Anomie.06

Characters/Origins/Spoilers: Kade, Olivia, Dawn (Year Zero/The Alters) Caeto (Spire)

Local Network World: Spireverse

Kade hit the ground. Hard. She groaned, fingers tensing and curling, trying to find purchase. The dirt that clawed up under her fingernails was soft and cold. Raising her head just a little, she could see that it was grey, and finer than sand. Something more in the realm of dust. As she forced her other muscles into action, pushing herself up and onto her knees, it clung to her. It seemed almost…wet. She tried to brush herself off as well as she could, but little lines and ripples of it clung into the seams and divets of her jean-skirt, and her tank top, and her green-black flannel overshirt. She wondered if it was in her hair, running her hand through the messy curls. Giving up on the attempt, she sighed, sniffling a little. She could still feel the trace-lines of old tears on her cheeks, and her face felt hot. Which was strange. Given she was in space. Which was, famously, not warm.

“Where do you think we are?” She heard Olivia’s voice, and looked over to see her standing there in the greyish dust, looking out over the blank nothingness of it all. “It doesn’t feel like an Otherwhere anymore. I can’t feel the edges to it.” She noted. She paused, looking back at Kade, expression…blank. “I can read your thoughts.”

“What, like you used to be able to?” Kade queried.

“Before Bel’s world, yeah. I feel like…me, again.”

“I feel it, too. My powers.” Kade slowly nodded. She held out a hand, making a couple of errant rocks and some dust float around. She eddied them into a little spiral, experimenting, before letting them go. “Yep. Looks like we’re back online.”

“Sound less enthused, why don’t you.” Olivia muttered. Kade ignored her. She turned around, spinning a tight, cautious little circle. Velvety blackness, horizon to horizon in every direction, sky speckled with stars. The ground was rough with greyish dust and tiny rocks; the occasional soft ridge and narrow valley. Directly ahead, far past where they stood…hulking…was a planet. A gas giant, it looked like, banded with white and orange and polluted yellow-white…swirling together at the margins, and haloed by a flat plane of rings, glinting and sparkling in the night. Well, ‘night’: technically it must have been daytime, given the fact they could see…anything. Kade looked down at the pale grey dirt again. She squatted down, running her fingers through the warped outline of where she’d fallen. “It looks like the moon.” She commented.

“Yeah. A moon.” Olivia offered. “The last thing I remember is - ”

“ - Being tortured?” Kade cut her off, not particularly wanting to run back over the last however-long-she’d-been-stuck-in-Its-Otherwhere.

“You call that ‘torture’? Bunch of memories we didn’t have? I’d call it ‘clarity’.”

“Yeah, cause you’re a cold bitch.” Kade theorised.

“The fuck is that meant to mean?”

“Ever since we found ourselves on Bel’s world, you’ve treated me like…a fucking acquaintance. Like everything we’d been through before that didn’t matter, like the only thing that mattered was that you had Annabelle back - ”

“ - That’s really dramatic - ”

“ - And those memories It forced down our throats? Having to live through those? Having to see a version of ‘us’ where you still gave a shit about me, like you used to? Knowing you don’t now? Yeah, I’d call it torture.” Kade summarised.

“Can we…solve for the immediate?” Olivia asked, holding a hand out towards the gas planet astride the horizon: “Like…what the fuck is that?”

“Yeah. That does seem…pressing.” Kade admitted. “Give me a second…” She held a hand out to either side, attempting to move herself up off the ground. It felt like…muscle memory. Using her powers was more imagination than strain, and, as usual, picturing it manifested it. She rose up out of the dirt, hovering lazily upwards above the surface. She twirled in place as she got higher, scanning outwards for something - anything - to indicate…civilisation.

“Also, how can we breathe?!” Olivia called out from the ground. “Shouldn’t we be either burning or freezing? Does this thing have an atmosphere - ”

“ - Do I look like Google?!” Kade called back. “How the fuck would I know?!” Off in the distance, she could see a collection of domes and spires; numerous matte-white structures sitting flush against the planet’s surface, ensconced in a shallow crater that bounded its edges. She could see gargantuan pipes branching out from it; pushing into the dirt around the settlement in every direction. She nodded to herself, slowly lowering herself down and onto the soft, grey dirt. “This is stupid.” She noted.

“Yeah, I don’t know if this is meant to be part of what It was doing - ”

“ - But what else could it be?”

“Exactly. So it’s probably a lesson, or a game, or a test.” Olivia surmised. Kade nodded.

“There are people in this direction.” She pointed in a vague approximation of where she’d seen buildings. “It’s…I dunno, a lead?” Kade began to walk in the direction of the settlement. Olivia shrugged, following.

“So…” Olivia started, then paused.

“What?”

“Look, I’m going to try not to be ‘me’ about this. I know we…drifted.” Kade snorted. It wasn’t voluntary.

“We didn’t drift.” She snapped. “You did the amatonormativity thing where you treated me like a second-class human being relative to your primary focus. You valued your ‘people’ based on who you were fucking. It’s…insulting, and childish, and you’re meant to be queerer than that.”

“Y’know what, fuck you. Genuinely. We found ourselves trapped in some weird world, centered on Bel, de-powered, and yes, my dead ex was very much alive, and yeah, I got pretty wrapped up in that. But you were the one who - ”

“ - What? Wanted to talk about - ”

“ - I didn’t want you to break it, okay?” There was - Kade noted - something almost pleading in Olivia’s voice. “That’s you, that’s what you do, you find a scab, and you pick at it until it bleeds. I couldn’t lose her again - ”

“ - But losing me, that was fine.”

“I was never gonna lose you.”

“Well, you did. You have. There’s clearly a version of us out there in the Multiverse where things’re good between us, but this isn’t it.” Kade shrugged.

“Kade, I - ”

“ - Stop. I don’t care. You didn’t want to talk about it then, so I don’t want to talk about it now. We need to figure out why the fuck we’re in space, and…how to…not be…in space. Fuck. Fucking Bel…” Kade growled out the last couple of words, pointedly stomping up small clouds of grey dust.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. It didn’t take long - ten minutes at most - to find their way there. The ridge had been steeper than Kade had expected. The entire complex was sunken into the crater, and with the exception of a couple of spires, Kade couldn’t see the settlement until they were basically on top of it. But clambering up the ridge and standing on the lip of the downslope, she realised it was far more extensive than she’d originally thought. The dirt and rock beneath the structures had been dug away, and looking down through the gap between the structures edges and the beginnings of the grey dirt, she could make out a vast framework of beams and lattices holding the structures up - floating them - at approximately surface level. Gazing further down into the abyss below, she could see innumerable cube-like structures - some huge - interconnected with tubes large enough to move through.

“How do we get in, do you think?” Olivia asked. Kade glanced at her, weighing up the question.

“There has to be a way, but…” Kade watched her footing as she started to move down the slope. The dirt was loose, but rocky underneath. Movement was slow. At the bottom of the downslope, there was about twenty metres of plateau before the structures began, and before the chasm beneath them opened up. Kade reached the bottom, walking slowly towards the edge. “I’m not seeing any doors. No windows…nothing.”

“You could just fly down.” Olivia suggested.

“Down there?”

“Yeah.”

“Into the hole?”

“Sure.”

“Get fucked, Liv. You fly down the giant, city sized hole with no defined bottom.”

“Well I might if I could.”

“I’m thinking…” Kade moved closer. The structures sat over the hole, but they were close enough to reach without falling. She reached tentatively out to touch the white matte paneling. As if on reflex, as her fingers passed about ten-centimetres-to-touching, the panel in question clicked back and slid away, revealing a biometric scanner. “Well that’s pretty unhelpful.”

“Um…superpowers?” Olivia stepped up beside Kade, shouldering her lightly. Kade consciously forced herself not to flinch away from Olivia.

“Oh, right. Rusty, I guess.” She raised a hand, before pausing. “What if I…depressurise it or something?”

“Seems unlikely. Breathable atmosphere, roughly…” Olivia bent down, picked up a small rock and let it drop to the ground: “Earth-ish gravity? Why would the inside be different enough to be a problem?” Kade raised an eyebrow, holding up her hands to start listing off thoughts:

“Maybe they’re not human, maybe they’re weird humans, maybe we can breath because we’re not actually breathing and this whole thing is a simulation we get special rules in - ”

“ - We have to try something.” Olivia insisted.

“Fuck it.” Kade sighed, flicking her wrist and tearing a deliberate hole in the side of the structure. She kept the shards of steel and mesh hanging in the air. They sat there, weightless and expectant, as she waited to see if anything…exploded. “Yeah, seems fine.” Kade nodded. “After you?”

“And they say chivalry’s dead…” Olivia smirked, stepping through the hole and into the structure, followed momentarily by Kade, who - looking back and closing one eye - attempted to re-seal the hole she’d made. The materials welded back into place inexpertly, leaving a very obvious structural scar behind.

“Good enough,” She shrugged, looking around the ‘room’. It was sparse. Office-like, in a space-y sort of way. Square. Two doors out, one ajar. Round, fluorescent lights were embedded in several places on the roof, and the floor and walls were grey, plated metal that clacked hollowly when you moved -

“ - Um…Kade?”

“What?” Kade rolled her eyes as she looked towards Liv…saw her arm outstretched and index finger pointed. She followed the trajectory to the ajar door to their left.

“Oh.” She murmured. She couldn’t help herself. She walked, ensuring - she wasn’t sure why - that her footsteps were muffled, by going toe-to-heel with each step. Reaching the door, she slowly pulled it open, revealing…South Bank. A vast swathe of grass astride the river. Blue, cloudless skies…the Helios Foundation pyramid nestled amongst the CBD skyline…and hundreds of rough, wooden ‘X’’s, the ropes holding them together seeming yellow-white under the glare of the sun.

“Is that the way out…?” Olivia murmured from behind her. Kade shivered. She shook her head, not turning back.

“It’s an Otherwhere.” Kade heard her own voice, syrupy and affectless. And it was true. She could feel it: the bounded, limited nature of the world behind the door. But…no rift. No to-and-from delineation. Not something built, created, deliberate: something…torn. Testing, she reached out into the vibrations, seeing if she could create her own, but…no. Blocked. She felt the fine muscles below her left eye twitch involuntarily. Definitively. She slammed the door shut. “Yeah. We don’t want any part in that.”

“Well, you’re the expert, I guess.”

“Dunno about that. But I know what ‘none of my business’ feels like.”

“Might be over-correcting slightly, on that front.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Just…” Olivia sighed. “With everything that’s happened since we ended up on Bel’s world. We’re the same person, deep down, you and me. We tend to respond to avoidant bullshit with absence. So…playing chicken with each other, it’s mostly going to end with us just running in separate directions.”

“That’s the most esoteric attempt I’ve ever heard at trying to shift blame - ”

“ - It’s an apology, moron.”

“Well, you suck at apologies then.” Kade surmised.

“Yeah. I know. Another fucking opportunity for growth, right?” Kade nodded distractedly, glancing around the room.

“It feels…really empty. Far too empty.” She muttered. “I just blasted a hole in the side of this place, and…nothing. No alarms, no people…”

“Maybe they’re all in the down-below?” Olivia guessed.

“Then why bother having an up-above?” Kade mused. “But…whatever. We don’t have a clue. We don’t know the rules - ”

“ - Don’t we? Its genre. And it’s written by an alternate version of us. So…space-opera adjacent, colony on a distant world - probably a moon? - subterranean colony with a deserted above-ground section? Probably for mining or something, cause it’s sure-as-shit not somewhere you’d wanna live unless you were being paid to. How would that track, narratively?” Olivia asked. Kade’s lips tightened into a scowl.

“Yeah. Okay. I can’t think of a response that doesn’t end with ‘let’s get the fuck out of the up-above’, so…”

“Let’s get the fuck out of the up-above.” Olivia echoed.

“Right.”

The hatch - hatches plural, technically; Kade and Olivia had seen about five while exploring the empty up-above for the best way down - had led into a wide concrete tube sided by ladders. There was one on each side of the sheer drop, steel biting into concrete in a hundred places - more, probably - sturdy and clearly meant for routine use. The grips on the handholds, as they climbed down, had seemed like they were coated in rubber, but were almost sticky with friction, as if they’d been designed to prevent easy loss of grip.

Reaching the bottom, the tunnels had branched off, widening further, the concrete now covered over with crystalline veneers. No lights, as such, just an ambient glow evenly dispersed throughout…whitish, imitating daylight. At every juncture was a large panel, inset into the crystal, displaying a map of the down-below. Inspecting one of the panels, they could see the installation as a whole was…vast, city-scale, neatly spiderwebbing, clearly extending out into subterranean cave networks. From the diagrams, Kade and Olivia guessed that these tunnels - some horizontal, some diagonal with moving walkways - connected the entirety of…wherever the fuck they’d found themselves. The panels displays seemed to cycle through different languages - Olivia clocked simplified Chinese, or…something close to it, and Kade was convinced one was Cyrillic script, not that she entirely knew what that meant - but the one closest to ‘English’ seemed to designate it ‘Imnyen Combyne’. Kade assumed it was probably some sort of derivative script, like a dialect divergence.

From the map, there was definitely a centre-point - a middle ‘cube’ - and assuming the scale was relative, it would have been larger than the entirety of the up-above. Not hard to reach, since all ‘roads’ led either to it or away from it, so Kade and Olivia decided to just simplify the situation and aim for that.

The door - which was, Kade felt, a pretty insufficient descriptor for what they were passing through - slid smoothly open. It was…well, it reminded Kade of a huge ‘moon-gate’, its perimeter etched with intricately carved stonework, set into the crystal walls of the passage in a way that felt like it should have seemed…anachronistic? An ancient-looking portal between places, inset into glowing, daylight simulating crystalline walls, bulging out to accomodate its size, containing a slide-away aperture of the shiniest, coldest-looking aluminium-analogue imaginable…and yet…no. It looked like exactly what it should have been, for a grand entranceway into the heart of a colony on a distant world. Into…whatever the ‘Imnyen Combyne’ was. As the aperture widened, revealing the interior, Kade raised an eyebrow.

“Is that from fucking - “ Olivia muttered.

“ - Changi Airport?” Kade finished. A long, stone-tiled walkway, leaning to a vast waterfall-like megastructure stood before them, water pouring down from the middle of the space, surrounded by a central plaza, which, in turn, was surrounded by intersecting, terraced levels of lush gardens filled with tropical plants. Many of these, Kade - at a glance - realised were bizarrely non-terrestrial: swollen leaves, luminescent veins, and a general unfixedness. She could, if she kept her eyes on them, see various plants moving slowly around in the dirt with the gait of half-asleep marsupials. “Yeah, it’s cool but derivative.”

“Fucking Bel.” Olivia raised a hand to the bridge of her nose, squeezing down as she slowly shook her head.

“Fucking…Bel.” Kade nodded. “In fairness, it’s probably just world-building flavour. I do that too; come up with stuff I’d never put in the actual text as kind of…placeholder ‘vibes’.”

“Lazy.”

“Oh yeah? You try coming up with a whole-ass fleshed out sci-fi setting without cutting some off-screen corners for texture, little miss ‘the only thing I write is bad poetry about emotionally paralysed sapphic yearning and suicidal ideation.’”

“Get fucked.” Olivia muttered.

“You get fucked - ” Kade began before being cut off:

“ - Hey! Who are you two?! The curfew is mandatory!” Kade stopped dead as the…soldier? Security guard? Guy in his mid forties with salt-and-pepper hair, clean shaven, wearing a hacky navy blue sci-fi space onesie, running toward them, lugging what Kade deduced was probably some kind of portable rail-gun? There was a translucent chassis encasing it through which Kade could see internal components, and…with a flick of her wrist, the guns component parts dismantled, leaving the ‘guard’ fumbling with an armful of metal blocks.

“I missed this.” She smiled, looking down at her hands. She looked back up at the ‘guard’. “Anyway, we’re not from around here, we’re - ”

“Harmonia Rerum Traiectuum.” The ‘guard’ intoned warily, dropping the remnants of his gun haphazardly to the ground. His posture, however, remained unchanged. Clearly the assumption that he knew who they were wasn’t doing a great deal to dampen his wariness

“Sure, let’s go with that.” Olivia shrugged.

“We weren’t expecting…” He paused, considering, looking down at the blocky remnants of his weapon: “Augmented.”

“Well, guess it’s your lucky day.” Kade smiled awkwardly.

“Lucky?” He echoed with a humourless laugh. “Is that a joke? We’re expecting Quadrian bombardment at any moment, and Corpo Congress sends us a couple of two-tone psychics? We need ships. Ordnance.”

“Don’t underestimate what we can do.” Kade bluffed, folding her arms across her chest, fixing him with her best impression of an ‘icy stare’. He shook his head with a dismissive little sneer. “We’re going to need a full dossier on the current situation so we can get to work.”

“Shouldn’t you have already - ”

“ - You know how the Corpos are.” Kade hazarded, giving ‘leveraging obvious prejudice’ a try. He slowly nodded.

“Kept you in the dark, did they? Like good little weapons?”

“That’s the job.”

“Fine. Follow me.” The ‘guard’ turned on his heel. Kade and Olivia waited a moment, falling in behind from a respectable distance.

“Not bad.” Olivia noted.

“Yeah, well. Harmonia Rerum Traiectuum.” Kade frowned. “Did she seriously build out some…evil dystopian future Organisation and call it ‘HRT’?”

“Pure brain rot.” Olivia concurred. “What do you think the ‘Quadrians’ are?”

“I dunno. Robots? Aliens? Bet your ass they’re gonna have four of something, though. Did you get a read on him?”

“What? You know I can’t read anyone who hasn’t travelled between parallel worlds.”

“Oh, right. Well, let’s see about that intel, then. Hopefully find something useful that gets us closer to out of here.”

Gyren - Not a ‘Guard’, as it turned out; a ‘conscripted defence officer’ (whatever that meant? Kade wasn’t sure) - guided them through the plaza, through the neatly sectioned residential towers that looked copy-pasted-per-block, and into a large complex beneath the ‘street level’ of the Central Cube. He led them to a small room with a slightly-too-large table…Kade’s first impression had been that it looked like a repurposed storage room. Rows and rows of open shelving were pressed against the back wall, clutters with boxes and folios. Some of them were labelled, some not. There were also a few cluttered stacks of what looked like random tech; cords and components, mostly, with the occasional blocky hand-held, or esoteric implement. Gyren had tried to leave them with a slim dossier, but Olivia had stopped him.

“We'll also need everything you have on the state of the colony.” She’d said. “Social and political context, demographics…everything.”

“Why?” He’d asked, voice and expression managing to hit that specific sweet spot between irritated and confused.

“If we’re going to fight, we need to know this place inside and out.” Olivia had clarified. Kade had just nodded, trying to suppress a grin. Despite herself, she’d missed this: in crisis with Olivia; watching her former ‘mentor’ treating ‘confidently full of shit’ like a personality trait.

It hadn’t taken long before Gyren had returned, lugging a stack of files, which he’d dumped unceremoniously on the table in front of Kade, before leaving them to it.

“Lucky the power thing automatically made them assume we were…‘Augmented’ or whatever.” Olivia commented after the door slid closed, watching as Kade, sat across the table, started to divide the paperwork into several stacks, picking one up and beginning to leaf through.

“Yeah,” she shrugged. “Not like I couldn’t have just taken this place apart if they’d made a fuss, though.”

“That’s my girl.” Olivia chuckled.

“Careful.” Kade warned. “We need to work together. But don’t forget that I am both doing the heavy lifting on this caper and actively choosing not to punt you into orbit around a gas giant at present.” She quietly, matter-of-factly laid out, glancing up and making eye contact before going back to the files.

“Have it your way.” Olivia muttered.

“Okay, so…yeah. Mining colony. Immian Combine. Syrenis system, Fifth Daethaal…which looks like…from context…a colonial designation? Earth seems to exist in this setting…wow, we’re a long way from home, right now. They must have FTL of some…right, right…that’s why this colony is significant. And why a little moon has such big gravity. They’re mining Unobtainium for FTL.” Kade murmured as she skimmed.

“Please don’t tell me she actually called it ‘Unobtainium’…?” Olivia groaned.

“No that’s me uh…editorialising. Compound Seventy-Five? Super-dense - gravity, as I said - rare…doesn’t say much more than that, other than that it’s why this colony is important.” Kade raised an eyebrow. “Right, and there’s why they don’t trust the HRT.”

“Cause they’re transphobic?” Olivia smiled innocently, clearly pleased with her joke.

“Save it for Bluesky.” Kade rolled her eyes, flipping a page: “This is a ‘Civic’ colony, managed by the ‘Interstitial Coalition’. Looks like they have kind of a…tense agreement with the HRT, which is um…Corporate…parliament or whatever. So you’ve got Corpo worlds and Civic worlds, and the HRT manages the Corpos and the IC manages the Civics, and in theory everyone’s meant to get along, but - ”

“ - Corporations are evil.”

“As a rule, yeah. And it seems from this…” Kade held up a few sheets of paper before tossing them down on the desk: “The HRT have made a…well, a cost-benefit rationalisation. I think these guys might be fucked.”

“Because of the Quadrians.” Olivia confirmed. Kade nodded. “So who are these ‘Quadrians’?”

“Yeah, yeah…give me a sec…” Kade muttered, flicking through files. “Terrible world-building quirk…”

“What is?”

“Paper. Stupid. Where’s my holo-pad?” Kade griped, waving a stack of pages in the air demonstratively. “Yeah, okay. Huh. Quadrian Mandate. Species ‘Yth’ - okay, so, yeah, aliens - humanoid, bipedal…fuck.”

“Something bad?”

“No, just…lazy naming conventions? Four arms.”

“Shit, that is lazy.”

“Huh. Actually, inferring here, it might be racism? The war started when an Earth Corp claimed the Yth - Quadrian; seems like the human word for them, not their own - homeworld. Single planet species, blah blah blah, colonial uprising, blah blah blah…oh, cool. Looks like they reverse engineered Earth tech, ran the Corporation off, then…took the war off-world. Good for them. Fuck ‘em up, kids.”

“We love an anti-colonial narrative.”

“Yeah, and clearly we don’t diverge from Bel on that front. Okay, so here’s the specific threat. ‘Cato’.”

“Is that one of the Quadrians?”

“The Yth. Yeah. ‘Strategist’. Kinda sounds like a General. Commanding a fleet, raiding colonies. Propaganda…propaganda…huh.” Kade paused, brow furrowing as she flipped through pages.

“What is it?”

“Did you ever study Ancient History?”

“At uni, yeah.”

“Well, looks like that name - ‘Cato’ - is what the Corpos started calling him. For Cato the Elder.” Kade paused, looking up at Olivia. “So clearly…dude has a pretty singular focus, here.”

“‘And furthermore, kill all humans’?”

“Humanus Delenda Est, yeah.”

The ‘war room’ was…clearly not that. It looked more like a repurposed office lunch room - complete with kitchenette built into the right hand wall - sparse; non-matching tables and chairs. Kade wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t what they’d been ushered into. No rank badges, no air of authority. Just a few tired folks in matching onesies. These weren’t soldiers: that much was clear to Kade. These were random people desperate to defend their home. And, based on the data, about to catastrophically fail to do so.

On the far side of the room, a bank of several large monitors - 100-plus inch screens, currently running looped footage of what Kade assumed were off-world encounters with the Yth - were set up. Beside them, arms folded and staring down at her feet, back against the wall, was the one Gyren had greeted as ‘General’, as he’d brought Kade and Olivia in. Kade was trying not to be obvious about the fact that this woman - bit over five feet tall, brown-and-burnt-orange hair pulled back in a severe little ponytail, clever eyes and a seemingly perpetual, knowing smirk on her face - looked exactly like her best friend, Dawn. Across the multiverse, most alternate versions of her had an alternate version of Dawn. Closest confidante; lifelong companion…favourite person. Since coming to - being trapped on - Bel’s world, Kade had been cut off from that connection, and it was something that she had felt with the intensity of a hole in the deepest part of her. The awareness that the Dawn she remembered probably ‘belonged’ to a ‘real’ version of her, somewhere out in the Multiverse, didn’t help. If anything it had made the ache keener. Her resentment more…tactile. She knew that, for Bel, it probably wasn’t even deliberate: just something that’d leaked into the narrative through the gaps. Constructed narratives tended to have an emotion-motivated curve to them, whether legible to a reader or no. But…seeing a physical facsimile of Dawn - here, now - felt…cruel.

“So going over the files…it’s not looking great.” Olivia noted.

“We’re a mining colony. Interstitial never saw a need for military infrastructure.” Gyren explained.

“Which is why your group were petitioned. We’d hoped the mutual benefit of extracting and refining Compound Seventy-Five would be a motivator. And yet…” ‘The General’ deadpanned.

“They sent you - from your perspective - two little girls with mind powers. Which doesn’t really help on the scale of…space battles.” Olivia summarised.

“Correct.” ‘The General’ provided Olivia with a single, sharp nod. Kade glanced at Olivia: composed…compartmentalising…bluffing her ass off. Did she not see it? Had she not noticed? She must have, Kade reasoned. Olivia had been just as close to her Dawn as Kade had been to hers, so…why was she not flinching the way Kade was?

Cold bitch.

“Well the good news is, we can help.” Olivia stated with - in Kade’s estimation - a little too much confidence. Also, the ‘we’ in that sentence was doing some uncomfortable work, given which of them had actual offensive capabilities. Kade slowly inclined her head in Olivia’s direction, begging the question. Olivia glanced at her. Kade could see Olivia grinding a chunk of the flesh on the inside of her lower lip between both rows of teeth. She recognised the stim. Anxiety related.

“So you did notice?” Kade muttered.

“I’m not fucking blind.” Olivia hissed.

“’General’.” Kade forced the word out. The first time she’d spoken since entering the room. “Are we able to try…communicating with the Yth?”

“Talk? With the Quadrians?” ‘The General’ re-stated. Kade felt her lips curl into a scowl as she was involuntarily flooded with the memory of the tone in Dawn’s voice as she’d humoured Kade’s attempts to explain why Warhammer 40000 was good, actually. Same exact tone, coming from the same exact mouth. The vertigo was almost physically painful.

“‘Quadrian’. Now it just sounds like a full-blown slur…” Olivia griped.

“Yeah, cause it is one.” Kade rolled her eyes. “Look. I may be able to fight. But it seems as if…the Yth didn’t start this conflict. Maybe we can try finding common ground, here? Empathising with their position?”

“You think people haven’t tried?” Gyren snapped. “We’re far from the first colony Cato has attacked. It’s how we know the pattern. It’s how he got that name. We’ve got no love for the Corpos, but…as far as the Quadrians are concerned, it’s guilt by association.”

“I mean, they’ve got a point.” Olivia shrugged. “The Quadrians, I mean. You’re supplying the HRT with fuel, which is, in context, supporting the war effort.”

“While moral high grounds and ethical grey areas are fascinating…” ‘The General’ cut in: “This happens to be a ‘we fight or we die’ scenario.”

“Point taken.” Kade nodded. “But can you get me on comms with Cato?”

“Yes.” ‘The General’ nodded. “The Quadrian fleet is currently positioned on the far side of the Envirette: the gas planet. We can triangulate a signal off a staging post we have on an intermediary asteroid outpost.” She explained as she reached for a small device with an LCD panel; tapping several times. “There’s no guarantee they’ll answer, but - ”

“ - Immian Combine.” The affect-less voice bled through into the room, in perfect, un-accented English. Almost…robotic. A live feed flashed up on the middle of the three screens, revealing smooth skin; human-like features…for the most part. The lack of ears, or really any visible hair was an obvious divergence, but somehow - to Kade - appeared to be taking a back seat to the intense and immediate reaction her brain seemed to have to the uncannily perfect facial symmetry; the serene, unbothered expression, and kind, intelligent violet eyes. She had to put real effort into holding the Yth at emotional arms length, feeling an immediate draw on something deep inside of her to veer towards…sympathy? Even…attraction? She shook her head, deeply confused.

“I am speaking on behalf of the Combine, yes. My name is Kadence.”

“Greetings, Kadence. We are Cato.” The documents had consistently described Cato as ‘He’, but that didn’t quite seem to…track. As someone who’d spent quite a lot of her life being perceived as just that, and the rest of it actively trying to remedy that in the opposite direction she was perhaps more aware than most of what a distinct lack of performed gender looked like. Ironically, perhaps, given the ubiquity of gender - at least in her mind, in her world - it was the thing that struck her as most immediately ‘human’ about the alien in front of her. She briefly wondered what the intent had been, on Bel’s part? What had she been trying to say, with the Yth?

“Are you actually?” Olivia raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that a name the Humans gave you?”

“A given word relays symbolic meaning. If by this word you understand ‘us’, and if we align with the meaning this word ascribes, this word is serviceable.” Cato explained.

“So you’re…comfortable with the…‘meaning this word ascribes’?” Kade clarified.

“We are.” Cato confirmed.

“Shit.” Olivia muttered.

“Yeah, not great.” Kade agreed. “Cato, could you…” Kade trailed off, trying to piece together something - anything really - that she could use. She settled, uncomfortably, on: “Could you like…not try to destroy this colony?”

“The target is strategic.” Cato didn’t seem like the sort of being that would shrug. But, Kade suspected, if they had been, this was the point where they would have.

“If you attack, I’ll…destroy your fleet?” Kade attempted, stumbling a little at the end. ‘The General’ glanced sharply in her direction as the attempt at a threat came out sounding like a question.

“Defensive assessment indicates this would be an unlikely outcome.” Cato replied evenly.

“I have powers.” Kade stated.

“We have very large guns.” Cato didn’t seem like the sort of being that would smirk. But, Kade suspected, if they had been, this was the point where they would have.

“Do you want to risk it?”

“‘Want’ is immaterial.” Cato replied. “We did not ‘want’ to be subjugated. We did not ‘want’ to go to war. We do not ‘want’ to remove the human capability to re-iterate their past transgressions. But we were, we did, and we must. Do you have a counterpoint to either our perspective on this chain of events, or our current response to it?”

“So…” Olivia cut in. “I think you’re probably correct on the chain of events, based on what we know. In terms of the response to it, what if there was a different way to…‘remove the ability to re-iterate’?”

“When your species inflicted this epithet - ‘Cato’ - upon us, we researched its origin.” Cato replied, almost…musing. “The Punic conflict is demonstrative of a larger pattern which can be broadly and consistently applied to the human tendency towards aggression. Recursive. Escalating. Consuming. Please advise of contradictory evidence.”

“I wish Alice were here…” Kade muttered. Olivia simply nodded, before coming out with:

“Look, what if the Immian Combine defected?” Kade glanced at ‘The General’, somewhat expecting her to jump in, declare her loyalties and take control of the situation. She didn’t. She just…stood there, looking exactly like Dawn; only more defeated than Kade remembered Dawn ever having looked. Olivia continued: “What if they surrendered to the Quadrian Mandate?” Kade’s head instinctively tilted upwards, meeting eyes with Cato through the screen. She’d expected them to flinch - or, at minimum, react - at the the term ‘Quadrian’. But they didn’t seem to…notice. Evaluating, she guessed the ‘this word is serviceable’ thing extended to the distinction between ‘Quadrian’ and ‘Yth’.

“We believe this is what your species might term an ‘irony’?” Cato observed.

“Huh?”

“You posit that we should accept servitude as peace from the Immian Combine, in the context of a conflict whereby Yth servitude resulted in war. Is this not definitionally correct?”

“But you were invaded.” Olivia countered.

“Are the Immian Combine not in the process of being ‘invaded’?” Cato queried. “We would observe that gradations of duress all exist under a single taxonomy.”

“This is a civilian colony!” Kade insisted.

“Ahh. We have difficulty with this differentiation.” Cato replied. “We, ourselves - ” he raised one of his four arms to indicate themself, specifically: “ - Are what you might term ‘a civilian’, in the sense that the Yth do not have a ‘military’. We were simply required by circumstance to iterate in the direction of conflict, as conflict was assigned to us from the outside.”

“Fuck.” Kade muttered.

“‘Fuck’?” Cato responded.

“It means - ”

“ - We understand what it means, we are requesting clarification on context.”

“You’re freedom fighters. Hitting strategic targets. It’s necessity, it’s…understandable, it’s…not something we’re going to be able to argue you out of.” Kade explained. She glanced at Dawn - ‘The General’ - part of her expecting to see the eyes of her best friend staring back at her; sympathising with the insanity of the situation…preparing to help her work the problem. They weren’t. ‘The General’ looked exhausted to the point of ambivalence. And…specifically…not sympathetic so much as resigned.

“‘Fuck’ indeed, if that was the intent. You are, of course, welcome to continue to attempt to, but…from our perspective, your observation is likely correct. We do not believe there to be an alternative to our current course of action. We have considered the scenario. Thoroughly.” Cato said. Kade almost thought she detected a note of…apology, behind the words?

“I’m not bluffing. Leave, or I’ll destroy your ships the second they come into range.” Kade assured Cato.

“You will do what you must, and we will do what we must.” Cato inclined their head over the comms screen, before cutting the transmission.

Kade threw open the door to the small office, dragging Olivia inside and slamming it shut. She began pacing back and forth.

“So what do we do?” Olivia asked after several moments.

“Huh?” Kade replied, distracted.

“Do you think you can actually take out - ”

“ - Oh, that? The…hot, bald, four armed enby’s alien armada? Don’t care.”

“What?” Olivia squinted at her. “I mean…yes, they were like a work of art - I mean jesus - but what?! You don’t care?!” Kade finally looked directly at her, head lolling slowly to the side:

“We’re not…involved in this. You get that, right? Please tell me you get that. Our priority is - ” Kade strode over to the narrow door to what must have been a supply cabinet, or locker, in the corner of the room, pulling it open to reveal the torn Otherwhere to South Bank and the ‘X’’s: “ - This shit.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t your problem.”

“I don’t want it to be my problem, but Bel is kind of making it my fucking problem. It’s a big, ugly scab, and I’m gonna pick it until it bleeds. Cause that’s me, right? That’s what I do?” Kade sneered.

“But just abandoning this place?” Olivia sidestepped Kade’s incredibly unsubtle anger: “Seriously? We’re from the multiverse! Just because this isn’t our world doesn’t mean it’s not a world!” Kade waved her off, resuming her pacing.

“I think I get it.” she nodded slowly to herself. “This whole thing, it’s uh…running on autopilot.”

“What do you mean? Do you mean Bel?” Olivia hazarded. Kade could tell she was practically humming with anxious static. It bothered Kade. Made it difficult for her to think cleanly. That was the problem with Reading: the ability to do it made you sort of…porous. Soft around the edges of your mind. She was leeching Olivia’s anxiety, and she knew Olivia was leeching her compartmentalisation, which was amplifying the whole thing into a feedback loop. Kade pushed through:

“Yeah. I mean Bel. This…all of this…” Kade gestured broadly, “It’s too…clean. Too…I don’t know. Plug-and-play. When I create an Otherwhere, I imagine something specific, right?” Olivia nodded reluctantly. “Then, the bubble forms around that, and the interior populates within the bubble. Central concept, bounded space, world-building.”

“It’s ad hoc, is what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, more or less. This isn’t…that. This has bones.”

“I mean…it’s a little rushed?” Olivia offered. “Some parts are pretty derivative and uninspired? And it feels sort of…sterile, like it’s not quite built out enough?”

“I’m not doing craft critique, here, Liv. I’m not arguing whether the structure is good, I’m arguing that it exists, which makes it not an Otherwhere. And there’s no…no lesson, here. This clearly isn’t a test, it’s just a setting. My running theory, is that whatever happened between Bel and It - that…other thing, that made the ‘X’’s - broke Bel down enough that her power is on autopilot. It’s glomming onto existing narrative structures within Bel’s mind, and we’ve been thrown into the miasma of it. Probably the others, too.”

“You think they’re all out there? In amongst Bel’s unfinished work? That’s a…pretty fucking big leap, Kade.” Olivia sighed, shaking her head.

“Yeah. It is.” Kade admitted. And honestly, she was second guessing it herself. “But I feel it, is the thing. I’m Otherwhere girl. I sense this stuff. You know that. It might be negative space for me - this ‘setting’ feels like a real, actual place - but that?” Kade pointed accusingly towards the open door; to South Bank and the ‘X’’s on the other side: “That’s a hole. A hole torn in the fabric of whatever this place is, that leads to a memory-constructed-Otherwhere that may as well have a signature scribbled in the corner. Bel. This ‘setting’? The fact it has bleeding edges? It’s a symptom.”

“Of what?” Olivia asked.

“I dunno.” Kade conceded, turning to look out into South Bank. “Nothing good, I wouldn’t have thought? If her power is something along the lines of narrative manifestation - ”

“ - Then manifesting her back catalogue with holes in it that lead to recent trauma probably, allegorically, hits at something along the lines of a dissociative episode.”

“Right. Probably. Maybe. I dunno, but - like I said - it feels accurate.”

“And if you’re right, that would mean we need to…fix her.” Olivia posited.

“Uh huh.” Kade agreed.

“Fix the prison warden from within the prison she’s ignoring.”

“Approximately.”

“Okay.” Olivia shrugged.

“Okay?” Kade queried, looking back at Olivia.

“Yeah, I mean…I trust you.” Kade stiffened. She said it just like that: like it should have been something obvious. A shared truth. An a priori. Something about that made Kade…she didn’t quite have the words for what it made her.

“Do you, now?” She asked, the words leaving her lips slowly…eyes narrowing.

“Of course I do.” Olivia scoffed. “With everything we’ve been through, I trust you more than anyone.”

“Really…” Kade drawled, consciously attempting to avoid the outward appearance of ‘seething’. “First step, then. We need to get out of here. We’ll cut through the Otherwhere, see what we can find - ”

“ - After we fix the…Space Opera sitch?” Olivia cut in.

“No, that doesn’t matter. We don’t have time for side quests.”

“I mean…we can’t just leave them to die.”

“Olivia! They’re not real!” Kade took a step towards Olivia. It wasn’t entirely voluntary. From somewhere deep within her, she wanted to put her hands on Olivia: shake her; wake her up.

“Well neither are we!” Olivia shouted. Kade stood there, frozen. Cold, silent air passed between them. Time passed. Probably just moments, but to Kade - as she attempted to arrange her thoughts - it seemed…longer.

“Oh. So now you want to have this conversation?” She growled; words carefully selected but coated in venom: “Now?!” She demanded. Olivia backed away, looking down at her feet. “Olivia, we went through hell together - we were closer than close - and then…somehow, we found ourselves in some…bullshit delusion, recreations of our actual selves, pulled out of the vibrations as toys…and you abandoned me for trying to have a conversation about it, so that you could devote your energy to getting back into the pants of the cis version of yourself - ”

“ - Fuck you: reductive.” Olivia bit back, clearly reflexively.

“It’s really not. That’s the whole entire story. And now you’re trying to leverage the thing you fucked me over for - this: unreality - to get me to risk myself? And you know it’d be me risking myself, since you’re about as effective in a fight as a bunch of fucking parsley - ”

“ - That’s not what I’m doing, I just…we’ve seen enough death on worlds other than our own. Both of us. If we can do something about it, why wouldn’t we?”

“But them, Olivia? Denizens of this fucking…hacky, sci-fi fever dream? If there was no risk, sure. But ‘very big guns’ is a hell of a deterrent, and I might be a copy of Kade, but she and I differ about as fucking heavily on suicidal ideation as you and the real Olivia do on having redeeming fucking qualities underneath your avoidant bullshit, so get in the fucking robot, Shinji!” Kade pointed angrily at the door to South Bank.

“So I’m Shinji in this metaphor, am I?” Olivia snarked.

“Fuck off, it’s like…a kind of aphasia. I’m so fucking furious at you, random shit just…comes out.”

“Kade. This isn’t you.” Olivia begged: “The old you would’ve - ”

“ - The old me would’ve whined about how much of a cunt you are, had a breakdown over not passing, and tried to drink herself to death. I’m not her; you’re not you. Let go of the fantasy. We’re fucking leaving.” Kade hissed, grabbing Olivia, and pull-pushing her towards the Otherwhere: towards blue sky, green grass, and the vast field of ‘X’’s.

“You’re so out of line, here, Kade…” Olivia muttered, shaking her head and making a beeline for the ‘X’’s.

“Look, even if I had been up for it, what could I have done? If you wanna get academic about it, I don’t particularly value Humans over Yth in that context, and I’ve only ever used my powers on Local Network Worlds, at ground level, with line-of-sight.”

“I’m not disputing that, I’m - “

“ - Y’know what I think?” Kade snapped, folding her arms across her chest, stopping dead, forcing Olivia to turn back around to face her: “I think you’re dying to avoid the other stuff I brought up.”

“Fuck...” Olivia groaned. “I miss you being all…freshly out and - “

“ - Manipulable? Compliant?”

“No, what is with you?”

“I grew up, Olivia. I got through the baby-trans phase, got up-to-speed on the Multiverse - “

“ - And now you don’t need me anymore - “

“ - How fucking dare you, you were my ride or die, and you abandoned me!”

“First I’m hearing of it!”

“Oh you avoidant piece of shit, I’m gonna…” Kade cut herself off, taking a deep breath, holding it, and inhaling slowly. “This place is a mess of doorways.”

“So you’re done, now?” Olivia hazarded.

“Oh, so very close to it.” Kade muttered.

“What?”

“Just…nothing. We’re going to have to do some testing.” Kade began moving between the ‘X’’s, slowly reaching out, grazing the bare wood with her fingers.

“Are you looking for something specific…?”

“No, just…rolling some dice. Playing duck-duck-goose about it.” Kade explained distractedly. “Let’s try this one.” She settled on.

“Any idea what we’re getting into?”

“Not really. It feels…familiar, though? Like a well-trod pathway? That’s probably good, right?” Reluctantly, Kade placed a firm hand against the central join, reaching for Olivia’s hand. As Olivia took it, the world around them shuddered, blurring white. When they refocused -

“ - Ahh shit.” Olivia groaned. Hanging from a long beam astride the river hung a huge flag depicting a red circle surrounded by 16 red beams.

“Oh, sure. This should be fucking famous…”