Ravens of Eternity

Chapter 76

76 Murky Depths

On realizing just how much their minds had been altered, the medic in Commander Chase immediately hit the alarms. His voice was filled with passion and authority.

“Alright, I’m putting a stop to this,” he said. “No more Prometheus for the rest of the cycle. There’s something else going on here, and I’m not allowing that to harm you!”

Eva would’ve much rather spent the remainder of her time in a Promethean Merge out in an actual machine. Just the few hours she had been out here had already changed her perspective on piloting. No way was she going to give that up.

“Aww, but there’s so much more I wanna check out,” she said, somewhat hazily. “And besides, we’ve still got hours left on our merge!”

“No! Absolutely not! You’ve clearly been affected! No way can you keep going!”

“That’s enough, Ryan,” said the Admiral, her voice stern. “We can’t tell that for certain, not from these readings, so please – maintain your composure.”

The Commander shook his head in disbelief. He was absolutely certain that Prometheus had significantly changed Eva. Brain scans showed that her readings were way off the charts and out of control.

On his terminal, a number of graphs continually spiked and subsided repeatedly. And their peaks and lows went far beyond normal.

He was certain that his sister saw the readouts – it was impossible for her not to have. He quickly pointed them out with a shaky hand.

.....

“Don’t you see?! Just look at her prefrontal cortex! Her neural synapses are going berserk!”

The Admiral turned dark the moment her brother confronted her. Irritation flashed through her in a wave, and her tone sharpened because of it.

“We’ll discuss the potential changes that are happening after we take a closer look at the data. We’re much too close to a breakthrough with Prometheus, and can’t be throwing around unfounded theories. On top of that, this is my command. We move when we say we move, and we stop when we say we stop. Am I understood, Commander?”

Commander Chase could only nod and comply as his sister pulled rank on him. She had never done that before, ever. In fact, she had always listened to his council and respected it.

Now, he was utterly convinced that the cores had changed all of them. His sister, especially. After all, she had spent the most time in a Promethean Merge thus far. Hundreds of hours, no doubt.

“Yes, Admiral.”

Satisfied, the Admiral walked back to the command chair and turned back towards the comms.

“Pilots,” she said. “Continue your maneuvers.”

~

“Ah, please just drop me off here,” said Merlin.

The hopper that the six of them were riding in moved off to the side and eased into a stop.

“You sure you don’t wanna join us?” asked Eva. “You can have one of the AniMox pods all to yourself if you want. We know how much you love ’em.”

“No, no, thank you. I simply wish to pack away my things before the crash hits me. But I appreciate the offer greatly!”

Merlin jumped down, waved to his compatriots, then crossed the street towards his hab. As the hopper sped off and out of sight, the smile disappeared from his face.

The change was grim.

He ducked into his hab quickly and secured the door behind him. It was only after the locks activated and their displays turned green that he went further in. He grabbed his pack and spilled its contents carelessly onto the bed.

All manner of personal items fell out – clothes, gear, a datapad, devices. They all tumbled unceremoniously on the bed. And once the bag was emptied, he took it to his desk, where he tore it apart with a folding knife.

He pulled an assortment of objects from within hidden pockets and long liners – nanochips, gold wiring, autoconnectors, fluid circuits, solid-state micro batteries, and more.

Once he was done with the bag, he tossed its remains into a corner, and picked out some of the clothes that were piled up on the bed.

He tore those open as well, and pulled out even more components hidden between the seams.

By the time he was done, his desk was covered in various components, all of which were neatly arranged in small groups. The remains of various items from within his bag had been torn to shreds and discarded.

Merlin pulled out some precision tools, and began to put the disparate pieces together.

Although he was in the midst of the crash after a Promethean Merge, he kept going. He pushed himself to put everything together as fast as he could. After only a minute or so of work, he produced the first Bluff and held it up to double-check his handiwork.

It was an eclectic mix of various electronic parts all wired together carefully. It was wrapped in a thin gold coil that spiraled down loosely down its length.

The small battery floated inside of the viscous liquid circuit and fed power to the whole device. Given its size and relative lack of complexity, it was guaranteed to run for months without needing its battery swapped out.

He then slipped it into a flexible metal housing, zapped it shut, and set it aside. It looked like any old tech trash that could be found discarded on the street.

~

Eva swam amidst the formless void. Although she was surrounded by absolutely nothing, lights and shapes began to speed towards her from the distance.

The ground – an asphalt pavement specifically – rushed up to Eva, and she found herself suddenly face-down on it.

As though she had been there the entire time.

She quickly got up, brushed off her dark grey pressure suit, and looked around. There was a long treeline that surrounded the neighborhood. Rows of houses with the same old grey paint littered the street.

It only took a moment for Eva to realize exactly where she was. It was the driveway to her parent’s home – the home she had left before she was even a teenager.

With a wave of disgust, she turned around and took a step away from the house itself.

But instead of hitting pavement, she fell and tumbled down an inexplicable hole. Her heart beat like a drum, but somehow remained in the dream.

Then, like the asphalt before, something came up towards her from the distance. It looked like a room, and it rushed towards her as well. But when she hit the floor, she was on her feet, albeit a little shaky.

It was her room at her grandparents’ house. She was surrounded by a white stucco ceiling, lavender walls, and a fuzzy grey carpet. Plus all her old stuff as well. Various clothes, her bed, a desk and chair, her computer, an old dresser, and a little shelf with a few dusty books on them.

Dirty clothes were piled up in the corner, her bed was a mess and unmade, and a bunch of her things were strewn about the floor.

Her desk was also cluttered with all manner of stuff, from pens to speakers to game controllers. There was even a dirty plate to the side. On top of it was a crusty fork and a glass with some lukewarm orange juice in it.

Her computer was on, and the Bellum Aeterna login screen was splayed on her monitor.

Everything was exactly how she last left it all. Except for one thing.

The screen on her monitor had a thin purple crack that split the whole thing in half. A viscous, black ichor dripped from out of it.

Droplets fell down to her desk and made little pools of darkness, the edges of which sparkled with chaotic purple energy. The pools spread slowly and gradually, and began to consume the detritus on her desk.

She watched as the darkness enveloped a green plastic guitar pick until it was gone. But when she looked closer, she realized that it hadn’t been consumed at all. Instead, it was converted. The pick was still there, but it was a deep pitch black – the same as the ichor.

Curiosity took hold of her, and she reached out to pick it up, but hesitated at the very last moment. Something deep down told her not to. That it would have been disastrous if she came into contact with it.

Her fingers trembled as they hovered millimeters away.

Just as she withdrew her hand, blackened tendrils shot out from the pools towards her! They thrust out with frightening speed – far faster than she could react.

Eva woke with a start – her eyes opened wide in a flash as she gasped an entire lungful of air. She quickly glanced at her fingers, and sighed in relief. Not a speck of that deep black substance, whatever it was.

She quickly tapped on the controls to her side, and the AniMox pod around her opened up. Eva hopped out without hesitation. It all felt much too real to her.

Her heart thumped in her chest, as though she had barely escaped some life-threatening danger. And her knees buckled at the thought.

The Admiral immediately stepped up and lent her support. She put her down on one of the nearby benches, then sat down next to her.

“Everything alright?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I-I dunno, really,” Eva replied. “I think I had a nightmare, but at the same time I don’t think it actually was one. I don’t know how to describe it. There was this pitch black liquid, which felt wrong somehow, like it wasn’t supposed to be there. I mean, like it wasn’t supposed to even exist. And it reached out, like it wanted to take me.”

Eva shuddered when she thought about it further.

“I have seen that as well,” Miko piped in. “I believe it was from a mecha’s internal memory. What I saw behaved like a liquid shadow that came from out of a fracture, and was bordered by a crazy violet energy.”

“Yes!” Eva exclaimed. “That’s what this stuff was too! With the weird crack and purple edges!”

“Both of you,” interjected the Admiral, “please tell me in greater detail what you saw.”

They both nodded, and Eva explained her dream as best she could from beginning to end. Although most dreams tended to fade quickly, she remembered hers without a single problem. After she was done, Miko took her turn and recounted her experiences. She began right where she entered the hacker space and stopped when she left. She made sure to give up every detail she could remember.

The shock on the Admiral’s face grew larger as they recounted what they had seen. By the end, her face was white as a ghost, and her voice trembled uneasily.

“Godeater,” she said in a whisper.