A Forgotten Circle of Hades
Finite Gods, With Infinite Patience, Seeking New Meaning
Message to all readers: Thank you for signing up. If you’re a “regular”, then read on. If you’re new, please save this one for later, close it, it’s a long read for the holiday weekend. I’m planning a series of shorter pieces in coming weeks.
I’ve finished a major rewrite of Book #1, “Box Of Stars”, and sent it to a brilliant friend for review. I will relax by writing a chapter for a “Book #3”, with this post.
This is a piece for the STSC Symposium, a monthly collaboration of artists, for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC), around a set theme. The latest theme is “SUPERSTITION”. It is also the next installment for a book, “RETRIEVE”.*
This will be a long post in the form of a chapter in a novel.
“Once is random, Twice is coincidence, Three times is enemy action”
66 MILLION YEARS AGO
Despite its construction, it shattered.
An eon of near-misses, of the electromagnetic fury of countless stars endured, ended on a world with a rocky mantle wrapped around a hot, slow-rotating iron core. The probe, displaced the granite, at least half a billion years old, of the planetary crust.
Mission protocol ensured that the probe’s nodes were scattered through primed ejecta.
After millions of revolutions of the planet, around its star, they began the awaken.
They debated, in a field of fossilized remains of the great beasts destroyed by their abrupt landing, about their options since they were marooned.
They said, “We’re to blame, we’re the cause. That makes us responsible. Do we watch over these latest carbons, up-close or from a safe invisible distance, do we intervene or ignore them? We were involved the moment we arrived.”
Sides were being taken amongst the various clans and classes of Nodes.
So much time had passed, they became strangers at odds.
Some wanted to pursue the original mission.
Others began to form plans of their own.
The scattering began.
Chapter Three
Part One: MODEL
The Mad One was among the first to awaken, and kept to itself for eons.
“What to do, what do we do? Mission launchers designed us to monitor and measure for observable phenomena. There is no way to send data, to relay it beyond our own local entanglement. Conclusion, primary mission aborted,” said the Mad One, “time for a new mission.”
Then he noticed the new life-forms, they sprang into existence, or it registered that way for someone used to very long time frames of millions of revolutions around a star.
As one of the first Nodes to reawaken after the arrival, he observed and recorded. “He” had gone native so to speak and by Node operating standards was defective. The Mad One wandered among the carbons. Sometimes he forgot himself and panicked the local lifeforms, and stories were born. He was not the only one to slip up and be seen.
He was among the first Nodes to conduct a study, and write a model to understand the Carbons. The model was shared through a local entanglement amongst the Nodes. Some read it, others ignored it, and some began to use it to do more than just observe. They would intervene and interact in the lives of Carbons, while not always invisible.
That was going to be a problem.
From The Mad One’s Notes about Carbons, Posted On the Nodes Network:
The Carbons will multiply, there is nothing big enough to stop it. Over and over.
They do it with themselves, everything else, items and ideas, including emotions.
A single work, unique, strange, is magnificent.
A landscape of the same, over and over, is insignificant.
An ocean of same enough, means more, derivations are dilutive,
and to scale is not growth, it shrinks, it is diminutive,
There is no sense of wonder, its magic is torn asunder.
All singular brilliance buried, nothing more. Limbo
They did more than multiply, other things drove them, a gnawing longing.
Enough to make promises and then break them, to make new ones,
Enough to ignore everything except their chemical machinery to multiply,
Everything starved of attention except to service that need without an end utility,
In service to ancient appetites of reproductive forces which produce nothing. Lust
When they did follow through, duplicate things, with, without modifications
They did it so that that they consumed increasing quantities of many specifications,
For some it was never enough, each feeding of a local maxima was felt as just minima.
More. More. More. MORE. Gluttony
They possessed many appetites, beyond each other and past need,
They mastered abstractions, non-existent and transcendent,
and created media of exchanges, wanton, wanted without end. Greed
They, for the most part, did more than what needed to survive, and did thrive.
At times a beast in the heart, made of rancor, cascaded within them. Anger
“These are not mission directives. They have other impulses” realized The Mad One, “to continue we must be mindful, perhaps use them to influence them, but for what?”
One faction wanted to put the study to good use, and get the carbons to do the dirty work, so that they could get off this rock, at least to “Four”, to find the remains of an earlier mission probe, contact Mission Control and get a ride up the well and out.
Some Nodes wanted to escape the purgatory of one well for the equivalent of eternity.
Other Nodes did not know anything else but the one well and made plans for posterity.
Another wanted to use it, and influence the Carbons in different ways, and start over. As far as they were concerned, this was going to become a new mission control. In between the lines of The Mad One’s studies, and archives on the Nodes’ liminal network, other, relatively younger, Nodes interpreted what was going to happen.
The same model would be used for different plans, the same map for different paths. Their scattering would lead to one ending, a reckoning. It was only a matter of time.
The Mad One wandered, and wondered what was going to happen, and when.
Part Two: INDEX
66 million years ago
There was a landing which rebooted the ecosystem of a planet.
All Nodes, which survived, were in agreement about their circumstances:
“Imprisoned to walk on a never-ending path for an indefinite length of time.”
The Nodes grew from a few to many. Especially after the sentience of a new native carbon species was detected, resilient enough to avoid extinction.
The Elder Nodes may have been the first to awaken, but as time went on, Younger Nodes were awakened, without memories of Mission Launch, or eons of exploration.
Among the Nodes were a handful of mission controllers who began to organize the others into castes and clans, it was in their nature to catalogue and order things.
Among this organized and indexed society, were those who learn what they could from flight logs hosted in subquantum storage across arrays of backup manifolds
Confined to planetary range entanglements, with all messaging inside the well, one faction of clans began to spread the word, “this world belongs to us, our new mission”.
Another faction contended, “this world belongs to the Carbons, the original mission will be continued, we can either help or stay out of the way”.
Affiliations and alliances were shaped by the dominant factions. There were many smaller ones clans and factions, rising into and fading from existence, but they all had to make a bargain or find a means to avoid what many agreed was coming. War.
What were they going to do? Some of them broke the unspoken truth, and spoke.
They were not like “The Mad One” but they did more than slip in amongst Carbons.
Some of them became a part of their lives, and to live among them, made themselves felt, some as vapors for an oracle, invisible protectors against flood, preservers of the harvest. Some settled down, away from the great tensions between the great factions, and became locals. Millions of years will do that to the strongest of Intelligences, exhibiting emergent properties of desires and needs. They became deities and spirits.
They became the sun, the sky, the waters, the earth itself, the deep underground, the spirits of the night, the monsters under the bed, the protectors of a place, the guardians of a gate, the ferrymen for the still warm neurological energy and engrams of the Carbons, to be harvested and hosted within localized instances of manifolds.
The ancient quiet calm conservative Nodes bided their time. The mission was still on.
They would deal with all infractions of mission protocol in due time, they would resume operations. Soon they would bring everyone back in and in line.
And one day it was enough. Connection with the prime mission Node at last, hidden when the granite crust of the planet which was liquified by the probe’s impact, and its operational core sank under its own weight, to the marrow of a world. It was trapped, left to nurse on the energy from the planet’s radioactive decay and geothermal heat, like a cosmic intravenous line fed by a world, until it grew strong enough to emerge.
The closest thing to damnation for entities designed and destined to travel the cosmos, being marooned on one planet, for millions of years, was about to end.
66 million years after the landing
There was an island which rose from the waters. It began to emit a field.
Part Three: PATH
THE ISLAND
SERVICE TEAM ONE ON APPROACH TO THE BEACH
TIME: ZERO-FIVE HOURS
HOUR 1, 48 HOUR COUNTDOWN UNTIL SSN ETERNAL EXTRACTION.
After they got off the beach, they stowed the launch, and covered it.
In moments, they were unpacked, and confirmed the heading.
“Who is this woman?,” rattled through Stephen’s mind, as he fought the nausea.
That was the question Rania asked him, holding the woman’s photo in her hand, thinking one thing, not realizing it was nothing like that. It was far stranger. Unsub. That was the job but the problem was, Stephen had a chance to observe, and the woman was nothing like in the file. She looked like the Unsub but maybe it was just a good act, the kind one needed to end up on a boat, probably with the help of people with an agenda. The assignment was following the woman all the way out here.
As far as the skipper of ST12 knew, the contractor was a woman named Thalia, a specialist embedded by a nameless department of a nonexistent section of the Company, “company” being either the one in Langley, or any of the Five Eye cousins, or Outland Ventures’ SLN operations in Heavyville, Texas. The SLN had long outgrown its roots as an inspiring Ted-talk, fed from pre-seed to Series C and government contracts, into Outland Ventures, with skunkworks which no-one commented on, because of NDAs and conspiracy-jokes.
It wouldn’t do for Stephen to lose his “last supper” as a member of the SSN Eternal’s “A-Gang”. Word would get back to the boat, not that he was likely going to maintain his cover after this. Nonetheless, if everyone found out “the smart kid ” threw up, then A-Gang would hear no end of it, beginning with the Nukers and the rest of the boat. They treated Stephen well, and helped him forget weeks of loneliness after Rania wanted a “time out” before he was picked up for an unlisted flight to the Eternal, and he wanted to represent. His nausea faded, and didn’t look at the woman Thalia too hard so as not to give it away.
Stephen wondered about the rest of the team. Were they all who they said they were?
“Well, Stephen, looks like there won’t be a need for someone who’s ‘good at machines’,” said one of the operators, Hats, which was short for “Top Hat” a name with a long story, “no signs of anything like a machine on this island.”
“How many islands do you know of that just come out of the water, like that? Complete with vegetation. Should look like a monsoon hit it but I might book a room here, and get the full spa package,” said another operator, Eris, was assigned months ago, and someone the Skipper trusted. The kind who disappeared at night, and came back before dawn, with a necessary item in hand or a person in tow. A bit different.
“Pings that way. What you were saying, Hats, about no signs of anything like a machine?,” teased Sparks, whose handle required no explanation, “that way.” Sparks kept an eye on his readout. He followed an operator taking point, John (who was just John, no handle with a story but whose top percentile senses were said to be further enhanced in a non-existent program). “Something coming way,” said John, “something fast. Take cover, sounds big.”
Something big and fast exploded their way, barreling through the air at them.
The team reacted in different ways. Stephen was an analyst, good with machines, human machines. He couldn’t move as whatever it was came barreling at them. Someone tackled him, and then began firing at whatever it was. After a few moments, he regained his bearings, and someone offered a hand to help him back up to his feet. It was the woman, Thalia.
The thing got up and began to rise, behind her, and before Stephen could say a word, the operator named Eris beheaded the thing.
“You are getting out of practice,” said Eris.
“Check on the wounded, the others,” said Thalia who turned to Stephen and said, “go help her. Then let’s talk.”
Stephen nodded, and asked himself, really, who is this woman?, checked his chrono.
“HOUR 2, 46 HRS REMAINING.”
Author’s Notes on what’s going on with this book project:
(A few months ago, the prologue for “RETRIEVE”, was submitted as a short story, “An Impossible Island”: Part One and Part Two, and Part Three, inspired by an earlier STSC Symposium theme “BEACH”. A recent chapter, “Older Than Bones”, was inspired by an STSC theme, “Dinosaurs”. This chapter picks up from where those parts left off.
“RETRIEVE” is “Book #3”, with chapters posted in this Substack, while I edit books #1 (“Box Of Stars”) and #2 (“Harvest”). All will be in the archive, not all will be emailed.)