Let's Read Animorphs! The Whole Series! Ch-ch-ch-chaaanges

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Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

Chapter 15

quote:

I was docked.

Sky. All around me.

The crystal!

I was docked to a crystal. Azure Level. Docked, eyes open, yet in the game. I was playing Inidar.

The game scenario involved two alien species, one a wandering nomad race in search of a new home. The other species was a world-sized behemoth. So vast, so all-consuming that it very nearly was the planet.

�I�ll take the Ketrans, if you choose to accept.�

�Gladly,� Inidar memmed back. �You underestimate the value of size and power. You�re an idealist, Ellimist.�

�Oh? Well, step into my lair, said the dreth to the chorkant.�

Inidar laughed.

�Shall we immerse?�

�On the other side,� he answered.

�This isn�t real,� I memmed. �You�re dead, Inidar. You died a long time ago.�

�True enough, Ellimist,� he agreed. �The Capasin killed me. Killed us all. They�re here, too, you know. Would you like to see them?�

�The Capasin? Where? Where is �here�?�

�Open your eyes, Ellimist, what do you see?�

�Equatorial High Crystal. But she�s dead, too. And Lackofa in the next dock. Is he dead? Am I dead? Or is this some kind of dream? Hallucination?�

�Are those the only choices?� Inidar asked, mocking. �Might it not be a game?�

�It might,� I said. �But whose?�

Inidar laughed delightedly in my head. Then he was gone, and before me, before my eyes, not a uninet memm, but right in front of me appeared the Capasin. The one I had killed.

�Hello again, Ellimist,� he said. There was a gaping, bloody wound in the top of his head and down where the point of the crystal shard had extruded from his throat.

�This is all a trick,� I said.

�Yes. Almost as neat a trick as the way you skewered me. A primitive spear to stop a modern spacecraft. Ouch!�

�What is this game?� I demanded. I was not the juvie I appeared to be, I was commander of the Searcher. I was commander of all that remained of the Ketran people. All that remained.

�Well, whose fault is that?� the Capasin asked as if he�d read my thoughts. �You invent games where you play with the lives of entire species, you cleverly broadcast these games through Z-space without bothering to include the explanation that they are games, just games. And then you�re surprised when someone comes along to squash you like so many parasites.�

�You didn�t exactly wait for explanations,� snapped. �You slaughtered us.�

The Capasin spread his limp arms in a very Ketran gesture. �It�s what we do. And if you�d had any fortitude you�d have returned and taken your planet back. Instead you wander around lost, looking for a place that doesn�t exist. You�re a cowardly species.�

�Less than a hundred of us in one ship to retake Ket?� I sneered. �You sound like Menno. It was always the radical move with him: Return and fight it out to the death, or adapt and become something entirely new.�

�Yes, and now we see how right I was,� Menno said. He was crowding in beside the dead Capasin, elbowing him aside. �Look where you�ve got us. Do you even know? We�re the game pieces now. Father has us. Father has gathered us here, made us into his toys.�

�What are you talking about?�

�You think it�s all a dream, don�t you, Ellimist? It�s real. Or mostly real. Inidar is a construct, a fake built out of your own memories. So is this one particular Capasin, though there are real Capasins here. And anyway, I�m real enough. In my own way.�

�Why are you here? You should be aboard the Searcher.�

�I was in command, remember? Not you. We saw when you went to active sensors. At that point I ordered the same, no reason not to. So we saw you firing weapons down there. I took the Searcher down to rescue you. Surprised, eh? Surprised that I would try and save your life? Don�t be. How could I abandon you and hope to maintain control of the crew? No one wins the game of assassination. I had to at least try and rescue you.�

�The Searcher can�t penetrate a water environment,� I said suspiciously.

�Father�s reach goes beyond the water,� Menno said. �He controls everything on this moon. We were skimming the surface, trying frantically to fit out one of the fighters to go in after you. And all at once a wall of water, impossible, of course - it rose up from nowhere, a wave a half mile high. And you�re right: The Searcher doesn�t do well in water.�

�Aguella?� I asked.

�Right here,� she said.

�How did you � Are you all right?�

�I was killed, Toomin. We all were. All but you.�

I wanted to laugh. It was ludicrous. She was talking, she was right there now, in front of my face. Hovering in the pure clean air of home.

�Would you like to see the truth, Ellimist?� Menno asked.

�Yes, of course.�

�Don�t be so quick to decide. You won�t like the truth.�

�You�re all dead. What can be worse?�

Menno�s smile spread wide.

And all at once the crystal was gone, the sky gone. I was underwater. Underwater but breathing. Something held me. Tentacles. Deep worms, they were inside me! The tendrils grew into me, penetrated me, made me a part of them.

I floated, tethered, in a field of tentacles that spread as far as the eye could see. Menno floated nearby, tethered, penetrated, incorporated. His eyes were closed. His chest had burst open. I could see his insides.

A few feet away - Aguella. My lovely Aguella. Tied. Attached. A dead thing grafted onto the creature called Father.

Lackofa. Jicklet. Bodies, more and more, I twisted to see more and more. They were all around me, some seemingly uninjured, others torn apart by impact wounds or by sudden depressurization. Everywhere the dead. The last of the Ketran people.

�No, you are the last of the Ketran people, Toomin the Ellimist,� Aguella said. She was before me once more, hovering, her beautiful face, her � all an illusion. The crystal floated. The people lifted. Far below, the lava rivers ran.

�What do you want with us?� I cried.

�I am Father,� Lackofa said. He was gazing down at me from his dock above. Old Forty-two. �I am the life of this planet. All that is here comes from me, belongs to me, is a part of me. All power is mine.�

I had a sudden, searing glimpse, a compressed data file downloaded at ten times normal speed, like a hundred memms exploding in my head at once. I saw Father. He covered every square inch of the moon, every mile of ocean floor, every tiny island, everything from pole to pole. A billion tentacles all waving and waiting.

We were not Father�s only victims. I saw Generationals and Illamans. I saw Capasins. I saw members of races we had encountered on our long, long search. I saw races no Ketran had ever met. All of them dead. None alive but me, if this was truly life.

But it mattered little to Father. Even the dead could be used, kept whole, their soulless brains made to function.

How many spacecraft had been drawn to this blue moon? Father was old. He had been old before the first sentient lit his first rocket.

�What do you want with me?� I cried.

Menno said, �It is lonely with only the dead for company. I want to play a game, Ellimist.�

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B53Vlje7mcM

Chapter 16

quote:

The game was all.

Aguella was gone. Dead. For the first few years - decades? centuries? - Father had brought her to me. She had come and Lackofa had come and Menno had come. All my dead brothers and sisters, my friends, my enemies, my love. All dead. But still Father had given me my home in Azure Level, my old home, with my fellows around me. Inidar was there, and Wormer, built of my own memory.

The pure memories, those that Father created out of my mind, were thin, paltry creatures. They did only what they had always done. It was a shame I had never known them better. If my memories had gone deeper Father could have made them more amusing.

Where Father had the body and brain he could be far more creative. Aguella and I propagated. We had three juvies. But they were sad illusions, partial, incomplete: I had never paid any attention to young juvies. My mind could not create them, write them fully. They seemed to come and go at random. I would remember them and they would appear; I would forget them and they would disappear for hours or days.

Lackofa and I grew old together, old friends. We spent our free time together. Recited the old poems together, talked about the good old days. He grew old. So did I.

Jicklet would come by sometimes. We would run into her at the perches. She was quite the respected person now, under consideration for appointment to the Council.

And Menno? For a while it was Menno I played against in every game. Father would match us together. Father enjoyed watching the interaction of hostilities. Menno and I were so different. But over time our hostility paled, faded. It�s hard to hate a dead person. Even one who seems so vital and
alive.

How many games had I played with Father? A thousand? Ten thousand? I tried to refuse, but when I did he simply turned off the illusion of home and I saw who and what and where I was. I was back under the sea, tethered for eternity to the tendril that grew inside me, that reached itself into my brain. I was back amidst the endless forest of tentacles with Lackofa and Menno and poor Aguella still floating, dead but never decaying, never disintegrating, never, never at peace.

But it was more than the loss of illusions that motivated me to play. It was that I had nothing else.

Nothing but the game.

The game and the tiny flicker of undying hope.

What a sad, desperate illusion. How ludicrous to cling to the hope of escape. And escape to what? Where would I go? What would I be? I was part of Father. There was no Toomin, no Ellimist.

There was only Father.

And yet � I still lived. I still played the game and made my own gaming decisions.

Father needed me, I had long since recognized that fact. He kept me alive to play. Because though I lost each game, I was his best opponent.

�I want to play a game,� Father said. He had acquired a new face, his own face, or a facsimile, a sort of �game name.� He took Ketran form, an oldster, a Wise One. He flew to my dock, hovered, and repeated, �Shall we immerse?�

�On the other side,� I said.

Father played many games. Many games. I believe he had culled them from a thousand races, all over the galaxy. We had played games not much different than our own old Alien Civilizations. We had simple games of reflex. Killing games. Games of forethought involving the complex movement of pieces on a flat plane or within a cube or within n-dimensional space. Games that were games of games.

It was all I had. I had begged Father to kill me, to end it. But of course he refused. I had tried deliberately losing, hoping to make the games boring to Father. But Father was patient: He could outwait me. For years, decades, it didn�t matter to him. And in the end I always came back to the game. You make what you can of the life you have, I suppose.

The new game began.

It was different. Father had acquired some new species.

I was all at once in a close, dank, almost airless room. At least it seemed airless to me, a Ketran. Though in all fairness I now lived out my life smothered beneath miles of ocean - and tethered do a tendril - so I was hardly one to complain.

Nevertheless, it seemed airless. Not a large room, perhaps a hundred feet square. There were creatures, odd, misshapen things that seemed to be an amalgamation of a dozen different races. Faces with two eyes front and a third eye facing back. Their hair was long, running all the way down their spiked backs to the floor. All different colors: green hair and red hair and yellow. Black faces and white and purple. Arms seemed to be almost optional; some had three, others as many as nine. They were definitely new. Like no race I�d ever seen before. Father had made a new acquisition.

I knew instinctively that we were aboard a ship. But it moved. Not the smooth acceleration of a spacecraft. This ship moved up and down and sideways as if it were being buffeted by a storm, or even floating on a watery sea.

The creatures sat at tables with their individualistic bodies splayed out comfortably. They were enjoying drinks. Perhaps mild intoxicants. And they were watching us.

We, me and Father in the person of Menno, were performers at one end of the room on a raised platform. We each held a tool of some sort. A long thing, nearly my own body length, a sort of flattened, whimsically shaped board. And stretched along the board were seven taut strings. There
was a mouthpiece as well that reached up to where I could, by bending my neck just a little, place it in my mouth.

Menno grinned at me, a cocky challenge. He placed his mouth around the mouthpiece and blew while strumming his fingers across the strings.

The result � it was � it was like nothing I�d heard in life or a dream.

The sounds were not mere sounds. I don�t have words to explain. Maybe no one does. The sounds touched a part of me I�d long forgotten. The sounds made me think of Aguella. Of home. Of the stars and the sun and the clouds and of all the beauty, sadness, joy, and laughter I�d ever known.

Menno/Father finished playing and the creatures in the audience emitted honking vocalizations that seemed especially harsh in contrast with the sounds of Menno�s instrument.

�Your turn,� Menno said.

I placed my lips as I�d seen him do, and my hands as he had done. And I made sounds. But not the sounds he had made. Mine were harsh and grating and contemptible in my own ears.

And yet, I could hear, even there, even in my own incoherence, the seed of something. Something.

The audience favored me with stony silence.

�That�s game.� Menno laughed.

�What is this game, Father?�

�These creatures are called the Unemites. They are not space-faring. I happened to draw a Skrit Na freighter into my web - useless species, the Skrit Na - and aboard their ship they had a Unemite captive.�

�The game, Father. What is it called?�

�They call it music.�

�I can never hope to win,� I said. �I beg you, Father: Release me. I don�t want to play it again.�

He refused. Of course I knew he would. And I knew this about Father: His one weakness was his cruelty. I could use that. He would force me to play this game a thousand times.

Step into my lair, said the dreth to the chorkant.

It's interesting the Ketrans didn't have music I don't know why I think it is, but it seems to me that it is.

# ? Aug 31, 2022 04:08

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# ? May 25, 2024 17:30

Zore: Sep 21, 2010; willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d�etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

Man, I forgot that apparently the Skrit Na have been around since before the Ellimist's ascension. That is a mind-boggling period of time to be the weird scavengers of the galaxy.

# ? Aug 31, 2022 04:30

WrightOfWay: Jul 24, 2010

This book is cool.

# ? Aug 31, 2022 05:33

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Zore posted:

Man, I forgot that apparently the Skrit Na have been around since before the Ellimist's ascension. That is a mind-boggling period of time to be the weird scavengers of the galaxy.

Cockroaches always survive, I guess.
(No disrespect intended to roaches)

# ? Aug 31, 2022 05:35

Fuschia tude: Dec 26, 2004; THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

So the Ellimist is actually Sephiroth/Jenova? :ok:

# ? Aug 31, 2022 05:59

SirSamVimes: Jul 21, 2008; ~* Challenge *~

I really love the fact that Ellimist Chronicles is a piece of unashamedly weird science fiction.

# ? Aug 31, 2022 07:54

freebooter: Jul 7, 2009

It's fascinating/terrifying that Father, with all his unfathomably accumulated knowledge, is a cruel god.

Epicurius posted:

It's interesting the Ketrans didn't have music I don't know why I think it is, but it seems to me that it is.

Or, apparently, any of the thousands of other aliens Father has ever encountered! It's also interesting that in human societies, music is a universal aspect of culture.

quote:

Menno grinned at me, a cocky challenge. He placed his mouth around the mouthpiece and blew while strumming his fingers across the strings.

The result � it was � it was like nothing I�d heard in life or a dream.

The sounds were not mere sounds. I don�t have words to explain. Maybe no one does. The sounds touched a part of me I�d long forgotten. The sounds made me think of Aguella. Of home. Of the stars and the sun and the clouds and of all the beauty, sadness, joy, and laughter I�d ever known.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tynWSAesAo

(I genuinely like this song but it's also the funniest one I can think of to imagine Menno suddenly launching into and sending the Ellimist into a rhapsody)

edit - or wait, maybe it's this one (I don't why but it has to be saxophone)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpuwcINDHnQ

freebooter fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Aug 31, 2022

# ? Aug 31, 2022 09:43

Mazerunner: Apr 22, 2010; Good Hunter, what... what is this post?

that it's an instrument that has both mouthpiece/wind component and strings is interesting.

makes me think.... bagpipes

# ? Aug 31, 2022 10:33

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Mazerunner posted:

that it's an instrument that has both mouthpiece/wind component and strings is interesting.

makes me think.... bagpipes

Well, that fits with the horrible noise Ellimist made, at least

# ? Aug 31, 2022 10:53

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

Chapter 17

quote:

�Shall we immerse?�

�On the other side,� I answered.

The Unemites. The instruments. The hundredth game.

I had waited. So hard to show just enough improvement to entice Father, to challenge him, without revealing all that I was learning. So hard to lay the foundation of this moment.

The hundredth game. But the ten thousandth time I had played it in my mind, all alone. The instrument, the adge, as the Unemites called it, had scarcely been out of my thoughts.

The adge had become a part of me. It was inside me, in my brain, and even if Father ended the game, he could never take the adge from me, never take music from me, never. I owned it. I had become it. And now, this game, the hundredth, I would show him.

He was Menno, cocky, sure of victory, but wary enough that he had to try harder than he�d have liked to gain the approval of the audience.

And yet, in a hundred games Father had not advanced. Not an original idea, not a new expression. Ironic at some level: Menno, the real Ketran Menno, had always been an advocate of taking the game to a new level, injecting a wild disregard for convention. I smiled to myself. Ah, Menno, you�d be proud of me.

But it was Aguella who was in my thoughts as I raised the adge�s mouthpiece to my lips. It was Aguella who made the music possible for me, and the lack of an Aguella, or anything like her, that would doom poor Father. You needed love to win at the game of music.

I played a riff. Menno gaped. The audience sat forward.

That�s right, Father, I�ve rewritten the rules.

I played of sadness. I played of loneliness. Despair. Love found and lost. I played of tragic misunderstanding and weary cynicism and defeat. I played of perseverance, endurance beyond all suffering. Endurance in the face of hopelessness, hope when even hope was a betrayal.

My adge spoke of every terrible moment of my life. It spoke of the loss of my people. The loss of friends. Losses and losses.

And yet, though l played so much sadness, the music at the same time denied despair. How could anyone despair while music was being played

I could see it in the Unemite faces: They heard the loneliness and in that expression of loneliness found comfort for their own.

Oh, yes, I had them. I owned them, the audience. I had them through and through and they would go with me wherever my adge led.

And Father? Oh, it was sweet to see him. Sweet to watch his uneasiness turn to amazement turn to sullen anger.

The music didn�t touch him. But he could see that I had won. I had won the game so resoundingly, so finally that he could never hope to compete with me again. Not at the game of music.

�How?� he asked me finally.

I played a phrase on my adge, and then I did what no Unemite had conceived of doing. I sang. I used my voice, my Ketran voice, to make the sounds that the adge could not.

The Unemites went mad. The hooting was frantic, manic, insane. Lovely.

�How?!� Menno/Father demanded, barely concealing the rage.

�I�m a loser,� I sang in answer. �They called me a brilliant loser, all winners, all winners but me: loser. But only a loser can sing the azures. Only a loser truly sees.�

So this actually tells us something about Father, I think. Every living thing, every alien he's come across, he's killed. But he's lonely, so he kept the Ellimist alive so he could play games with him. But he's not really interested in the game. This is all about control. He's making the Ellimist play the games he wants to play when he wants to play them, and punishing him if he doesn't, and the Ellimist has to lose,, because winning means that the Ellimist knows something or is better at something than Father, and Father is the ultimate solipsist.The reason the Ellimist can win, though, is because Father has no actual creativity. He can only copy what he's absorbed from his victims.

Chapter 18

quote:

I thought that Father would kill me straightaway. But he didn�t.

I thought he would never play the game of music again, but he tried. And this time he copied much of what I�d done. It didn�t matter. I had a new trick up my sleeve: improvisation.

I had devised a tactic of improvising in duet. I would offer a musical phrase, play for a few moments, then invite him to pick up the thread and extrapolate.

Father could not. And his efforts were pitiful.

For a long time afterward, Father did not approach me. No games of any kind. Nothing but silence. I was left to float, left to gaze out across the grim sea of tethered, invaded bodies. Long-dead Aguella. My muse.

But everything was changed now. I had music. And even without an adge I was so long used to living inside my own mind that I could play and compose all the endless days and nights.

At long last, after years perhaps, Father came to me. He had a new game, a new species. Not music, not anything like it. A simple game of placement and pieces.

I lost the first four games. I won the fifth. The sixth. The next five games after that. Every game.

Father raged and twisted the scenario into a nightmare vision. He stormed away and left me to float.

And surely now he would kill me. He understood what had happened. I had won at music and that free-form, improvisational game had done things to my mind, changed me in ways even I could not understand. I saw in more dimensions. Intuition was close to me now, intimate to me. I trusted my own moves. And conversely, Father had been shaken.

A year. A new game. A killing game this time. Weapons in a maze.

I won the first game.

I won every game.

Silence from Father. Why did he not kill me?

I reached out to him, wanted to know his mind. But he made no answer. He had gone far away, he had withdrawn. And yet, I lived.

And then dreadful hope, that awful emotion that draws us to our doom, began to rise in me. I reached out, reached down my tether, through Father�s own neural net as if it was a biological uninet.

I reached for AgueIla.

�Aguella. My love.�

�Toomin?�

�Yes.�

�Am I alive?�

�Do you think? Do you see? Do you sense?�

�I ��

I could see her dead body, see her through the sun-dappled water. See her through a passing cloud of neon-green fish.

�My memories, all � � she said. �I feel you, Toomin. Only you. Alive, but � what is happening?�

So many years, how could my heart still tear apart? How could the pain still be so fresh?

�You live in my memory, Aguella. But now, here, in this place, you live only when Father touches your neurons, when he raises your memories.

�There is no Father, here,� she said.

�I have made you live again, for this moment. The parts of you that I touch come alive again, Aguella. The memories, the notions, the ideas. But only for the moment.�

�Then I am dead.�

�Yes. You are gone, Aguella. This is only the shadow of you, the biological brain, neurons switched on, a biological computer, nothing more.�

�Let me see. Once more, let me see what I am.�

�No. No.�

�Ah.�

�Aguella. I ��

Could I ask permission? Of a person dead for decades? It was a mockery. She would give the answer I sought. Her will was long gone, long since flown away.

�I am making you a part of me, Aguella. Do you understand? I am downloading you, your thoughts, your knowledge. All that you were. Are.�

�I was always a part of you, and you a part of me.�

I lowered the barriers between us. Felt the flood of information come into me. Data, that�s all it was, the encoded data that, deciphered, was all that made her Ketran. Her fear, her desire, her love. It all became a part of me and even in that terrible moment, that hideous moment when I treated my one love like nothing more than a uninet file, I gloated and thought, Ah, Father, you were a fool to withdraw. Now I�ll come for you.

I downloaded Jicklet. Lackofa. Menno. One by one I absorbed their minds. The other Ketrans, till all the last of the Ketrans were inside me.

And then others. Alien minds. Alien thoughts.

Alien sights. Faster! Generationals. Illamans. Capasins. Skrit Na. More! Faster!

I was a uninet bug, eating data, spreading, consuming, absorbing. Still I was no more than one percent of Father, but already I was a hundred times myself.

Daankins, 333�s, the Wurb, the Breets, the Multitude, the Chan Wath. Race after race. I emptied each dead mind into mine, each set of data, no time to look, to see, to open and enjoy, oh no, no time, the race was on, a race to consume, to download and absorb.

How long till you see it, Father? How long till you spot this new game?

On and on I roared. And still Father did not feel me, did not sense his growing peril. Why should he? Father had never known a true enemy. He had owned his entire world for his entire evolution. A single life-form that had invented every other that swam in his sea, simply to amuse himself.

Then, at long last, I felt his unease. Felt his attention. He sent out impulses, racing through his vast network, felt here and there for the cause of the odd, disturbing sensation.

I showed him nothing. I hid myself. He searched and found only emptiness. Emptiness where there had been captive minds. Where were the Capasins? Where were the Generationals? Where were the Graspers?

Where were those Ketrans?

And at long last, as his slow-growing dread emerged, as he began to feel a new emotion, he asked: Where is Ellimist?

I was half of Father now. We were equal. I stopped my advance.

�Shall we immerse, Father?� I said.

�What game?� he demanded.

�The game, Father. The last game.�

And this is how the Ellimist will overcome him. He's beating Father at his own game, because the Ellimist knows how to learn, and Father didn't realize that by binding Toomin to him, he also bound himself to Toomin.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 04:08

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

To quote Watchmen:
I'm not trapped in the submarine extraterrestrial undying online graveyard afterlife game anemone with you. You're trapped in the submarine extraterrestrial undying online graveyard afterlife game anemone with me.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 04:39

Comrade Blyatlov: Aug 4, 2007; should have picked four fingers

Father is a neat concept. Really neat. I don't know if I've seen anything quite like it elsewhere.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 05:54

Vandar: Sep 14, 2007; Isn't That Right, Chairman?

This book is so loving cool you guys.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 06:38

Remalle: Feb 12, 2020

quote:

I had devised a tactic of improvising in duet. I would offer a musical phrase, play for a few moments, then invite him to pick up the thread and extrapolate.

Father could not. And his efforts were pitiful.

Turns out Father could only be defeated with the power of j a z z

# ? Sep 1, 2022 06:45

Zonko_T.M.: Jul 1, 2007; I'm not here to fuck spiders!

I've read stories where people get absorbed into a hive mind but I don't think I've ever read one where they escape by hostile takeover.

That's just the power of the arts!

# ? Sep 1, 2022 06:59

Fuschia tude: Dec 26, 2004; THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

Father is a neat concept. Really neat. I don't know if I've seen anything quite like it elsewhere.

Zonko_T.M. posted:

I've read stories where people get absorbed into a hive mind but I don't think I've ever read one where they escape by hostile takeover.

That's just the power of the arts!

Yeah I was going to say, Father is basically the Zerg (without the ability to reproduce its members). And uh, Kerrigan kinda did that hostile takeover thing, too :shobon:

# ? Sep 1, 2022 08:03

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Feels good to be eleven again. I've tried to draw one of our Ketran friends

# ? Sep 1, 2022 08:46

Comrade Blyatlov: Aug 4, 2007; should have picked four fingers

What's meant by pods?

# ? Sep 1, 2022 08:57

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

What's meant by pods?

No idea, and I couldn't find a way to draw "pods" that didn't look stupid. I await scholarly review.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 09:02

Flowers For Algeria: Dec 3, 2005; I humbly offer my services as forum inquisitor. There is absolutely no way I would abuse this power in any way.

Probably some sort of feet, from the greek word pod�s meaning "foot". Feet that can hold on to stuff, obviously.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 09:51

Turpitude II: Nov 10, 2014

Remalle posted:

Turns out Father could only be defeated with the power of j a z z

quote:

But only a loser can sing the azures.

the blues

# ? Sep 1, 2022 11:55

Cythereal: Nov 8, 2009; I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Zonko_T.M. posted:

I've read stories where people get absorbed into a hive mind but I don't think I've ever read one where they escape by hostile takeover.

That's just the power of the arts!

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, depending on how you read the Transcendence ending.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 12:31

Traxus IV: Sep 11, 2001; it's our time now
let's get this shit started

This is really great, I'm loving it so far. I might not have as a kid if I'd read it then but I'm certainly enjoying it now, god drat

# ? Sep 1, 2022 15:58

feetnotes: Jan 29, 2008

Tree Bucket posted:

Feels good to be eleven again. I've tried to draw one of our Ketran friends

I love it! And I want to get in on the fun, so here's more or less what I picture:

I interpret "pods" fairly literally, to me they seem like bony protrusions a ketran can settle its on weight on when not in flight or docked. Nothing fancy, maybe it was more like an ankle bone when they were surface dwellers. I picture the docking talons having kind of moved backwards, so the ketrans can grip onto the structure behind them and still see forward.

Otherwise, some batlike and some birdlike features. They never mention feathers, so I figured leathery wings. Quills and their coloring are prominent, so I made them into a kind of head and torso covering. I don't think they're supposed to have beaks but I always imagined them, and nothing else seems right now!

# ? Sep 1, 2022 19:50

Ceebees: Nov 2, 2011; I'm intentionally being as verbose as possible in negotiations for my own amusement.

Tree Bucket posted:

Feels good to be eleven again. I've tried to draw one of our Ketran friends

Neat! I always thought of them as bug people, myself. No idea why.

# ? Sep 1, 2022 19:58

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

Third Life

Chapter 19

quote:

The last mind I absorbed was Father himself. And when I took him, I took nothing. There was no Father. No mind at all. He was nothing but a sponge, in the end. A creature of the simplest biology, an accident of evolution: a predator sponge that linked with its prey. Father was nothing but his victims. And when I had absorbed and cut him off from all of his victims, Father was nothing more than so much seaweed.

I was Father now. I contained within me all the knowledge of a hundred intelligent races. But I was still Toomin. The Ellimist. I was not content to live here, in this blue moon�s seas. I was born a creature of flight, of open skies.

I opened my eyes and gazed out through the sea. Out over Father�s hideous crop of the dead. I released the tentacle that held me. It took a long time. Tendrils had penetrated me, entered my brain. There was pain, physical pain that I had not felt in decades. And when I was almost free I nearly drowned. The tentacle had supplied all my needs for food and air and had preserved me from aging. Now I strangled, my lungs seized, my stomach heaved. I moved muscles that had not moved in a lifetime.

I kicked free of the tentacle, free! I opened my wings and flew slowly upward through the water, rose to the surface. Air!
Free! My face out of the water, untethered, free!

Could I fly? Could I possibly fly? How to get my wings above the surface? Impossible. Im - It came like a tidal wave. A roaring waterfall of sights, sounds, images, ideas, emotions. I was swept away by it, a free flyer in a hurricane.

All the minds I had downloaded into mine, they were all there, all crowded now into my own limited Ketran brain. I was a computer running a thousand sims at once. My own body seemed to exist in infinite variations. I had hands, feet, wings, tentacles, stingers, prods, claws, feelers; had eyes of every kind, I could see light all across the spectrum, I could see X rays and cosmic rays and microwaves, I had ears to hear only the deepest bass notes, and ears to hear only the highest pitches, and ears to hear a fuzzball floating on a breeze at a thousand yard�s distance.

And all of it, all those sense memories, all crammed into my own inadequate body and brain.

I fought down the rush, the deluge. I surfaced again, me, Toomin, the gamer who called himself Ellimist. I was in control. No, not control. No. All I could do was suppress the waiting onslaught. I couldn�t use it. Couldn�t open the door to it and use it without being overwhelmed.

I swam, scared now, staggered by what I had done, lost. I swam beneath the bright glowing disc of the planet above, beneath the white and brown moon, beneath the warmth of the distant sun.

I swam for a long time, but I was not lost. We had often used this moon of Father�s as a game board, Father and I. I knew where each little island lay and in a few exhausting hours I lay prostrate on soggy soil.

After a while I opened my wings to the breeze and let them dry. The riot in my head was still there, still clamoring. A mob held at bay by flimsy gates.

When I was dry I took to the air. I flew for the first time in so long that I could not help but cry. I flew on the lift of my own wings, above the almost-endless sea, above the awful crop of the dead that still lay tethered to Father.

They were deteriorating now, of course. Father no longer kept them safe from age and the rotting effects of the water. He no longer nourished them. They had reached their final deaths. The entire moon was a graveyard.

I flew and searched. I had never seen the place I was looking for but I knew it existed. Father had let us play across the surface of his world, but there had been blank zones, areas that simply never appeared. What secrets were there in those concealed redoubts?

I flew and caught a nice tail breeze. I was hungry. Amazing! I was tired. Wonderful! I was free. Alone.

Ahead I saw the outlines of what I had expected to find. A hidden island. Larger than the rest and higher. It was dry compared to the other lands of this moon. It was thickly covered with vegetation, mostly green with some startling swatches of orange and red.

Here and there, nestled between the trees, were spacecraft. Some had been there so long they were completely overgrown with vines and moss and trees. Some looked like they might have crashed just weeks or at most months before.

They were huge, and they were small. Dangerous-looking and innocuous. Some bristled with weapons or were painted fantastically. Others were utilitarian boxes.

All the ships of all the races that had been lured to Father over the millions of years he lay in wait. I had found Father�s trash dump. It took a while but I located the Explorer. And I found the Searcher. Searcher was a crumpled, twisted mess. I landed on an undamaged spar and stood there a while. The gravestone of my people. The last Ketran now stood vigil at the gravestone of his race.

Explorer was in better condition. It lay upside down, which was an inconvenience in gravity, but the engines powered up, and the systems worked. She would fly. I could leave Father�s moon. And go where?

I was now as alien as it is possible to be. The only Ketran in a galaxy that, with few exceptions, had never known we existed.

And I was an alien who contained within himself a multitude. I was filled up with answers to the questions of tens of thousands of relatives and friends on a thousand worlds. I knew where their loved ones had gone, why they had never returned. I was all that was left of Ket, but I was at the same time all that was left of other long-extinct races and of tribes and families.

I had become a living repository of life in a hundred variations. Life that would remain closed behind the locked doors of my own feeble brain unless � unless I could become something else.

�You were right, Menno. We must adapt, in the end. Adapt or die.�

And Toomin isn't willing to die.

Chapter 20

quote:

It took thirty more years to do all I needed to do.

I went through each ship, each wreck, and took what I could use. I burned roads through the jungle and built haulers. I built a sprawling shop with tools that would have made Jicklet drool with envy.

I dipped into the mass of minds that lived within me. Over time I learned to survive the storm of the multitude, to take what I needed and go on. Jicklet was often there with me. And an engineer named Hadra 232. And a Z-space theorist named Nu. And a hundred other scientists, technicians, theorists, builders, designers, innovators.

And biologists as well. Lackofa was with me. Others, many others, from other races.

The work changed shape, mutated, grew like a living thing and in fact became a living thing. For although I was building a ship, I was building so much more. I was building a new race. A race of one. A race of millions.

I was singular and plural all at once. I was alive and I was a machine. Engines were a part of me. Computers linked directly with my brain and soon the link was forgotten and the line disappeared. Sensors were my senses. I was vast. Vast enough to release the multitude.

Thirty years, and at last I was ready. I had passed most of a century on the blue moon. It was dying. The air worsened slowly, but that was all right, I no longer needed air. The waters reeked of decay, but I no longer needed to drink. The fish had long since become extinct. But I had saved the dead. And now I opened wide the gate to my multitude, never to close it again.

All my Ketrans, all my Generationals, my Daankins, my Hayati, my 333�s, my Wurbs and Breets and Gofinickiliasts, my Multitudinals, my Chan Wath, my Skrit Na and Illamans and Capasins and my one Unemite and so many others. Race after race. I emptied each dead mind into my extended brain, my biological-mechanical-synthetic construct, all free again.

So much knowledge, so much. And yet, when the flood was calmed, only I was truly alive. It was all me. I was still alone.

I lit my engines and rose from the surface of the dying moon.

From space I looked back on it. What was fitting? Some races burned their dead, some ate them, some buried them in the ground. Some finality was called for so that the floating bones and exoskeletons and shells of all those honored dead could cease to be grotesque.

I called on my weapons and I blasted the moon till it broke apart, till the atmosphere was ripped away, till the sea boiled up into the vacuum, till the molten remains spiraled slowly down in the gravity well of the planet and were incinerated on reentry.

Then I entered Z-space and put a billion miles between myself and that foul place.

Now what was I to do? I was unique. As alone as only a unique creature can be. I was part of no species. I was part of many species, but there was no hope of companionship there. Who would welcome me into their system? I had become a physical embodiment of the inter-species uninet I used to dream of. I was a library of information from many races. And with my extended body/ship I was powerful beyond reckoning.

Now what?

Now what?

Now what? What is your game now, Ellimist?

I thought of returning to Ket. But that would only cause me pain. Return to what? To empty skies where my people once lived?

I flew. In and out of Z-space, in and out of orbits. Time meant nothing to me, I was in no hurry.

But the loneliness was another matter. I took refuge in creating subroutines, simulations of people. I tried to talk to them, tried to � But how can you really talk to your own creation? How can you talk to a machine you�ve programmed? It�s an exercise in narcissism. It�s the beginning of madness. I knew now why Father had kept me alive. He had long since learned the emptiness of communication without hope of surprise. A Ketran - any sentient species - is only his free will. Freedom and sentience are inseparable. The captive, programmed mind is no mind at all.

I flew for a long time. Years. Looking. For what? I didn�t know.

And then, I dropped from Z-space and entered a system where two planets were at war. They were technologically advanced, though not capable of Z-space travel yet. They communicated by microwave and laser emissions. They moved across the lands and seas and through the skies of their respective planets. They had suppressed most diseases.

Two planets in strangely close proximity, no more than a quarter million miles separating them at their closest points. One was called Jall, the other the Inner World. The Inner World was actually in the more distant orbit, but then �inner� may have been a reference to some other factor. Neither Jallians nor Inners were part of my multitude, though the 333�s had knowledge of their existence, I was in a far reach of the galaxy.

I arrived, invisible to either side. I arrived in the midst of a ship-to-ship battle. In fact, I dropped out of Z-space within twenty miles of being struck by a terrifically powerful Jallian beam that missed its intended target, missed me, and finally, diffused and harmless, slightly warmed the nickel-and-iron
surface of a passing asteroid.

�Well, well,� I said. (I�d long since lost any reluctance to converse with myself.) �I seem to have stumbled into a war.�

The Jallian ship, a fantastically painted behemoth half a mile long, fired again. This time the beam found its victim. A small, swift Inner ship that looked, with its smooth, swept lines as if it had been designed to move through water, blew apart.

The Jallian jubilation was short-lived. A swarm of Inner craft emerged from the primitive stealth-state that allowed them to hide from Jallian sensors.

The Jallian ship fired again and again and annihilated five of the attackers, nearly a third of the total. But then the Inners fired. Their weapons were weaker. The Jallian ship did not blow apart. But the outer skin had been sliced open. Pressurized atmosphere blew out into space. And bodies, too. Writhing figures, helpless.

I acted before thinking. Acted on pure instinct. I extended a force field between the Jallian ship and the Inner Worlders. Both sides fired. Neither side�s weapons penetrated my force field.

I moved closer and let them see me. How it must have shocked them! Their ships were boxes of steel and titanium and composites. Mine was a living thing: crystal and flesh and composites all melded together, all wrapped in force fields of unchallengeable power. I was a visitor from a future they had only barely begun to glimpse.

By all rights they should have powered down and waited to learn my pleasure. Far from it. Both sides took less than five minutes to touch me with their active sensors, to feel around me, half-sighted.

And then the Inner Worlders opened fire. On me! The Jallians used the distraction to fire on the Inners, and in seconds what had been a two-front war became a three-way free-for-all.

I almost laughed. But the sheer malevolence of these two species was disgusting. I could have destroyed both fleets with a shrug of my wings.

I stretched out my power and wrapped my fields around them. I drained their power, damped their engines, scrambled their sensors, and left them drifting, helpless through space.

Then I opened communications.

�Your war is over,� I announced.

It's sort of ironic. The Capasins, not understanding games, attacked Ket because they thought the Ketrans were manipulating other species, bending them to their wills. That action set up a chain reaction where the Ellimist is now doing exactly that.

Epicurius fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Sep 2, 2022

# ? Sep 2, 2022 03:06

Zore: Sep 21, 2010; willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d�etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

And yeah, The Ellimist is now an insanely advanced composite mind that bootstrapped itself through a technological singularity driven entirely by Toomin's refusal to ever say die.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 03:26

WrightOfWay: Jul 24, 2010

I can't really blame the Inner Worlders for opening fire on the eldritch monstrosity that suddenly appeared. If you're lucky you will die quickly and be spared the coming horror.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 04:38

CidGregor: Sep 27, 2009; TG: if i were you i would just take that fucking devilbeast out behind the woodshed and blow its head off

Gotta say, from the perspective of a new reader, I was 100% expecting Menno to turn out to be Crayak, and then expected Father to be Crayak, and now they're both dead and I have no idea what the gently caress to think.

So, you know, par for the course with this book, at least.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 04:39

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

feetnotes posted:

I love it! And I want to get in on the fun, so here's more or less what I picture:

I interpret "pods" fairly literally, to me they seem like bony protrusions a ketran can settle its on weight on when not in flight or docked. Nothing fancy, maybe it was more like an ankle bone when they were surface dwellers. I picture the docking talons having kind of moved backwards, so the ketrans can grip onto the structure behind them and still see forward.

Otherwise, some batlike and some birdlike features. They never mention feathers, so I figured leathery wings. Quills and their coloring are prominent, so I made them into a kind of head and torso covering. I don't think they're supposed to have beaks but I always imagined them, and nothing else seems right now!

Aww heck yes. I'm glad you found a solution for the pods that works biologically and aesthetically.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 04:53

Malpais Legate: Oct 1, 2014

CidGregor posted:

Gotta say, from the perspective of a new reader, I was 100% expecting Menno to turn out to be Crayak, and then expected Father to be Crayak, and now they're both dead and I have no idea what the gently caress to think.

So, you know, par for the course with this book, at least.

God I remember reading as a kid and being certain of Father being Crayak too, especially with that chapter break between in Chapter 18 and Chapter 19.

I love the image of this winged, technological horror emerging from Z-space and immediately talking to these warring races the way one talks to two wrestling kindergarteners.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 05:26

Cythereal: Nov 8, 2009; I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Hey, Ellimist, I've played this game before.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 15:50

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

the real comparison is the super underrated classic Millennia: Altered Destinies

# ? Sep 2, 2022 15:54

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

An Actual Princess posted:

the real comparison is the super underrated classic Millennia: Altered Destinies

In the next chapter, the Ellimist helps a race of fish people deal with the Clawfish threat.

# ? Sep 2, 2022 16:02

theCalamity: Oct 23, 2010; Cry Havoc and let slip the Hogs of War

The Ellimist, Player of Games

# ? Sep 3, 2022 03:51

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

Unfortunately, we're going to have to see how they respond to his demand tomorrow. More chapters then.

# ? Sep 3, 2022 04:41

Capfalcon: Apr 6, 2012; No Boots on the Ground,
Puny Mortals!

Loading screens suck, but they're a necessary evil, I suppose.

# ? Sep 3, 2022 14:28

freebooter: Jul 7, 2009

WrightOfWay posted:

I can't really blame the Inner Worlders for opening fire on the eldritch monstrosity that suddenly appeared. If you're lucky you will die quickly and be spared the coming horror.

It reminds me of the biblically accurate depictions of what angels looked like. Just something Lovecraftian that blows your mind

# ? Sep 4, 2022 01:16

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

Chapter 21

quote:

Two sets of furious faces appeared to me. The Jallians were represented by a multi-armed slug of sorts. She had no name, only a title, a designation. She was Life-giver of the Jain Sea. And indeed she was giving birth as she appeared to my enhanced sight. One after another, small, squirming grubs slid gooey and red from slits arranged in a circle around her middle. The grubs were picked up and carried away by attendants - the type of creatures I�d seen writhing in vacuums just moments earlier.

Life-giver of the Jain Sea was enraged. �Who are you, nothing, to interfere with me? I speak to a nothing! Obey me!�

She spoke a strange language, but with the database I had available there were few languages not immediately understandable to me.

The Inner Worlders had a more pleasing appearance, at least to my sensibilities. For one thing, they were winged, and I had the Ketran prejudice in favor of the flighted. And they had multiple, bright yellow eyes. The one who spoke for them called himself Captain Whee, which had a certain whimsical sound to me.

Captain Whee was polite, but still managed to convey hostility. �Stranger, please stand away. We have business with the Jallian vermin.�

�I am unwilling to allow this slaughter to continue,� I said mildly.

�This is not your concern,� Captain Whee pointed out. �But we do admire your evident technological superiority. Were you to side with us and exterminate the Jallians, we would be happy to ally ourselves with you.�

�That�s a very gracious offer,� I said dryly. �But I don�t think there�s going to be any exterminating.�

�Nothing! Disappear, nothing! Avoid my notice!� the Life-giver roared. She could not believe that I refused to obey. It was an arrogance that was perhaps a function of her essential biology.

Perhaps it is hard to remain humble when you are known as Life-giver.

But what was odd, what was surprising and disturbing to me, was my own emotional reaction: I was happy. I was talking to real, living creatures whose every word and motion were not mine to invent.

From the Jallian planet a second huge ship broke from orbit and vectored at full speed toward us. Moments later the Inner Worlders responded with a virtual cloud of their small, sleek ships.

Were they intending to attack me or each other? Did it matter? Either was madness.

It was the game, all over again: Alien Civilizations. No different than any of the many scenarios Wormer or lnidar or Aguella and I had played.

The question was, How I should play it? I had already pulled a Menno: I had intruded into the game. Made myself a central player, onstage, rather than offscreen.

And yet I was still drawn to the subtler approach. What would either species learn if I simply annihilated their ships in a display of crude power? And was that really my place?

I did not ask myself whether it was my business to interfere at all. It was not that I confused game with reality. l simply saw these two objectionable species as fools trapped in a pointless hostility. Didn�t I have the right to intervene? Of course I did.

I was not Menno, I was Toomin. I was Ellimist: the brilliant loser. But now I knew so much more. My wisdom was deep. My powers were vast. Surely � and then there was the core fact that I was not playing against anyone. No opponent, just the game itself.

The minimal move, then.

If this were really a game I would simply alter the orbits of the two planets so that they did not pass so closely. Slow them down or speed them up to matching, opposite orbits. Put their sun between them. They lacked the technology to fight a war across those distances.

But great as my powers were, they were not that great. And yet I could surely move an asteroid. Or two. Or a hundred.

The system�s asteroid belt was just beyond the orbit of Inner World. It was a simple calculation, well within my abilities. And I had sufficient brute power in my body/ship.

I left the two sides to murder each other and withdrew to the asteroid belt. It would take some time: Asteroids are not rocks to be casually flung about. But perhaps the two sides, seeing what I was about, would suspend their battle.
I
used my body/ship to nudge an asteroid, not a large one, out of its orbit. My engines were more than capable. The asteroid slid down the gravity well, vectored to find a new, lower, faster orbit. I worked and waited. In a few weeks� time the two battling worlds had separated by enough to force them to suspend hostilities - a natural part of their conflict. It was only at their nearest approach that the two worlds could reach out and kill the other.

I waited as my fleet of asteroids hurtled through space. And when the time came I slowed them, braked, nudged them into place. It took the better part of a year.

And now the two planets were approaching convergence again, and I could see the war preparations in full swing: ships refitting and topping off their fuel.

I waited till the two worlds were just edging into battle range. And then, one by one, I blew the asteroids apart. Seventy-four asteroids of differing sizes became tens of thousands of meteors of every size. They were a dense, deadly cloud of projectiles that with each orbit would rip up anything
that launched from either planet.

The Jallians and Inner Wonders would be unable to reach each other at least till such time as they developed vastly more capable spacecraft.

I had created an impenetrable orbital minefield.

The Jallian war with the Inner Worlders was over. And I had found my mission, my purpose in the galaxy.

So, will this come back to haunt him?

Chapter 22

quote:

It was as if the galaxy had conspired to make sense of my disjointed, fractured, bizarre life.

I had been a wastrel Ketran gamer. I had been a survivor of mass destruction. I had been a Zspaceship captain. I had been a helpless captive, forced to be a new type of gamer. I had evolved into something the galaxy had never seen before, a melding of many technologies, the minds of many civilizations, all flowing in and through a matrix of music.

And now that strange resume seemed to match perfectly with a job that needed doing. I would be a peacemaker. And more: I would foster the growth and advancement of species. I would teach them the ways of peace. The massacre of my own people by the Capasins would not be repeated on any other world. Not so long as l was present!

I flew Z-space, emerged here and there, searching the galaxy, using every bit of my vast trove of knowledge to look, to see, to feel, to learn, to understand. I listened to the music of evolution itself, or so I flattered myself.

Life was everywhere. A thousand thousand planets teeming with life. Most of it very primitive, but why should that stop me? I could step in early, I could �intrude,� in Menno�s phrase. And yet, I would intrude with exquisite sensitivity and the purest motivations. I would create harmonies.

Boldness allied with restraint and a minimalist aesthetic, all in the service of moral certainties: that peace was better than war, that freedom was better than slavery, that knowledge was better than ignorance.

Oh, yes, the galaxy would be a wonderful place under my guidance.

I flew from star to star, world to world. Here I lifted up a failing race, there I ended a plague; in another place I fed the hungry. A century flew past. And another, and more and more. Time was almost meaningless to me now. My challenges were vast and worthy, they kept my mind engaged. I made friends on many worlds, became an honorary member of a hundred families, clans, tribes, species, races. They spoke of me, of the Ellimist as I had become known, with respect, gratitude, awe.

And then the day came that I happened by sheer coincidence to find myself within a relatively short distance of the scene of my first triumph. A thousand years had passed since I had stopped the war of Inner Worlders and Jallians.

Finding myself so near, I returned to savor. To reminisce.

I returned to find no signs of life: on the Jallian world. The planet was sterile, its atmosphere almost gone.

The Inner World still teemed with life, but I caught no sign of microwave or radio or laser emissions. No satellites orbited the planet. The Inner Worlders were reduced in numbers and existing at a primitive technological level.

It took only a short while for me to reconstruct what had happened. It was easy enough once I found a single, still-orbiting mine. A primitive device, produced in great numbers by the Inner Worlders. They had launched huge numbers of them, laid them in the path of the onrushing Jallian world. Many of the mines had been annihilated by my meteor cloud. But many had survived, and then survived reentry to explode on contact with the surface of the Jallian planet.

Even now, a thousand years later, the radiation could be read. Even now the craters could be seen from space.

Morbidly I went about the work of compiling every detail. More than seven hundred impacts. Seven hundred nuclear explosions.

�Not such an easy game to win, is it?�

For a moment I thought the voice was my own. The tone of sarcasm and deprecation mirrored my own self-directed rage. But then my sensors lit up. Something was emerging from Z-space. Something big.

I spun, readied my defenses, still confident that nothing, no matter how unexpected, could really challenge me.

But the ship that appeared suddenly in normal space was nothing I had ever seen. Nothing that any of my multitude had ever seen.

This ship was not a ship: It was a planetoid, large enough to be a small moon. And yet it was Z-space capable. Incredible! Impossible! An illusion, it had to be.

I swept the planetoid with my sensors and I could literally feel the entity�s acquiescence. It invited me to look. It did not care. It did not fear me.

There were life-forms on the planetoid, perhaps twenty thousand, in a wide array of species, most naturally evolved, but some, I suspected, were experimental. Created.

But there was only one life-form that truly concerned me: My sensors showed lines of power, raw, snapping power connecting this one creature to all the other life-forms.

I had not felt fear in so long � I almost did not recognize the emotion. Fear. I feared nothing! I was the Ellimist. In a thousand years I had not encountered anything, anyone to challenge me.

�The Ellimist,� the creature said with a laugh I heard deep in my mind. �I have seen your handiwork in many places through this galaxy. I am pleased to meet you at last. I�ve been looking for you.�

I could not see him; he hid his face from me.

�You know my name,� I said, trying to conceal any slight sign of fear or agitation.

�Oh, but you�re famous in so many places. The Great Cosmic Do-gooder.�

�You have the advantage of me,� I said. �I do not know you.�

Then he showed himself to me. I saw with a shock that he was like me: As much machine as biological. But his biology was entirely different. He was evolved for the surface, or perhaps even for a subterranean life. No wings would ever lift those massive, muscled limbs. And no creature with that single, dominating red eye could ever navigate easily in three dimensions.

�I am called Crayak. Of course, that�s just my game name.� He laughed a knowing laugh, a ridiculing, belittling sound.

�You are a gamer?�

�Aren�t we all?�

�No longer,� I lied. �I no longer play a game. I do what I can to make this a better galaxy.�

�Well, you�ve done a wonderful job of that here,� Crayak said. �I can see plainly what happened: Your clever debris barrier gave them the idea of using nuclear mines. One planet destroyed the other, and, lacking a foe, lacking a challenge, the destroyer itself fell into barbarism and decay. Yes, quite a nice job.�

It was true. There was no doubting it. Part of me wondered how it was that Crayak could read the signs so well. But mostly a single phrase went round and round in my head: brilliant loser. I had lost. With all the best of intentions, I had annihilated one species and reduced another.

I lost to Inidar, lost to Wormer, lost to Aguella. I had lost in a different way to Menno: By resisting his call for adaptation I had led the last of my people into Father�s snare. And I had lost to Father, in the end, by becoming Father myself. What was I, after all, with all Father�s victims contained within me? I was but a high-tech version of Father.

And now I had fallen victim to arrogance. I�d begun to believe in my own moral superiority. My own invincibility.
�You�ve been following me?� I asked Crayak.

�Yes.� He waited. He knew what I wanted to ask, but he would make me ask it of him.

�How many others � like this?�

�Not many,� Crayak said. �No, often you�ve succeeded admirably. Your solution to the Mamathisk self-annihilation game was brilliant. Subtle. Effective. You redirected them to a life of productive peace. I had to go in and destroy them myself.�

I had begun to revive a little as he described my success. Then, his last statement.

�You did what?�

�I reversed the effects of your meddling,� Crayak said. �The Mamathisk reverted to cannibalism when they experienced repeated crop failures. A plant parasite. Impossible for them to stop. But as you know, cannibalism is a losing adaptation. The Mamathisk are effectively extinct�

�Are you mad?!� I cried.

�No, I don�t think so, Ellimist. I�m just a gamer. Like you. But with a perhaps different philosophy I don�t play the game to save the species, but to annihilate it. I play the game of genocide.

This galaxy has even more potential games within it than the galaxy I left behind. I will cleanse this galaxy of all life, too. Then, when no sentient thing is left alive, I will kill you, Ellimist. That�s my game. Shall we play?�

I have a feeling I'm going to be rapidly adding to my list of genocides in post 2.

# ? Sep 4, 2022 04:31

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# ? May 25, 2024 17:30

Fuschia tude: Dec 26, 2004; THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

Epicurius posted:

quote:
I had been a wastrel Ketran gamer.

Oh great, one of the minds Ellimist absorbed was Jordan Peterson

# ? Sep 4, 2022 07:55

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Let's Read Animorphs! The Whole Series! Ch-ch-ch-chaaanges

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