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The rain really penetrated everywhere, gradually eroding any hope that this place could ever be put in order. With varying diligence, it watered us for about three days, and then something finally appeared from behind the clouds… No, not the luminaries at all. The black moon appeared and like an eyesore it crawled across the clear sky. I was sitting on the roof of the citadel and looking at the ocean.
For the first time, I didn't want to run somewhere. Follow a route that wasn't drawn up by me. I felt a collision with a force so powerful that resistance seemed useless. I could not be distracted by this woman with a look, because there was absolutely nothing, I could oppose to her. I basked in the rays of the sun and digested the information extracted from the archive machines. Somehow, mysteriously, I managed to turn them on. I did it as if I had done it many times, without hesitating for a second. And if something has been tormenting me these days, this was it.
But work distracts. Looking in the database for research equipment, I found diagrams of several devices that helped out the first contact mission. The young humanity sent them to study distant frontiers and provided with extremely useful tools unimaginable in my world. I chose a tablet for storing a portable database and tried to assemble something similar in my head. Wishing the device in front of me, I got an object that looked very similar to the original images, but it did not work. Then I had to delve into the details of the factory assembly, opened a textbook on physics, then on mathematics. This rabbit hole has taken me far.
A song was heard from below. It was Baraman who was studying with the children on the waste ground. They cleared it of corpses in a matter of days. And now he has set up something like a school there, only with a focus on survival. Surprisingly, Captain Kulagi helped the furry countryman in everything. And even the sailor Fig had a hand in cleaning.
The sad news came a week later. Richitina managed to catch a signal from the mainland. It reported the Federation's loss of all major cities on the coast. And Master Eleanor Grummays was officially declared dead at the Maneian Heights. I cried a few times alone. Although this man pursued his own interest, he was like a father to me. Everything inside me was shaking, I wanted to close up, go to the bottom with the submarine and lie forgotten by the whole world. But it seems I've become less sensitive after everything that's happened to me. A day, two, and I realized that I would just eat myself if I didn't do anything. And went back to math.
Subjects were given to me easily because I could wish myself increased attention, and this greatly accelerated the learning process. Another month or two, and I'll be able to assemble a transistor. Yes... I will never have time to learn all this. Some trick was needed.
In search of a trick, I went back to the warehouse where I had previously found computer equipment with databases. There, among the junk, I found a jar with eye sockets, an empty contour made of heavy-duty material and a neurocontrol interface. Why I remembered what the last one was called, I didn't know either, but my hands connected it to the database themselves and putting it on my head I found myself in another world. There were layers of information in front of me that reacted to my desires in the same way as the worm. It seems that the only thing that distinguished them was the price you paid for your wishes. The database of Outs was demanding dizziness and headache, not death.
“Are you going to touch the air for a long time?” I heard the voice of May-e-oka.
“I'm busy, don't bother.”
For a few days I felt sick from the neurointerface, but then I got used to it and my training accelerated drastically. I asked the database to show me information very quickly. And using worm I wished to memorize everything momentarily.
A few days later I started building an engine. It was my first engine and it blew up. The second and third exploded in the same way. The fourth flew into the sea. Children came to watch the launch of the fifth. They peeked out from behind the shelters, beaming with curiosity. It lifted me into the air and immediately fell, amid a general squeak and laughter.
By this time, I had set up a workshop in one of the docks and invented a gasket material that did not let black rain through. Wishes taken from my knowledge-enriched brain took significantly less worm energy. That's how I tried to call the dead people to myself, so as not to see their terrified energy entities all the time before my eyes. The children no longer left the workshop, and Baraman's lessons gradually moved to the nearest pier.
Once I collected drops of black rain for analysis. It turned out that there are a lot of specific microorganisms in the water that can survive under enormous pressure. This could be explained by an underwater eruption. But the very appearance of the Black Moon, as well as its sisters; the knowledge I received from the archive of Outs could not explain it in a natural way. Mental terraforming in three-dimensional reality was available to Angels operating on a higher plane of reality. Such technologies could create any moon from scratch. That is how I started reading about imprints.
It turned out that there was no miracle here, at least for those who compiled this database; the imprint was a copy of the physical body in the fourth dimension, from where it was possible to take and copy data at any moment, or, as one of the alternative theories said, just project it onto the illusion of linear time. Outs forbid themselves to move body to other dimension or modify it in any way, so it was not acceptable for them to reason this way. But the entire physical model of reality was based on exactly the theory of many worlds, which allowed them to build multidimensional ships and even cities, create stars and planetary systems.
And if the imprint, rejected by the Outs, allowed to actually achieve immortality, then what did the Angelic possibilities give? It was very casual about this in the archives, but from these scraps of information, it seemed that my worm was only a pale reflection of that power. There was less and less doubt, the worm and the imprint had a common origin.
The scientists of the Outs were a heavily repressed caste in their military society, but did not disdain to write down next to ideologically correct theses, the most modern theories emanating from the Central Computator - a multidimensional machine located in a cluster of stars rotating at great speed around Sagittarius A, a pair of supermassive black holes in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
When I looked through the neural interface at the moving images of stars, it took my breath away. I was flying with the interstellar gas away from the supernova explosion, and tears came to my eyes by themselves, making it difficult to look. I wanted to be there, among those glittering furnaces. I wanted to get to know their world, which I missed, even having never been there. Our life, even if it was full of events, seemed so small and insignificant compared to how people lived there. Then why did they come here?
All these questions occupied me much more than the need to continue our mission. And in parallel with the engine, I began to build a device that could give me the opportunity to edit the imprint. This will give me a chance to deal with my curse. If only the Outs had more about it.
“What's new?” asked May-e-oka, who again found me in the neurointerface in the basement of the archive.
“Nothing, busy, sorry,” I got nervous again, remembering that I hadn't really talked to anyone about what I was doing.
A couple of weeks later, I managed to build a device that could float above the water, and my engine accelerated it to such speeds that I had to come up with fasteners for the driver and passengers. By copying a simple machine intelligence from the archive, I was able to set up my flying motorcycle so that control could be transferred to a child. On it I went to the ocean.
The navigation instruments were guided by the stars, determining the coordinates well enough in clear weather, and soon I learned that there were several more islands nearby. The Ops archipelago was quite extensive, and so from island to island I visited them all. Some of them were full of only volcanic ash, and some were the same pieces of the ship of the Outs as our island, which was called Pleya. With the exception that there were no inhabitants on those islands at all. Unfortunately, I didn't find any archives there, even after assembling a couple of assistant drones that quickly scattered through the streets overgrown with black mold.
Black mold was another of my discoveries. The microorganisms that fell together with the rain turned out to be symbionts with one of the species of local fungi, and quite quickly began to build their kingdom, noticeably different from all known to the archive. I found something similar only on asteroids near Proxima Plausa, but they were poorly studied, so there was little data, but the mutualism was surprisingly similar.
Alien life on undeveloped planets was of little interest to the scientists of the Outs. Their main occupation was to prove that aliens do not exist in a broad sense, because all organisms originated from a single source. Throughout history, man and its derivatives have not met a single creature that would not have similar features to them at the level of RNA or DNA. Which confirmed the theory of panspermia. The immortals who left the galaxy in the direction of Andromeda have not yet returned to know for sure about the life inhabiting those spaces. After all, even with the gravitational sliding technologies that was modern to the authors of the archive, it took millions of years to visit neighboring galaxies without accepting the idea of the absence of linear time. And it was impossible to accept this idea, because that's how the Angels reasoned.
I could hardly imagine a person, even if immortal, ready to spend millions of years in flight. No one knew what it was fraught with. But it turned out that there were such madmen. As well as those who couldn't stand it and jumped into black holes. Like the one who jumped into mine. It was so amazing to think of myself as a resident of a black hole. And that I'm the one who jumped.
Such thoughts lingered in my head for a reason. Reading about imprints, I learned well that a person who has made a copy cannot die. The contract was sewn into the imprint. According to this agreement, the Central Computator gives a 101 percent guarantee that a person who has copied a body into an imprint will not cease to exist, even if his universe dies. Rob's words began to sound very different in this light. And the fact that I remembered how to use the equipment of the Outs suggested that the Person From The Launcher in me did not die at all. At least completely. But who did the engineer pull out then?
There was ridiculously little about engineers in the archives. It was possible to reduce all the information to the fact that they exist. The Outs didn't know who they were and what they were really doing. Although they could copy the memory of them. I wish I could be in that memory bank with nanofluid now. I could learn so much more.
“Bike, there...” May-e-oka's voice was heard again when I was looking at the layers with data about engineers.
“I can't, later, please.”
I wanted rather to build an aircraft capable of leaving the atmosphere. But I didn't know a lot about where the exit from the wormhole that connected the black hole where our ancestors jumped and the surface of the planet was located. The archives depicted the black hole Baby as an anomaly which was a top priority to colonize for Pure Empire of Out. But any other information on that was classified and was simply absent from the archives. Apparently, the exit was somewhere very close. After all, my idea was that tidal forces between the planet and the wormhole caused the ship to fall apart. Or did it happen for some other reason? And why don't we see gravitational distortion in the sky? Or is it on other side of the planet? Then it turns out that the wormhole rotates around our suns together with the planet? Is this possible? I need to immerse myself more in astrophysics.
Finally, in my search, I reached the most extreme island of the Ops archipelago. It was my last hope. Outwardly, it differed from the others in that it was some kind of solid piece, not assembled from parts. And it looks like the black rain didn't take it, because although the surface was dirty, I didn't notice a single rusty detail.
Imagine my surprise when people met me at the pier. They waved cheerfully at me and pointed out a parking spot. Their appearance was somewhat unusual. Barely perceptible, but they were different from everyone I met. Even Baraman's feline appearance had something familiar about it. Narrow eyes, round flat faces. No, I've seen similar ones in the capital, but still not like that.
I was met by two brothers, Yon and Gwon. They didn't speak standard. But I already knew their language from the archive, so I understood it, but I still had to wish from worm to be able to speak it. Their ship hit the anomaly before the Outs. And it survived because of the design features. Firstly, it was three-dimensional, and the ship of the Pure Empire was four-dimensional and could be in many places at the same time, which, in my opinion, led to destruction during the passage of the event horizon. And secondly, their ship was constructed from very ancient derivatives of element 115, which had not degraded to the properties of iron, as my companions explained.
But my biggest discovery was that the island was just the tip of their ship. They managed to land it, not without adventures, right on a wide shoal, or rather on a cooled underwater volcano. And the ship was many times bigger underwater than it was on the surface. It was a whole city.
Yon and Gwon led me through endless halls decorated with portraits of their leaders, until we descended into the largest of them, where a hologram with the face of a young girl appeared. The hologram greeted me and then sang a song.
“Laugh, laugh, you evil comet. You have the fate of the Earth in your hands. But there is no more beautiful and sweeter light than the light of the stars far ahead!”
Then she disappeared. My companions gave me a glass of liquid in my hands and explained that everyone who was taken inside was going through a ceremony of acquaintance with the Pioneer I – their most famous leader of the Komsomol movement on the ship. And according to tradition, I have to drink as a sign of goodwill and friendship.
Completely dumbfounded, I lifted the glass and sniffed, it smelled absolutely disgusting and so I realized that it was alcohol. But what could they do to me? And I swallowed the liquid, and immediately choked and coughed all over the hall. Yon and Gwon laughed. And then they suddenly became serious.
"We took the liberty of testing your DNA," Yon began.
Wiping my mouth, I looked at them both with fright.
“Don't be alarmed, this is standard procedure. We're all loyal to the species here. Therefore, we must check everyone who leaves their biological material on the ship," Gwon agreed.
“And even though your sequence is extremely unusual, it partially coincides with the DNA of a person once familiar with Pioneer I. Therefore, we brought you to the hall and showed her hologram. But, unfortunately, you showed no signs of recognition.”
"Exactly," I nodded, still struggling with heartburn, "I didn't show it.”
"The records say that the carrier of this DNA drank rice vodka well," Yon laughed.
I laughed with them. We hugged and I wanted to cry and kiss them. Through the laughter the face of Master Eleanor appeared, I froze. And then someone tapped me on the shoulder.
“Bike,” May-e-oka said angrily and shook me, “wake up Bike.”
I turned my head around, and then the girl tore off the neural interface from my head.
“Oh moons," I said, losing my balance.
"Exactly," May-e-oka picked me up and sat me down on the computing station.
"You've been here all day and missed the most important thing.”
“A day? What day?” I was surprised, feeling dizzy and unable to make out where I was and why I wasn't on the Chinese ship.
"Soon I'll get used to finding you unconscious. Yes, all day," May-e-oka announced, walking around the basement, "but the main thing is different. Captain Kulagi has escaped.”
"Do we need him?"
"No, sharaman," the girl snapped, "but he took the Fig and the submarine with him.”
“The red moon with him, I will build one myself and even better.”
“What?” my words made her stop.
“My engines, you forgot, I flew them across the sea.”
“What engines?”
I looked at her in surprise, and then looked down at the neural interface in my hands.
“Maglev engines with a burning element of Friskorayte for atmospheric braking.”
“Don't talk nonsense. There are no engines.”
“So, all of it was...”
“Of course, shakrash-na, you dreamed it, yes. Primitive neural network toys. It shows you a vinaigrette from your memory. You can keep it on for years. My original had such periods when she didn't come out of this self-generating bullshit for 300 years.”
“So, I haven't built anything...”
“Oh moons! He got it. But this is the least of the problems. The main thing is that we can't get off this stupid island now.”
“And how did he manage to deceive Richitina and Sha Zumm?”
“He didn’t, it looks like they went with him, because there are no traces of them on the island.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Truly.”
ns 15.158.61.7da2
