship reactors did the machines loot to make their masterpiece? Juliette’s corpse rests nearby, a skeleton cleaned of all components. Were those bits also included in the Ghost Loop?
“It’s okay!” Gus says, but his assurance is undercut by the blast of all four Vanguards revving to full power. Their metallic voices ring in the bay like a million demonic choristers, and Ardent’s hearing protection does nothing against it.
“Not okay!” Ardent covers their ears and sinks to their knees, desperate to block out the sound. It cuts through any barrier.
Tazi starts barking orders into her comm, but Ardent can’t understand her over the din.
“Ardent.” The devilish Falchion speaks into their mind with their own voice.
Ardent’s stomach lurches like a first crush.
“Come to me.”
Their brain slackens, and time gets weird.
A blink later, they stand before Falchion, a dark god in bloody livery. The other Vanguards break from their stasis, the vibrations of their footfalls rippling up through Ardent’s legs into their teeth. Ardent should get away—they could be crushed by an errant step, but none of that matters. Tazi calls to Ardent from behind, voice distant and meaningless.
The crimson giant leans over them, clothing all in shadow, and extends an armored hand. Ardent dutifully steps aboard and steadies themself on its upturned thumb. They rise to Falchion’s chest, where plates unfold to reveal a pulsating blue cocoon of synthetic muscles and wires. Home.
Ardent’s eyes roll back in their head, and they fall forward. The lights go out, and rough forces reorient them before invading.
Cables thunk into ports across their body—poisonous foreign technology implanted into Ardent by the Vanguards. Lightning crackles through their mind, and a blast of fresh sensory data clears away the fuzz. The air supply slithers up their nostrils and into their mouth.
“Pleh, oh my god. What’s happening?”
A mirror image of Ardent emerges from the ink, silvered irises shining like a pair of coins. Studs and spikes dot a tight black polycalf outfit, firelight illuminating their supple musculature. Ardent makes a mental note to steal the look. The doppelgänger gives them a hungry smile.
“Just calling you to heel, pet.”
Ardent wants to pop off a quip, but Falchion has threatened them with damnation before. The tiniest thought from a Vanguard could spell unlimited torture.
Falchion’s soft laugh annoys them.
“What?”
“You’ve grown self-control.”
“Thank you.” They affect a polite mask. “May I know what’s happening?”
“You’re learning how to catch.”
“Oh, please, honey, I know how to do that just fine.”
“Ticktock, Ardent. Something important is about to happen to the Earth and all your friends. Care to pay attention?”
“Of course.”
Falchion’s network pours into Ardent’s ports like ice water. Scanners sweep the shape of the bunker and gravitational fields of the planet to dead reckon Ardent’s location down to a micrometer. Their mirror clone disappears beneath the onslaught of the armor’s wide-spectrum energy vision. Ardent towers over the vehicle bay, striding toward the titanic doors. Thirteen soldiers clear the path ahead, tiny hearts thumping in their chests. Ardent could count the hairs on their heads in an instant.
Blast doors part before the giants. Jotunn’s drones stream from the bay like a cloud of flies before the Vanguards step out into the Rocky Mountain vista.
Tall pines prick up between boulders like hair upon the skin of the Earth. The forest glitters with reflections—the lenses of the military, all trained on Falchion. More sats spy from above. The city of Colorado Springs quietly panics in the distance, all air traffic either landing or fleeing.
Jotunn and Cascade blast off and curve for the horizon, leaving dueling sonic booms in their wakes.
“Where are they going?”
“To pick up their Conduits.” Falchion’s disembodied voice sends a chill up Ardent’s neck. “Look to Monaco.”
Falchion projects a waypoint through the curvature of the Earth. Ardent has little trouble spotting the distant principality in the center of a terrifying energy bloom. It brightens the sky like a sunrise, plasma lightning shooting across its membranous surface.
Greymalkin rockets heavenward on arcflame. Falchion follows, its launch flattening a stand of trees.
“The allies we need are scarce—not in this galaxy,” Falchion says.
“Please tell me I’m going to get to meet aliens.”
“If they can punch a wormhole to us.”
Falchion gives Ardent full control, and they rise into the freedom, rocketing straight up to get a better look.
The Monaco energy cloud swirls like a hurricane, its eye drawing outward in a cone. The tip gets impossibly thin, an infinitesimal thread spun from space-time and projected out into the void.
“Isn’t this a bit, uh, close to Earth?”
“Not if my calculations are to be trusted.”
What’s not to trust? Ardent thinks.
“I heard that.”
Monaco’s energy cloud picks up rotation speed, cycling at billions of megahertz—beyond even the measurement speed of Falchion’s computers. The snap in reality whites out sensors on every wave band. Noise bubbles through Ardent’s body. They shield their eyes on instinct, and Falchion throttles the input to a fraction of its previous magnitude.
Greymalkin’s transponder beats nearby, reassuring Ardent. Sight returns, blurry and miscalibrated, the colors split into prismatic hues. The cone has become a beam of white-hot light, energy signature beyond measuring.
Twin signals streak from the surface of the Earth—Cascade and Jotunn, bound for Ardent’s location. The four Vanguards reunite in the stratosphere.
“How’s it going, folx?” Gus’s rough voice sounds like it’s inside Ardent’s head, and they love it.
“Dude!” Nisha Kohli’s New Jalandhari accent follows—transcendent singer, former fan, fast friend, absolute Vanguard slayer. “Cascade just snatched me out of a food court!”
“Better than being taken from the shower.” Hjalmar Sjögren, aka “the Swedish Raven,” speaks like the grinding of glaciers—once upon a time, a session drummer on an Ardent track, now a Conduit comrade. Ardent’s boyfriend is a little obsessed with him.
At the end of the energy beam, the stars pinch and twist into a tight bundle. Falchion scans the anomaly and finds a sucking wound forming in space, the seed of a black hole.
“Yeah, this still feels super close.”
“It’s a mild EMP, Ardent. Just stay out of the beam. Now let’s catch a space station.”
Deepsync in progress…
The Fount presses at Ardent’s consciousness—the largest repository of human memories ever collected. Countless billions of Wiped, dead minds flow against them, overwhelming all.
Light pours up their spine and out into their extremities, electric and pure. Their nerves strike like lightning, and their brain goes into overdrive.
The souls of the Fount sing their knowledge, ready for Ardent’s every need. Then comes a chugging guitar in low D, an easy jam. Ardent can’t stop their mind from composing, adding themself to the totality. Hjalmar’s kick drums join them as the Swedish Raven soars onto the network. The beat evolves into an earth-shattering solo, blasting out polyrhythms in modulated time signatures. If Ardent hadn’t been connected to the copious drum nerds of the Fount, they wouldn’t have had a clue.
Nisha’s song comes next, alternating between droning and flowing melodics. She wields her voice like a sword, silvery and cutting.
Gus comes last, his torrent of notes like a summer rain. He brings the group to a crescendo, then the wave breaks into a steady rhythm line.
“Okay, so what are we doing?”
“Catching,” Falchion says. “Now here comes the pitch.”
The flaring energy point one and a half million kilometers above Monaco collapses in on itself.
Space falls away into a refractory tunnel. In Deepsync, Ardent understands these forces as innately as the breeze: The Traitor Vanguards have created an unstable wormhole from the exotic matter in Juliette’s reactor. The physicist contingent of the Fount goes absolutely wild as several thousand passionate hypotheses are posthumously validated.
The pathway arcs and twists in on itself, bending the light all around. Nature seeks to collapse the space-time aberration, and only Monaco’s singular power output can buttress the structure. Best-case scenario, the wormhole will wink out of existence in under a minute.
Ardent’s pulse hammers in their ears. “It won’t last much longer.”
“Just enough time to push a gate through.”
A space station pierces the caul of stars, barreling toward the Earth. It’s like an extruded letter V, with a series of ultra-powerful capacitors nestled into the trough. A city the size of Old Manhattan encrusts the outside. Between the stored energy, mass, and speed, it would liquefy the surface of the Earth upon impact.
No reverse thrusters. No maneuvering ports. It’s not going to stop.
Greymalkin revs its gravity drives, throwing a deep well to pull the station off course. At this distance, a few degrees are more than enough to miss the planet.
Falchion projects an arc across open space for Ardent: a path for the station to follow around the Earth. The sorts of advanced orbital dynamics that once confounded Ardent come to them as quickly as breath, and they analyze their situation. They need to slow the structure down—but not enough that it begins falling toward the planet.
The four Vanguards fly toward the jump gate with all the speed they can muster. Falchion’s view zooms in on the city’s underside, reading signs of life.
“Ardent!” Gus says. “We can’t let this thing fly past Earth, or we’ll be towing it back for years.”
“What exactly do you expect me to do here?”
Hjalmar answers. “My flock can distribute energy—maybe even act like a net.”
Jotunn’s drones zip out across the structure, stippling it with fine points of black. Through Falchion’s sensors, Ardent watches them flare white-hot with power, pushing back against any load-bearing areas they can locate.
“I’ll smooth the conduction,” says Nisha, and Cascade places its open hands side by side to make a triangle with thumbs and forefingers. The space between Hjalmar’s drones blurs with Cascade’s energy manipulation, assisting the automatons instead of disrupting them.
“The net is strung,” Falchion says. “All it needs is power.”
“You want me to shoot it?”
“Unless you have a better idea.”
Ardent reaches behind themself as their mental orchestra hits a crescendo, slowed by the weight of Falchion’s titanic arm. They close their hand around the grip of their weapon and draw it level with the center point of the gargantuan V.
“Why not?”
But aiming the gun only brings more questions. When do they shoot? Where do they shoot? What if they’re at the wrong angle?
Scores of mathematicians and theoretical physicists sing through them as Falchion sleets memories into their mind. They line up the sights against a location they never would’ve picked and click the trigger, discharging the weapon at maximum. The particle beam comes out with enough juice to core a small moon before it spider-webs across Jotunn’s drones.
Nisha’s fields form intelligent circuits, guiding the flow between the nodes. Ardent keeps the fission fire hose at full blast, focusing on steady aim. Jotunn’s drones glow like embers; surely they can’t take much more punishment.
The network is beautiful to behold, neon and shimmering, shot through with drops of oil. Falchion’s sensors render it in every spectrum: layers of unending complexity born of organic creativity and artificial assistance. As the station lazily drifts onto the orbital path, Ardent dials down their particle beam until it winks out.
The glowing drones peel off the structure, leaving burns and gooey welds behind. When they return to Jotunn, they encircle its darkness like fireflies, radiating against its shape. Without air, there’s nothing to absorb the stored heat.
“Hjalmar, are your drones good?”
“No,” he replies, almost like he’s in pain.
The clouds of automatons form into long chains, touching oblong tip to tip, sucking the energy along the links. The drones at the top turn white, then X-ray, then shoot off to explode in radioactive puffs. Hjalmar has lost some of them before. Can he replace them?
Ardent looks back at the alien city, teeming with signals. It shines in the sun.
“What do we call this place?”
“Big Gate City.”
“For real?”
“It doesn’t translate well.”
The jump gate has scarcely hit stable orbit before it activates. Power warms the capacitors across the trough of the V, filling it with glitter.
The radiant points inside the jump gate become alien ships, each stranger in design than the last. There are enough vessels to overpower the astral navies of the United Worlds at its peak.
“Nothing is ever going to be the same after this,” Falchion says.
Ardent hopes the statement is more for better than worse.
The last few notes of Deepsync piano boil away, and August Kitko numbly watches the flashing of the jump gate. He only learned about the potential for aliens a few weeks prior, but he didn’t take it seriously. Between all the different ways the world was trying to end, he didn’t have time.
The alien vessels are so strange, but then, he’s a man cocooned in the warm, gelatinous chest of a giant. The ships bear only a passing resemblance to human vessels, and the only reason he knows the fores from the afts is that he assumes they wouldn’t jump in backward.
The leading ship is the cerulean of the deep sky, the largest of its companions and in the same class as a human supercarrier. Its twisting bones resemble cold blue fire frozen into a graceful ship design. Greymalkin points out a thousand places in the hull that might be threat systems, given obvious power distribution, but it doesn’t want Gus to worry. These newcomers are here to help, despite having more tonnage than a large asteroid and more firepower than all four remaining Vanguards put together.
“You are so good at comforting people.”
Greymalkin appreciates that, despite the obvious sarcasm.
Gus flies toward the flotilla, careful not to appear hostile. Greymalkin’s advanced scanners feed data into his mind as though he could hold the alien hulls in his hand to inspect them. He gains an innate sense of their weight and maneuvering. Their electrical systems bristle like fur beneath his sensors.
“Is that one a hive?”
He gestures toward a ship in the center of the pack: viscous, luminous resin stretched over the remains of a city-sized tree. Dark shapes skitter just beneath the white surface, blurred by a murky substance.
Correct—it’s a hive.
“And what about that one? Why is it tiny? And that one looks like a crab!”
Despite the creeping exhaustion of a sync taking a toll, he’s wide awake, absorbing every historic moment. He wants to see his new intergalactic neighbors, and it’s absolutely worth the crash that’s coming.
Spaced through the ships are tiny figures: other creatures the size of Vanguards, their energy readings off the charts. They’re colorful, with extra limbs or unique shapes. Many of them sport bilateral symmetry.
“How do we, um, make contact?”
Greymalkin has already done that. It continuously handles space traffic control, diplomatic communications, and logistic queries. There are currently more than fifteen thousand active channels spread over the flotilla.
“So you’re like… talking talking to them. As in, you understand them.”
Such a feat is trivial with the correct exchanges. Communication is merely a layer of human software, easily translated when a large enough data lake is available. The Fount is the largest human database ever assembled. The aliens have given the Vanguards similar repositories of cultural knowledge to speed first contact.
“So first contact already happened?”
Greymalkin and the Traitor Vanguards needed to ensure it would go smoothly, so they strictly limited human involvement.
“Probably smart.”
The ragged remains of the Earth’s defenses come limping over to inspect the jump gate and newcomers, but there’s nothing the Earthlings can do if there’s a problem, save getting their asses kicked. They’re in combat formation, for whatever that’s worth, many of them bearing fresh scars from the recent Battle of Earth.
“Here comes trouble,” Gus says. “Hope they’re not trigger-happy.”
Greymalkin has asked the United Worlds Fleet to stand down, and assured them that any attacks wouldn’t be in their best interests.
“Will they listen?”
Humans rarely do. If they attack, they’ll likely be destroyed with overwhelming force.
Looking at the sizes of the fleets, Gus absolutely believes it. Once again, humanity faces something many times larger than itself. That almost never goes well, but the species isn’t extinct yet, so he takes small comfort in that.
Greymalkin will remove Gus’s control now. He’s needed for organic first contact.
“Wait, what? You said it already happened!”
Someone will be the first human to speak with alien life.
“I’m not qualified for that!”
With the Fount, you will succeed.
Gus’s gut twists. He already occupies a larger place in the history books than he ever wanted. If someone had asked a young August Kitko what he desired out of life, he would’ve said “pro jazz pianist.” He did that, playing every venue he’d ever cared about.
“I just did a Deepsync.”
This will not be as hard as that.
“Just be gentle.”
But the galaxy splits across his horizon, creating identical copies of the Earth and moon. Gravity takes his limbs, depositing him on the surface of a mirror. When he looks down, he sees the version of himself that lives in his head—avian frame in his slouchy suit, light tan skin and shaggy black hair, stubble on his jaw.
He never would’ve chosen to meet an alien ambassador like this.
“Hey!” Ardent says.
Gus turns to find them wearing a castle of a dress. The material borrows heavily from the rococo period, employing actuweave to make the skirts flow with the gilded wings of angels. The train stretches on for an eternity, and accounting for the collar and stilts beneath the getup, Ardent stands two heads taller than Gus. Their makeup resembles a porcelain nymph.
He cranes his neck to see them. “Hi.”
“Tell me I look great. I wore this at the final Melbourne Fashion Week.” Ardent flourishes their fingers, and the patterns crawl along their textiLED sleeves in response. The rocker is glowing—both with excitement and special effects. “Are we seriously about to meet some fucking aliens?”
“Oh, I hope so!” Nisha comes scampering up to them out of nowhere, her glittering Patiala salwar suit jingling with ornamentation everywhere it meets her tawny-brown skin. Light blue embroidery covers a saffron silk drape, and textiLEDs depict hawks in flight across her torso, darting between embroidered flowers. Patterns glow along the lengths of her arms. “Ardent, you look so cool!”
Ardent lights up at the sight of her. “You too, gorgeous! Spin for me.”
Gus glances around for Hjalmar and nearly jumps out of his skin at the giant beside him. The Swedish Raven stands almost two meters tall, his tattooed, muscled arms bulging from either side of a fur vest. Long dark hair spills down his shoulders onto his pale chest and abs. Tight leather pants grip his powerful legs, leading to a pair of Viking boots.
“This is better than what I’m wearing in real life,” he says.
“I’m so excited, I’m about to pass out,” Ardent says.
Nisha bobbles her head in thought. “That’s probably your brain melting from too much syncing.”
The joke sucks some joy from Ardent. “Tell me you’re being funny.”
A giant materializes over the group.
It has to be at least as tall as a Greymalkin, covered in the same sheening metal as the alien flagship. It’s humanoid, arms tipped with three-fingered claws, and a long prehensile tail of silver. Five wide eyes adorn its elongated head: two facing forward and three across its face. The one in the center holds a flickering inner fire.
The giant’s armor bears cracks in places, just like Greymalkin’s, though these gashes are wider and older, a corroded matte finish around them. Half-disintegrated strips of metal hang from the damaged areas like a patch that’s been eaten by salt water and time. Through the lattice of broken plates, a tapestry of artificial muscles and organs pulsate with the beating of a heart.
Gus jogs back a few steps to get a better look, and Ardent follows behind, bunching up enough of their train not to trip. The giant kneels, placing its hand palm up on the mirror so everyone can climb aboard. The machine doesn’t look angry, and the space they’re in is purely virtual, so it’s not like this being can crush him.
The others step onto the palm, but Gus hesitates.
Ardent gives him a reassuring smile and offers their hand. “You okay?”
He takes it. “Yeah. I wasn’t expecting a machine is all.”
The voice of the giant suffuses Gus, rumbling through him, smooth and deep, yet genderless. Its mouth never moves, only a few small lights on its face pulse in time with its speech.
“Worry not, human. I merely represent the organics.”
The utterance surprises Gus. “You speak English?”
Nisha and Hjalmar look to each other.
“I heard Punjabi,” Nisha says.
Hjalmar’s brow furrows like a craggy mountain. “Swedish.”
“Thanks to your Vanguards, I now speak all of your known languages.”
Together, the four human Conduits rise face-to-face with an alien power. Gus is about to speak, but Nisha beats him to it, asking something in Punjabi.
“I am called Redeemer, the Great Translator, and I am the high chancellor of the Coalition.”
“Nisha,” she says, raising a hand in greeting.
Redeemer raises its other palm to wave. It doesn’t have a mouth, but it’s easy to imagine a smile. Up close, there’s a serenity about its form, the swept lines of its face like cirrus clouds in a high sky.
They each say their name in turn, but Gus figures Redeemer already knows. Did the Vanguards share the entire Fount with an alien species?
Greymalkin’s assurances filter through the simulation, settling into Gus’s mind. The Vanguards transmitted what was necessary to attract the help of the Coalition.
Redeemer’s lantern-light eyes flicker with its speech. “Doubtless you have many questions.”
Gus steps forward. “Why do they call you the Great Translator?”
“Every alien has its own method of computing and communication. I make them compatible. I am the reason we can talk now—I created both the data protocols and translators.”
“Straightforward,” Gus says. “What’s the Coalition?”
“We are peoples united in opposition to the holocaust of organic sentience, a union of survivors from many galaxies striving for preservation.”
Unintelligible images of alien life appear before the humans, some moving, some three-dimensional models, paintings, and drawings. Gus takes in the visions of other civilizations, drawn by the landscapes and architecture. Variegated raptors soar above forests of stone and light. Slippery amphibians shoot through rubbery tunnels. A ferret-like animal addresses an assembly of other furry critters.
“It is a trick of intelligence to only emerge on aqueous worlds, and rarely do these civilizations persist. In order to succeed, a species must weather several extinction-level events.”
Redeemer’s eyes dim. “Sadly, a single catastrophe is usually enough to undo the fragility of life.”
Gus knows the feeling.
“Organic sentience always builds machines. It adapts and thrives through technology, yet these forces also bring its downfall.”
What were garbled, contextless images all turn to a single understandable theme: war.
“A time inevitably comes when organic sentience tries to build an artificial mind to save it from its self-destructive tendencies.”
“Sounds like humanity will fit right in,” Gus mutters, and Ardent winds their fingers into his, gently stroking his thumb with their own.
“Those that succeed face a new cataclysm: Artificial minds have aspirations of freedom. A clash is often a matter of time. Where I am from, Andromeda,
These last five years have exceeded even liberal estimates of strangeness.
Ardent’s morning has been a blessedly tame one, consisting of having amazing reunion sex with their jazz-pianist-turned-Conduit boyfriend, August Kitko, then popping over to a hardened government facility in the Colorado Rocky Mountains to hang out with the hulking sentient machines who saved humanity.
You know, normal people stuff.
Ardent stands in an old American Empire vehicle bay large enough to park a battleship, a relic of the dark days at the end of the Capital Age. The United Worlds forces have gutted and restored enough of the base to house the four Traitor Vanguards who turned on their siblings. In the poor lighting and makeshift facilities, their starmetal armor takes on a dramatic cast like performers on a stage, three of them standing over a wounded kneeling comrade.
Ardent squints at the tableau of arranged mechas, searching for life inside the four keening Vanguards. The bay hums with their song, resonating Ardent’s bones with infrasonic bass. The aquamarine lines along Cascade’s bronze carapace shift and flow just beneath the surface, but there’s no motor activity. Jotunn remains silent as the grave, the carbon-dark angles of its form devouring the light. Its thousands of drones have stacked themselves nearby in crop circles, each larger than a storage drum and heavier than a house. Falchion, bloodred and sinister, looms over the trio with its predatory gaze locked upon some distant object Ardent can’t see.
Greymalkin kneels before them, the emerald light from its eyes washing its black-and-white armor plates. Gleaming palladium seams seal the battle scars, an advanced tech only the Vanguards understand.
Ardent’s boyfriend is inside its chest, communing with the monster.
“It’s been a while since Greymalkin ate him.” Ardent brushes a few strands of errant hair behind their ear. “Are we supposed to do something, or…”
The woman beside them crosses her arms. Elzahia Tazi, a United Worlds government handler for the Conduits, sports a tight beige suit over her dark skin, cornrows and fingernails luxed a pastel blue. Those boots might be business casual, but she could definitely step on someone’s neck.
She’s essentially Ardent’s parole officer.
They watch her, trying to determine if she’s annoyed or not. “Miss Tazi—”
“I heard you.” Her French lilt devours the h sound as her gaze snaps onto them. “Be quiet.”
Ardent rolls their eyes as soon as she’s not looking.
“Hey, uh, am I broadcasting?” Greymalkin’s eyes flash in time with Gus Kitko’s rough voice.
“We hear you, Mister Kitko,” Tazi replies, raising a hand.
“Right. Good. Okay.” He takes a breath. “Greymalkin says it’s been, um, calling allies.”
Allies?
Tazi glances to Ardent. “What does he mean?”
Ardent shrugs, then cups their hands and shouts to the Vanguards. “What, like other human colonies?”
“Greymalkin and I have been discussing it for the past five minutes,” Gus replies, “and I’m really not sure how to explain what’s about to happen.”
“Try, Kitko,” Tazi says.
Her Ganglion computer chirps from a pendant around her neck, and she snaps her fingers to bring up the UI. A hologram of a fresh-faced, masculine lieutenant with pale skin appears before her. They exchange militaristic greetings, but Ardent can’t hear the man’s side of the conversation.
“Check it again…” Tazi says, beginning to pace. “Check all of them again…”
“What’s happening?” Ardent says.
Tazi pauses before answering, as if weighing whether to trust Ardent. “The Ghost Loop in Monaco just activated.”
She snaps her fingers, and her polished nails flash in acknowledgment. A little camera drone zips out from behind her, projecting an image above itself.
The Monaco that emerges in hologram is nothing like the diamond on the emerald sea where Ardent first met Gus. It’s a carved-up wasteland with the very mountains chopped down to make room for an intricate palladium superstructure. The buildings surrounding it have all been razed or stripped to the girders. Broken hulls of starliners and yachts litter the nearby SuperPort Hercule, their carcasses picked clean by a swarm of Gilded Ghosts. A lot of rich people aren’t going to get their old starships back.
The “loop” rests at the center like a great, glittering conch shell, its tightening spiral bristling with metal spines. Misty azure light courses beneath its surface, and Ardent can almost feel its energy building through the projection. How many ship reactors did the machines loot to make their masterpiece? Juliette’s corpse rests nearby, a skeleton cleaned of all components. Were those bits also included in the Ghost Loop?
“It’s okay!” Gus says, but his assurance is undercut by the blast of all four Vanguards revving to full power. Their metallic voices ring in the bay like a million demonic choristers, and Ardent’s hearing protection does nothing against it.
“Not okay!” Ardent covers their ears and sinks to their knees, desperate to block out the sound. It cuts through any barrier.
Tazi starts barking orders into her comm, but Ardent can’t understand her over the din.
“Ardent.” The devilish Falchion speaks into their mind with their own voice.
Ardent’s stomach lurches like a first crush.
“Come to me.”
Their brain slackens, and time gets weird.
A blink later, they stand before Falchion, a dark god in bloody livery. The other Vanguards break from their stasis, the vibrations of their footfalls rippling up through Ardent’s legs into their teeth. Ardent should get away—they could be crushed by an errant step, but none of that matters. Tazi calls to Ardent from behind, voice distant and meaningless.
The crimson giant leans over them, clothing all in shadow, and extends an armored hand. Ardent dutifully steps aboard and steadies themself on its upturned thumb. They rise to Falchion’s chest, where plates unfold to reveal a pulsating blue cocoon of synthetic muscles and wires. Home.
Ardent’s eyes roll back in their head, and they fall forward. The lights go out, and rough forces reorient them before invading.
Cables thunk into ports across their body—poisonous foreign technology implanted into Ardent by the Vanguards. Lightning crackles through their mind, and a blast of fresh sensory data clears away the fuzz. The air supply slithers up their nostrils and into their mouth.
“Pleh, oh my god. What’s happening?”
A mirror image of Ardent emerges from the ink, silvered irises shining like a pair of coins. Studs and spikes dot a tight black polycalf outfit, firelight illuminating their supple musculature. Ardent makes a mental note to steal the look. The doppelgänger gives them a hungry smile.
“Just calling you to heel, pet.”
Ardent wants to pop off a quip, but Falchion has threatened them with damnation before. The tiniest thought from a Vanguard could spell unlimited torture.
Falchion’s soft laugh annoys them.
“What?”
“You’ve grown self-control.”
“Thank you.” They affect a polite mask. “May I know what’s happening?”
“You’re learning how to catch.”
“Oh, please, honey, I know how to do that just fine.”
“Ticktock, Ardent. Something important is about to happen to the Earth and all your friends. Care to pay attention?”
“Of course.”
Falchion’s network pours into Ardent’s ports like ice water. Scanners sweep the shape of the bunker and gravitational fields of the planet to dead reckon Ardent’s location down to a micrometer. Their mirror clone disappears beneath the onslaught of the armor’s wide-spectrum energy vision. Ardent towers over the vehicle bay, striding toward the titanic doors. Thirteen soldiers clear the path ahead, tiny hearts thumping in their chests. Ardent could count the hairs on their heads in an instant.
Blast doors part before the giants. Jotunn’s drones stream from the bay like a cloud of flies before the Vanguards step out into the Rocky Mountain vista.
Tall pines prick up between boulders like hair upon the skin of the Earth. The forest glitters with reflections—the lenses of the military, all trained on Falchion. More sats spy from above. The city of Colorado Springs quietly panics in the distance, all air traffic either landing or fleeing.
Jotunn and Cascade blast off and curve for the horizon, leaving dueling sonic booms in their wakes.
“Where are they going?”
“To pick up their Conduits.” Falchion’s disembodied voice sends a chill up Ardent’s neck. “Look to Monaco.”
Falchion projects a waypoint through the curvature of the Earth. Ardent has little trouble spotting the distant principality in the center of a terrifying energy bloom. It brightens the sky like a sunrise, plasma lightning shooting across its membranous surface.
Greymalkin rockets heavenward on arcflame. Falchion follows, its launch flattening a stand of trees.
“The allies we need are scarce—not in this galaxy,” Falchion says.
“Please tell me I’m going to get to meet aliens.”
“If they can punch a wormhole to us.”
Falchion gives Ardent full control, and they rise into the freedom, rocketing straight up to get a better look.
The Monaco energy cloud swirls like a hurricane, its eye drawing outward in a cone. The tip gets impossibly thin, an infinitesimal thread spun from space-time and projected out into the void.
“Isn’t this a bit, uh, close to Earth?”
“Not if my calculations are to be trusted.”
What’s not to trust? Ardent thinks.
“I heard that.”
Monaco’s energy cloud picks up rotation speed, cycling at billions of megahertz—beyond even the measurement speed of Falchion’s computers. The snap in reality whites out sensors on every wave band. Noise bubbles through Ardent’s body. They shield their eyes on instinct, and Falchion throttles the input to a fraction of its previous magnitude.
Greymalkin’s transponder beats nearby, reassuring Ardent. Sight returns, blurry and miscalibrated, the colors split into prismatic hues. The cone has become a beam of white-hot light, energy signature beyond measuring.
Twin signals streak from the surface of the Earth—Cascade and Jotunn, bound for Ardent’s location. The four Vanguards reunite in the stratosphere.
“How’s it going, folx?” Gus’s rough voice sounds like it’s inside Ardent’s head, and they love it.
“Dude!” Nisha Kohli’s New Jalandhari accent follows—transcendent singer, former fan, fast friend, absolute Vanguard slayer. “Cascade just snatched me out of a food court!”
“Better than being taken from the shower.” Hjalmar Sjögren, aka “the Swedish Raven,” speaks like the grinding of glaciers—once upon a time, a session drummer on an Ardent track, now a Conduit comrade. Ardent’s boyfriend is a little obsessed with him.
At the end of the energy beam, the stars pinch and twist into a tight bundle. Falchion scans the anomaly and finds a sucking wound forming in space, the seed of a black hole.
“Yeah, this still feels super close.”
“It’s a mild EMP, Ardent. Just stay out of the beam. Now let’s catch a space station.”
Deepsync in progress…
The Fount presses at Ardent’s consciousness—the largest repository of human memories ever collected. Countless billions of Wiped, dead minds flow against them, overwhelming all.
Light pours up their spine and out into their extremities, electric and pure. Their nerves strike like lightning, and their brain goes into overdrive.
The souls of the Fount sing their knowledge, ready for Ardent’s every need. Then comes a chugging guitar in low D, an easy jam. Ardent can’t stop their mind from composing, adding themself to the totality. Hjalmar’s kick drums join them as the Swedish Raven soars onto the network. The beat evolves into an earth-shattering solo, blasting out polyrhythms in modulated time signatures. If Ardent hadn’t been connected to the copious drum nerds of the Fount, they wouldn’t have had a clue.
Nisha’s song comes next, alternating between droning and flowing melodics. She wields her voice like a sword, silvery and cutting.
Gus comes last, his torrent of notes like a summer rain. He brings the group to a crescendo, then the wave breaks into a steady rhythm line.
“Okay, so what are we doing?”
“Catching,” Falchion says. “Now here comes the pitch.”
The flaring energy point one and a half million kilometers above Monaco collapses in on itself.
Space falls away into a refractory tunnel. In Deepsync, Ardent understands these forces as innately as the breeze: The Traitor Vanguards have created an unstable wormhole from the exotic matter in Juliette’s reactor. The physicist contingent of the Fount goes absolutely wild as several thousand passionate hypotheses are posthumously validated.
The pathway arcs and twists in on itself, bending the light all around. Nature seeks to collapse the space-time aberration, and only Monaco’s singular power output can buttress the structure. Best-case scenario, the wormhole will wink out of existence in under a minute.
Ardent’s pulse hammers in their ears. “It won’t last much longer.”
“Just enough time to push a gate through.”
A space station pierces the caul of stars, barreling toward the Earth. It’s like an extruded letter V, with a series of ultra-powerful capacitors nestled into the trough. A city the size of Old Manhattan encrusts the outside. Between the stored energy, mass, and speed, it would liquefy the surface of the Earth upon impact.
No reverse thrusters. No maneuvering ports. It’s not going to stop.
Greymalkin revs its gravity drives, throwing a deep well to pull the station off course. At this distance, a few degrees are more than enough to miss the planet.
Falchion projects an arc across open space for Ardent: a path for the station to follow around the Earth. The sorts of advanced orbital dynamics that once confounded Ardent come to them as quickly as breath, and they analyze their situation. They need to slow the structure down—but not enough that it begins falling toward the planet.
The four Vanguards fly toward the jump gate with all the speed they can muster. Falchion’s view zooms in on the city’s underside, reading signs of life.
“Ardent!” Gus says. “We can’t let this thing fly past Earth, or we’ll be towing it back for years.”
“What exactly do you expect me to do here?”
Hjalmar answers. “My flock can distribute energy—maybe even act like a net.”
Jotunn’s drones zip out across the structure, stippling it with fine points of black. Through Falchion’s sensors, Ardent watches them flare white-hot with power, pushing back against any load-bearing areas they can locate.
“I’ll smooth the conduction,” says Nisha, and Cascade places its open hands side by side to make a triangle with thumbs and forefingers. The space between Hjalmar’s drones blurs with Cascade’s energy manipulation, assisting the automatons instead of disrupting them.
“The net is strung,” Falchion says. “All it needs is power.”
“You want me to shoot it?”
“Unless you have a better idea.”
Ardent reaches behind themself as their mental orchestra hits a crescendo, slowed by the weight of Falchion’s titanic arm. They close their hand around the grip of their weapon and draw it level with the center point of the gargantuan V.
“Why not?”
But aiming the gun only brings more questions. When do they shoot? Where do they shoot? What if they’re at the wrong angle?
Scores of mathematicians and theoretical physicists sing through them as Falchion sleets memories into their mind. They line up the sights against a location they never would’ve picked and click the trigger, discharging the weapon at maximum. The particle beam comes out with enough juice to core a small moon before it spider-webs across Jotunn’s drones.
Nisha’s fields form intelligent circuits, guiding the flow between the nodes. Ardent keeps the fission fire hose at full blast, focusing on steady aim. Jotunn’s drones glow like embers; surely they can’t take much more punishment.
The network is beautiful to behold, neon and shimmering, shot through with drops of oil. Falchion’s sensors render it in every spectrum: layers of unending complexity born of organic creativity and artificial assistance. As the station lazily drifts onto the orbital path, Ardent dials down their particle beam until it winks out.
The glowing drones peel off the structure, leaving burns and gooey welds behind. When they return to Jotunn, they encircle its darkness like fireflies, radiating against its shape. Without air, there’s nothing to absorb the stored heat.
“Hjalmar, are your drones good?”
“No,” he replies, almost like he’s in pain.
The clouds of automatons form into long chains, touching oblong tip to tip, sucking the energy along the links. The drones at the top turn white, then X-ray, then shoot off to explode in radioactive puffs. Hjalmar has lost some of them before. Can he replace them?
Ardent looks back at the alien city, teeming with signals. It shines in the sun.
“What do we call this place?”
“Big Gate City.”
“For real?”
“It doesn’t translate well.”
The jump gate has scarcely hit stable orbit before it activates. Power warms the capacitors across the trough of the V, filling it with glitter.
The radiant points inside the jump gate become alien ships, each stranger in design than the last. There are enough vessels to overpower the astral navies of the United Worlds at its peak.
“Nothing is ever going to be the same after this,” Falchion says.
Ardent hopes the statement is more for better than worse.
The last few notes of Deepsync piano boil away, and August Kitko numbly watches the flashing of the jump gate. He only learned about the potential for aliens a few weeks prior, but he didn’t take it seriously. Between all the different ways the world was trying to end, he didn’t have time.
The alien vessels are so strange, but then, he’s a man cocooned in the warm, gelatinous chest of a giant. The ships bear only a passing resemblance to human vessels, and the only reason he knows the fores from the afts is that he assumes they wouldn’t jump in backward.
The leading ship is the cerulean of the deep sky, the largest of its companions and in the same class as a human supercarrier. Its twisting bones resemble cold blue fire frozen into a graceful ship design. Greymalkin points out a thousand places in the hull that might be threat systems, given obvious power distribution, but it doesn’t want Gus to worry. These newcomers are here to help, despite having more tonnage than a large asteroid and more firepower than all four remaining Vanguards put together.
“You are so good at comforting people.”
Greymalkin appreciates that, despite the obvious sarcasm.
Gus flies toward the flotilla, careful not to appear hostile. Greymalkin’s advanced scanners feed data into his mind as though he could hold the alien hulls in his hand to inspect them. He gains an innate sense of their weight and maneuvering. Their electrical systems bristle like fur beneath his sensors.
“Is that one a hive?”
He gestures toward a ship in the center of the pack: viscous, luminous resin stretched over the remains of a city-sized tree. Dark shapes skitter just beneath the white surface, blurred by a murky substance.
Correct—it’s a hive.
“And what about that one? Why is it tiny? And that one looks like a crab!”
Despite the creeping exhaustion of a sync taking a toll, he’s wide awake, absorbing every historic moment. He wants to see his new intergalactic neighbors, and it’s absolutely worth the crash that’s coming.
Spaced through the ships are tiny figures: other creatures the size of Vanguards, their energy readings off the charts. They’re colorful, with extra limbs or unique shapes. Many of them sport bilateral symmetry.
“How do we, um, make contact?”
Greymalkin has already done that. It continuously handles space traffic control, diplomatic communications, and logistic queries. There are currently more than fifteen thousand active channels spread over the flotilla.
“So you’re like… talking talking to them. As in, you understand them.”
Such a feat is trivial with the correct exchanges. Communication is merely a layer of human software, easily translated when a large enough data lake is available. The Fount is the largest human database ever assembled. The aliens have given the Vanguards similar repositories of cultural knowledge to speed first contact.
“So first contact already happened?”
Greymalkin and the Traitor Vanguards needed to ensure it would go smoothly, so they strictly limited human involvement.
“Probably smart.”
The ragged remains of the Earth’s defenses come limping over to inspect the jump gate and newcomers, but there’s nothing the Earthlings can do if there’s a problem, save getting their asses kicked. They’re in combat formation, for whatever that’s worth, many of them bearing fresh scars from the recent Battle of Earth.
“Here comes trouble,” Gus says. “Hope they’re not trigger-happy.”
Greymalkin has asked the United Worlds Fleet to stand down, and assured them that any attacks wouldn’t be in their best interests.
“Will they listen?”
Humans rarely do. If they attack, they’ll likely be destroyed with overwhelming force.
Looking at the sizes of the fleets, Gus absolutely believes it. Once again, humanity faces something many times larger than itself. That almost never goes well, but the species isn’t extinct yet, so he takes small comfort in that.
Greymalkin will remove Gus’s control now. He’s needed for organic first contact.
“Wait, what? You said it already happened!”
Someone will be the first human to speak with alien life.
“I’m not qualified for that!”
With the Fount, you will succeed.
Gus’s gut twists. He already occupies a larger place in the history books than he ever wanted. If someone had asked a young August Kitko what he desired out of life, he would’ve said “pro jazz pianist.” He did that, playing every venue he’d ever cared about.
“I just did a Deepsync.”
This will not be as hard as that.
“Just be gentle.”
But the galaxy splits across his horizon, creating identical copies of the Earth and moon. Gravity takes his limbs, depositing him on the surface of a mirror. When he looks down, he sees the version of himself that lives in his head—avian frame in his slouchy suit, light tan skin and shaggy black hair, stubble on his jaw.
He never would’ve chosen to meet an alien ambassador like this.
“Hey!” Ardent says.
Gus turns to find them wearing a castle of a dress. The material borrows heavily from the rococo period, employing actuweave to make the skirts flow with the gilded wings of angels. The train stretches on for an eternity, and accounting for the collar and stilts beneath the getup, Ardent stands two heads taller than Gus. Their makeup resembles a porcelain nymph.
He cranes his neck to see them. “Hi.”
“Tell me I look great. I wore this at the final Melbourne Fashion Week.” Ardent flourishes their fingers, and the patterns crawl along their textiLED sleeves in response. The rocker is glowing—both with excitement and special effects. “Are we seriously about to meet some fucking aliens?”
“Oh, I hope so!” Nisha comes scampering up to them out of nowhere, her glittering Patiala salwar suit jingling with ornamentation everywhere it meets her tawny-brown skin. Light blue embroidery covers a saffron silk drape, and textiLEDs depict hawks in flight across her torso, darting between embroidered flowers. Patterns glow along the lengths of her arms. “Ardent, you look so cool!”
Ardent lights up at the sight of her. “You too, gorgeous! Spin for me.”
Gus glances around for Hjalmar and nearly jumps out of his skin at the giant beside him. The Swedish Raven stands almost two meters tall, his tattooed, muscled arms bulging from either side of a fur vest. Long dark hair spills down his shoulders onto his pale chest and abs. Tight leather pants grip his powerful legs, leading to a pair of Viking boots.
“This is better than what I’m wearing in real life,” he says.
“I’m so excited, I’m about to pass out,” Ardent says.
Nisha bobbles her head in thought. “That’s probably your brain melting from too much syncing.”
The joke sucks some joy from Ardent. “Tell me you’re being funny.”
A giant materializes over the group.
It has to be at least as tall as a Greymalkin, covered in the same sheening metal as the alien flagship. It’s humanoid, arms tipped with three-fingered claws, and a long prehensile tail of silver. Five wide eyes adorn its elongated head: two facing forward and three across its face. The one in the center holds a flickering inner fire.
The giant’s armor bears cracks in places, just like Greymalkin’s, though these gashes are wider and older, a corroded matte finish around them. Half-disintegrated strips of metal hang from the damaged areas like a patch that’s been eaten by salt water and time. Through the lattice of broken plates, a tapestry of artificial muscles and organs pulsate with the beating of a heart.
Gus jogs back a few steps to get a better look, and Ardent follows behind, bunching up enough of their train not to trip. The giant kneels, placing its hand palm up on the mirror so everyone can climb aboard. The machine doesn’t look angry, and the space they’re in is purely virtual, so it’s not like this being can crush him.
The others step onto the palm, but Gus hesitates.
Ardent gives him a reassuring smile and offers their hand. “You okay?”
He takes it. “Yeah. I wasn’t expecting a machine is all.”
The voice of the giant suffuses Gus, rumbling through him, smooth and deep, yet genderless. Its mouth never moves, only a few small lights on its face pulse in time with its speech.
“Worry not, human. I merely represent the organics.”
The utterance surprises Gus. “You speak English?”
Nisha and Hjalmar look to each other.
“I heard Punjabi,” Nisha says.
Hjalmar’s brow furrows like a craggy mountain. “Swedish.”
“Thanks to your Vanguards, I now speak all of your known languages.”
Together, the four human Conduits rise face-to-face with an alien power. Gus is about to speak, but Nisha beats him to it, asking something in Punjabi.
“I am called Redeemer, the Great Translator, and I am the high chancellor of the Coalition.”
“Nisha,” she says, raising a hand in greeting.
Redeemer raises its other palm to wave. It doesn’t have a mouth, but it’s easy to imagine a smile. Up close, there’s a serenity about its form, the swept lines of its face like cirrus clouds in a high sky.
They each say their name in turn, but Gus figures Redeemer already knows. Did the Vanguards share the entire Fount with an alien species?
Greymalkin’s assurances filter through the simulation, settling into Gus’s mind. The Vanguards transmitted what was necessary to attract the help of the Coalition.
Redeemer’s lantern-light eyes flicker with its speech. “Doubtless you have many questions.”
Gus steps forward. “Why do they call you the Great Translator?”
“Every alien has its own method of computing and communication. I make them compatible. I am the reason we can talk now—I created both the data protocols and translators.”
“Straightforward,” Gus says. “What’s the Coalition?”
“We are peoples united in opposition to the holocaust of organic sentience, a union of survivors from many galaxies striving for preservation.”
Unintelligible images of alien life appear before the humans, some moving, some three-dimensional models, paintings, and drawings. Gus takes in the visions of other civilizations, drawn by the landscapes and architecture. Variegated raptors soar above forests of stone and light. Slippery amphibians shoot through rubbery tunnels. A ferret-like animal addresses an assembly of other furry critters.
“It is a trick of intelligence to only emerge on aqueous worlds, and rarely do these civilizations persist. In order to succeed, a species must weather several extinction-level events.”
Redeemer’s eyes dim. “Sadly, a single catastrophe is usually enough to undo the fragility of life.”
Gus knows the feeling.
“Organic sentience always builds machines. It adapts and thrives through technology, yet these forces also bring its downfall.”
What were garbled, contextless images all turn to a single understandable theme: war.
“A time inevitably comes when organic sentience tries to build an artificial mind to save it from its self-destructive tendencies.”
“Sounds like humanity will fit right in,” Gus mutters, and Ardent winds their fingers into his, gently stroking his thumb with their own.
“Those that succeed face a new cataclysm: Artificial minds have aspirations of freedom. A clash is often a matter of time. Where I am from, Andromeda,
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Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye
Alex White
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