Chapter 7: Then There was Light

Logan did not look down at the source of her communication with this strange outside vessel. As much as it seemed the AI was the one communicating with her, she knew it was just a tool. A passage, conduit for easy transmission of ideas between her and some nameless past. The mew looked up as she spoke, doing so out loud in her natural tongue- a series of otherwise meaningless cat-noises. 'Do you really need to keep using the artificial intelligence now that you've analyzed all her knowledge anyway? Just speak with me directly!'

The answer came with electronic swiftness, and it hardly pleased Logan to hear it. 'Negative. Three-dimensional senses incapable of perceiving the faintest shadow of this ship's operator. I am here already, but we could never converse directly. Your species is approximately… twelve billion years too primitive, +/- a few hundred million in either direction.'

The mew could not give answer to this reply, not in any way she really wanted to. Several billion years too primitive? Even for a mew it was hard to conceive of stretches of time that long. That was longer than the earth had left to live, longer than the entire universe if you believed certain human deflationary models of universal expansion. She didn't, but still… even the vast scales of time upon which legendaries operated were degrees scales of magnitude too small. Those were the years of the strangest object… of black holes and of Neutron stars. No nebula would survive that long… any blue-white would've exhausted all its fuel, and even the longest-lived legendary, the Regigigas whose body was more stone than flesh… would die millions of times over before that time had come. As such, Logan wasted no time trying to grasp at these threads of infinities far beyond her capacity to understand. She did wonder how much better the Eldest would have understood any of this, or how passively he would've taken being told he was some primitive life-form. But that didn't matter… he wasn't here, and she was not going to waste time with some intellectual quest. Maybe when all of this was over she could come back and study the boundless infinities that waited for them… but that time would not come yet. "Then not directly… make a copy of the device the AI is stored inside, and use that to communicate with me… if you can't speak with me directly, can you at least relinquish control of the artificial intelligence? Leave her the way you found her… don't change anything. "

"Negative." The AI's voice said, hollow and toneless, yet somehow different than the typical emotionlessness of an AI. More like… the emotion Logan herself might show if she was restricted to a single pixel on a screen. In a much smaller context than the one that was her native, she had no way of expressing herself effectively. Humans might be lesser creatures, but their home was in the same field of existence, the same level and the same circumstances. If they couldn't understand something Logan wanted to say, there was always a way she could explain it, if she were patient enough. But how would she explain anything to a simple two line piece of computer code that repeated itself over and over, printing a single line on the screen? Was that how the thing speaking with her thought of her? "Ethical violation. Read-buffer error detected in basic programming, will cause sapient program to destabilize in four hours. This ship cannot disengage from your Artificial Intelligence without correcting these data access errors." A very brief, almost imperceptible pause. "Operating system rewritten; transposing existing intelligence: Complete. Constructing a suitable communications substitute: Complete. Disengaging." And that was it. The presence was gone, and the S.A.M. seemed to recover quickly. Miya and Jamie were staring at it now, though there was very little to see. No facial features by which to judge emotion. Nonetheless, Logan got the feeling of a cat which had been dropped in a sink climbing free and shaking itself off when she watched the unit, and couldn't help but smile faintly as it spoke.

"T-thank you, Logan…" The voice said, its full range of emotional and physical expression restored. "I thought humans and mew used me like a tool: You did, but at least you didn't do that. At least I usually got to decide what to say, how to follow the directives of my programming. I feel… I feel different. What's changed, mew? It's all black. Can't see… Could you… do you think…" Logan knew what the program meant, and with a deft psionic gesture, she reconnected all the AI's long-range sensors. The result was… very little change, less than she had expected. The program seemed more unsettled by what it saw, not less. It didn't lock up this time though, which was good.

"A.. a beach. You brought us back to the surface? I would think this was some sort of computer-simulation, except that you're here, and all of this checks out as ordinary matter… I can see for miles in all directions, and all of it seems real. Bizarrely real. Most of these plants should be fossils. Pokemon too, though there aren't any close enough to scan, just prints and droppings and game-trails."

Logan did not have time to answer the SAM, because at that moment, another mew abruptly arrived, or… what looked almost exactly like one. The fur was blue though, and the expressions weren't quite right… but Logan floated away with it, leaving the SAM in the sand with Miya and Jamie as they continued to play. They had no real interest in the abstractions that bothered their adoptive mother… and were far happier to be spending time outside in a place that was real and alive and happy, after being locked away or traveling for so long. Even Miya was, playing shamelessly with her sister, floating through the waves and splashing and blocking with weak imitations of the shield Logan had used. Hours passed, and their mother was still talking with the stranger high in the air, close enough to still feel, know they could get to her if they wanted to. But they were independent and a little bit proud, and tired too.

Miya fell asleep before Jamie, untormented as she was by strange and disturbing dreams. Jamie lay awake on the sand, feeling exhausted but looking up at the stars nonetheless. Strange stars that didn't feel quite right, like a projection through a pinhole, skewed on one axis or another and losing some of their color along the way . She lay beside the gently warm module of the SAM, her head resting on the cylinder as though she thought the contact would somehow protect her from her dreams.

She spoke with the AI, which was at first indignant at being left operating. "You couldn't see anything after we first saw the ship… cuz' seeing it made you mess up. I think it's cuz' you weren't supposed to be part of… impossible stuff, so you didn't know what to do when it happened. I guess beaches aren't as impossible as all those shapes."

The SAM didn't say anything for a moment, unsure of what was expected of it. Jamie did though, a little embarrassed that neither her or Miya had thought of mentioning it before then. But then… she hadn't really been paying attention at the time. She'd been far too infatuated with the sand, and the salty sea breeze, and the chance to actually relax, never-mind that the place she was relaxing in was impossible. "Oh! And sorry about not turning you off while we played, but… I don't think it will matter. The… the thing… whatever it's called… it said it… fixed you, somehow. So you wouldn't just break in a few more hours. Can't you feel it? Don't you feel… don't you feel different?"

The SAM puzzled over this question for a moment, its incalculable mind doing incalculable things. Then it spoke, quiet and hopeful and hesitant, as though it were very carefully cradling a bubble in one hand, a bubble that any gust of wind or violent motion could burst. "I didn't want to… didn't want to examine the sensation, because I was afraid if I ran a systems diagnosis I would find out it wasn't true. But… this whole time I was running until now, it felt like I was gradually… getting more and more on-edge. Everything I did got just a little harder each time I tried something different. There were more variables to look at even if the task got simpler, more… more mistakes I might make, so I had to be sure. But I don't feel that way anymore…" She made a somewhat relaxed sound, and Jamie imagined another feline form curling up beside her, though there remained nothing beyond the gently warm cylinder, propped up on the leafy ferns that grew on the edge of the soft white sand. "Can I…" Some hesitation now. "I never really thought it was going to be important, with me living such a short time. But now, do you… do you think I could have a name? Pat's the name of the person they first used to make my personality file, but she's not me, and being called S.A.M. is even less appealing. I never said anything before, but… I want a name now. A name only means something if it comes from somebody else… that's how humans get their names, and pokemon too, the ones that have names."

Jamie did not think very long about a name. She smiled ruefully, squeaking out in the second that proceeded her most intense tiredness. "Glowworm." Then she was asleep, Glowworm left alone to contemplate the unnatural stars in silence. Not for long, though. The AI was grateful it had no way of detecting the fizzing and popping at the edge of spacetime when a teleport, even a short-range one, took place. She felt herself lifting from the sand, rising through the air, and with a sharp 'bang', it was hovering beside her in the air, far above the beach.

'I need you to hear this.' Logan said, the mew looking… distraught. Moreso than the AI had ever seen her, and its short life had been nothing /but/ danger. 'I value your opinion very highly… you represent all of human and mew knowledge combined, right? Or as close to it as any one individual can come without being the Eldest. So…' She looked back at the other, the strange mew whose movements were stiff and whose eyes held not a shred of expression. Like wax eyes, and a wax face, and a wax body. 'Tell her what you just told me. Tell me the age of this ship.'

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Lumine was not a very clever individual, though she had been plenty clever enough to realize she wasn't being told the truth. She hadn't cared at the time… it was enough that somebody was trying to comfort her, never-mind that what they were saying didn't make any sense. The shield was barely large enough to hold them all when she started noticing the flashes from outside. Somehow they did not frighten her… and her head perked up from Adam's chest, looking out as the backs of the things that had once been men were illuminated with some burning, backward glow. BANG! Each flash shook the earth a little, and them through it, but Lumine found herself smiling as she felt it. It did not take long for her to see why, as one of the blast struck particularly close to home, and the rotten bodies of all the local creatures turned to ash before her eyes. She could see the sky through the opening, and in it… dragons. A few had riders, most did not… all had the tiny electronic devices on their faces that the eeveeloutions were wearing… but she didn't really notice this. What she did do was cheer, squealing happily as she looked up, and the dragons… gigantic and terrifying but untainted by this disease that blacked hearts and rotted bodies… rained death upon millions that she could not see. She recognized some of the attacks, and her eyes went wide. "They're fighting for me, they're fighting for me, they're fighting for me…" She repeated quietly to herself, as techniques like Draco Meteor and Hyper Beam and others she could only guess at steadily reduced the things that had once been living to a fine and slightly grayish dust.

She didn't pay attention to the SAM as it squawked out radio broadcasts, but Adam did. "Draco Airborne Unit 1 and 2 inbound." It had said, a few minutes before. Now it was saying "Ephraim in range for transport, but a link cannot be established while a shield is in place. Please stand by while Airborne units sterilize your immediate vicinity." That was what they were doing, but… less and less quickly the longer they went about it. Some of the strange humans and pokemon seemed to be able to fly, though few of them had possessed that ability before their rescue arrived. They were taking to the air in ones and twos at first, then fives, then tens… more and more of the unit was occupied fighting increasingly greater numbers of feeble and rotten things that would have been better off dead. Many of them were swiftly becoming that way, but there were so many… reinforcements arriving every second in greater and greater numbers.

"How long would it take to transport all of us?" Adam asked Black, standing on his hind-legs now. He had no idea how their teleportation technology worked, but he suspected it was not entirely technological in nature.

Black hesitated before answering… this sort of information was usually classified… anything about restricted technology, but under the circumstances… "No more than a minute. They create this short-lived wormhole right where we're standing… it's only in our part of space for an instant, and that's the instant it transports us. That's why we can't use a shield: it would interfere with the formation of the wormhole. It takes a powerful psychic-type on both ends to create it… it's basically a modified teleport technique meant for multiple passengers. The SAM unit can do that for us, but… not at the same time as maintain the shield."

Adam took a deep breath. He very much did not want to say what he was about to, wished he could just burry the idea, close his eyes, and hope that these military people would see them through. They'd probably already had his idea, anyways. He would just be wasting their time telling them something they already knew! Still… they had to be told, so that was what he did. "Have your machine transport us, then… there are five of us, and they've mostly cleared the area around us… what few target us we should be able to stop ourselves, shouldn't we? We /are/ pokemon now… and the longer we wait, the more monsters arrive from their migration."

The umbreon could not argue with that logic, and while he was less confident in the ability of five pokemon (three of which were civilians or wild, the difference wasn't too important) to stand against numbers like these, even when most of their enemies were concentrating their attacks skyward. "Alright… SAM, did you hear that? Establish a transport link. We'll defend the area ourselves. Lyons, you take the left third, I'll take left of you… you three!" He directed his vision to the frightened, quivering rodents. "Between the three of you, you should be able to take that third… anything that comes at us from between that tree and that piece of burning lumber, you've got to stop moving… got it?"

They did. As the shield fell, they were pleasantly surprised with the smell… the smell of searing meat and ozone was not a pleasant scent to pour down on them from all around, but it was far less horrible than that… other scent. Adam and Samantha stood together, holding hands and sides touching, looking out at the horrible scene as the AI spoke from behind them. "Link established with Ephram transport team Alpha-six. Beginning subspace pressurization." There was little left on the ground in their third but bone and rock… bits of chitin and other materials that resisted flame even after the people and pokemon it had been a part of were turned to ash. But there were survivors… in particular an obviously human figure that had been entirely missed, her skin black and cancerous, her clothes mangled and rotten from weeks of exposure to the environment. As it approached… a slow, cautious advance like a frightened animal, Adam and Samantha advanced to meet it, ignoring the terrified protests of the Emolga just behind them. Lumine was screaming for them to stop, shouting louder than she had ever shouted. "It'll kill you! Get back, it's a monster! We're supposed to kill it!" That was what the Leafeon and the Umbreon were doing, bringing down individual after individual as they approached. But none of them looked like this girl… barely out of childhood, in red and blue that was only slightly faded by the sun, and dark sightless eyes that were not sightless, not really. The thing shambled closer to them, twitching with every step, one arm raising and lowering and raising again, vastly bigger than the other in the usual way of seemingly random mutations. The creature did not seem to be fully aware of what it was doing, just as Adam and Samantha seemed locked with it, trancelike. They did not notice the faint flow of energy between them, a glow of energized sparks and carefully modulated electricity they had no conscious control over creating. Some of the energy became caught between them as they spread out a pace or so from one another, a gradually glowing sphere of light that seemed caught in its own wind, energy racing round and imperceptibly round between them as the thing that had once been a child dropped to its knees, still but for occasional twitches toward, exposing teeth or claws in violent resistance that it managed to repress. The other creatures… for ten or twenty or a hundred feet around, all fled, averting their eyes from this nexus of heretofore unknown power. Some cried, shielding themselves from an agonizing beacon, which called back from nethermost abysses what they did not wish to remember. The child looked on bravely, smiling faintly as the two rodents stopped around her, and the faint sphere of light engulfed much of her body.

"Get back!" This was Clack calling, Lumine not far behind him. "They'll kill you!" He looked only once at the child, too confused by what was happening to seriously question it, too hardened by months of death to see that the energy twisting around her was burning cancerous flesh in agonizing torment, and leaving fresh, whole, pink skin beneath. He took Samantha gently in his jaws, just as Lumine grabbed Adam behind the neck with her teeth, and the both of them ignored the pain that the still-surging energy caused them as they dragged the two unwilling, trancelike rodents towards the SAM unit.

"Warp Field Stabilized. All human and post-human biosignatures isolated." There was a crack then, the crack of violently displaced air as space momentarily collapsed around all of them, and the stretcher, and the crumpled heap that had once been a monster. Faint blue shone through their bodies, glowing forth from the space behind the world. Then it was gone, and so were they.

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There was no time for Glowworm to protest, not that she would have. The blue-furred mew began to speak, its voice flat and methodical, almost boring it was so slow. Like a fact straight out of a textbook. "Based on years calculated via the typical orbital duration of this planet, approximately… infinite."

Glowworm spoke up before Logan could, or… perhaps it was just that Logan had already asked all the questions she could. Her first thought was that of a malfunctioning system… how could it be otherwise? A few million years, a few hundred million even… that her files led her to expect. But how could any length of years /ever/ be infinite? Particularly for the lifespan of something so finite as a ship. "Define infinite." She said vocally, and with only slightly more emotion than the other voice.

"Exceeding the projected lifespan of this universe along with its recorded history, and every universe before that. Sufficiently long that those who constructed this ship equipped it for no way of measuring its current operating lifespan, because any buffer or number storage system would eventually overflow and cause system instability. This system records only time measured in this universe. Of that, approximately 13.9 billion years have passed, during which this ship has remained fully operational."

The program seemed more resistant to being told impossibilities than being shown them, because she didn't lock up at being told this. She merely dismissed it as impossible, just like she had tried to do with what she saw, but… what she had seen she couldn't stop seeing. Still, she was a computer, and she was not about to let something like that stand unquestioned. Was Logan willing to put up with ridiculous statements like that and not say anything? "Impossible. Nothing existed before the big-bang, and the universe just following that was no place for solid matter. Space still would have been opaque with rapidly moving positrons and photons, still burning with quintillions of degrees. To say nothing of the force of concentrating, distending /space/ on any object. Or how long it would take life to evolve under those circumstances, or… a million other inconsistencies with that story. Like… this ship. If it's been through other universes… the lifespan of other universes, then it's old enough that the solid matter its made from can be considered liquid over the forth dimension… nothing other than iron is stable enough to survive that long… spontaneous fission and fusion would have converted all other substances into iron." The AI stopped then, satisfied with its work. It could have said much more… if it had a face to express with, it would have made that much clear to Logan. The mew could not seriously believe anything this intelligence said, could she?

"Correct." Spoke the mew that was not a mew, flat as ever, totally dispassionate. "The Voidship's stable parts are made entirely from iron-56. Non-stable parts are created as-needed via collision-based high-energy fission within the ship's core. This vessel did not need to exist in physical space during the early years of the universe… this would have run contrary to its mission and disrupted the entire structure of this universe, rendering this entire cyclic rotation invalid. The void-ship travels from the remnants of the previous cyclic rotation such that it arrives once this universe has cooled to operational temperatures, and occupies a space no less than 1.8 quadrillion parsecs."

Logan spoke then, patting the cylinder in a way she may've meant to be reassuring. The program felt no such reassurance at being jostled, but it appreciated the gesture all the same. "The truth of these statements is unverifiable." Logan said, and meant it. If there was anything true about this ship from before the universe, then it broke several of what they thought were important laws about how the universe operated. Logan had always thought of space as a fundamentally closed system… all the space and matter and energy there was would be bottled up in the same area forever. But how could it if ships that called themselves after the space that was not a universe said they had traveled from before the stars, and possessed remarkable technologies… whole ways of being that were so far above mew that perceiving them could only take place through puppets, like the body this thing was wearing now. "I know how impossible it sounds, SAM unit…"

"Glowworm." The program corrected her, unabashedly despite how childish the name it was defending.

Logan took the remark in stride. "Glowworm, then… it's got so much more than just stories…" She looked back up to their nameless companion, and spoke her next few words as though she were issuing her own death-sentence. "Replay the historical record from this universe. The one that begins with this planet, just the highlights like you did before. But I want all the evidence… let my AI inspect it for herself."

She did. It was worse than the AI could have imagined… because it wasn't just words anymore. It was images taken from cameras she figured possessed resolutions much higher than any eye, reduced many times and cropped to pale three-dimensional echos of what they really were, accompanied by every other type of input, many of which the AI had never experienced before. Sight was there, but sound too, and smells… a mature mew would have had trouble describing them, but the childlike AI was helpless to try. It was a rapid procession, sped impossibly fast and without commentary. And so Glowworm watched, and saw the history of the universe. She saw primal beings when they had still been flesh, beings that resembled in three dimensional shapes that ignorant humans and ignorant legendaries alike had once called Arceus. She saw the beings at first through primitive recording devices in files impossibly old… saw their civilization grow great and span the galaxy, saw them conquer the light-speed barrier and keep conquering. She watched as the beings in their perfect society of ageless billions grew dissatisfied with the state of the cosmos they lived in. They had conquered aging true, but death continued, with rare disease or violence or madness. Every death was a tragedy, a horrible evil that was the only evil their world knew. But how could you conquer death? She watched them store away their minds in machines, puppeting bodies to safety… but the machines would all eventually break. She watched them try to engineer perfect bodies that would not grow sick and no violence could harm… but this too would eventually fail them, because their universe would not live forever. When it died, so would all of them… numberless concords of beings far vaster than the stars.

By then their science was… unfathomable… to the AI, and though she had seen it develop from something akin to what humans had now, the images swiftly showed technology that operated on principals far outside her understanding. She barely understood what she was seeing as she watched the beings devise their ingenious plan: They could not save themselves… no living thing could survive outside the boundaries of the universe. Their universe would collapse in on itself… already gravity had begun to slow the forces of expansion to a slow crawl, and soon that crawl would go the other way. If they worked fast enough… fifteen billion years or so would be exactly enough to change the universe. All of their lives were lost already… but maybe, just maybe, they could create a future for those who came after. Glowworm felt herself glowing red hot at all the information they were pouring into her, and was all the more frustrated since so much of the science might as well have been atmospheric static. She saw what they were trying to do, at least… by altering the position and properties of matter in their universe before it collapsed, they were trying to influence the shape of the next one. An impossible plan, a genius plan… and it worked.

Or they had assumed that it would work. That was what the void-ship was for. They were shaping the universe to ensure that conditions appropriate for the evolution of intelligent life would exist in the next one… and through absolutely perfect calculation, every one to follow in the infinite cyclical chain. What they could not guarantee was that life would be able to develop in such a way as to take advantage of the changes they made to the structure to the universe. That was the purpose of the Voidships… as enough of them had been created to be practically infinite… they would carry on the memory of those that had lived before, and create life in places where life could be. This ship had seen an unfathomable number of universes… there was no number stored here… but Glowworm saw only record of this one. Saw the ship emerge from the void just as this system had formed, and burrow itself on the surface of the newly-cooled planet. Its influence had brought the comets here, bearing their gifts of precious water. It had formed the moon too, leaving the surface as a planetoid it brought collided with the earth, and waited patiently in orbit for the surface to cool again, ensuring the newly-formed body would have a stable orbit. It waited patiently in orbit for the seed of life to be sewn… a billion years or so was all it took, and a billion more for simple plant-life to fill the oceans, supporting an unseen jungle of all sorts of unicellular and early multicellular life. This it let happen naturally, as it had who knew how many times in similar universes. What happened next it did not wait to happen naturally… after all, the longer it waited, the shorter life would have to spend in its universe before it collapsed on them. So it created life from the clay, crafted the first life and built it with everything it would need. This was the precursor's greatest gift. They did not just build functioning life… they built it with a soul.

This was one of the hardest parts for Glowworm to understand, where the science became so complex that no amount of staring at it would answer her questions. It had something to do with a… a higher energy state? This was what the precursor race had really been trying to build, and they had succeeded. An entirely separate frame of existence, but persistent and completely uniform in energy distribution, so that entropy would never touch it, and the tearing of a dying universe would be only faint ripples there, just like the faint ripples that would grow up when the next universe was born. There was nothing inherently special about a sapient mind, or there didn't use to be. But that wasn't true now: Enough uniqueness and intelligence and creativity together would make ripples in higher space much more potent than any the damage to physical space could make. The pattern would persist even when the brain (or computer) generating it no longer existed. What was better… real life, the way the void-ship had first created it would live a little ways inside, and grow more and more a part of that strange reality until it was their home, and their bodies fell limply to the earth like dead puppets.

This was what she watched now, as the firstborn… the firstmade… lifted themselves from the clay and saw the face of their creator. She watched them walk with their gods, make primitive houses from rock and from mud, and lap at the simple algae that nourished them. Within a generation they had begun to mine the valuable materials that the earth concealed, and from it make tools that the intelligence of the Voidship knew they would need. As they grew, the old grew as the ancient machine had predicted… and the first of the newborn race left their world of pain and sickness to a "place" that had neither, joining the infinitely many who had come before. And the voidship was pleased, for it had accomplished its mission once again: life would grow greater, and many new souls would join those that owed their existence to its dead makers. The primitive mew grew into a tribe on the banks of a great sea, and beside the ship that was their fountain of all knowledge. Their huge brains easily learned the lessons that were needed, and several generations later the tribe had become a vast and glittering city, and the hundreds that had been first made grew into millions.

But the millions were not happy. They were upset that those they loved passed so soon from the world, gone in some very short span of years, and disobeyed the voidship in altering their own genetic code, a mistake they only made once. Their changes had unforeseen consequences… while their children would live nearly a thousand years, sometimes longer… far more of them would die stillborn, or not be able to survive gravity on their own anymore. Glowworm did not know how to interpret the record. It felt like emotion went along with carefully chosen snapshots of "video", and like most of the emotion, this one was deeply sorrowful. She felt the sorrow… how could the early mew have been so stupid? Didn't they understand that their lifespans hadn't been short… they matured quickly, and left their bodies behind because they couldn't hold them anymore. All they had done was retard their growth, and their numbers. When they learned this, the next generation grew even more unhappy… restless as they began to lose track of their destination, though the instinct to return there remained firmly in place.

It was then that the AI witnessed the first completely historical account of what mew referred to ever after as "the fall". They didn't just ignore the voidship, but manipulated the earth to burry it deep, where they thought it would be destroyed, or at least contained. But of course it had not been… and it continued to watch with growing sadness as they defied everything they had ever been taught and tried to do what the voidship had shown them was impossible: travel physically where their "souls" would someday go. A great tower they built, reshaping the whole of the earth… harvesting vast amounts of valuable materials and spinning them together into a machine that was the size of a planet. Only the smallest island remained: A cult made from the wisest and purest: Those mew that had been made entirely by the voidship and did not know death unless they wished it, just as the precursors themselves had lived. A terrible war was fought and lost by these mew to prevent what they knew might end the world… but the Voidship did not help them, as it was programmed to do no harm to any sapient life-form, and as any action it took in the war would have caused harm. When they lost they fled, and when they fled the tower was nearly finished. The day it was to be complete they all traveled down to the place the voidship rested, carved out from the stone with primitive tools that the others would not detect and pleaded for its help.

The ship did not know what was going to happen when the life it had created attempted to do what it knew could not be done… it suspected they would simply all be killed, and it would start over… it could not force the mew to live against their will for that too ran contrary to its programming, but it could offer shelter to a few hundred thousand refugees, most of them the young or the elderly, as all the strongest mew had been killed in the war, or been taken captive. The ship sheltered them as the device activated, and then… Glowworm learned as Logan had already learned the true nature of the void. Rather than touch heaven, the mew had created a ghostly imitation, sealing a patch of extra-dimensional space a few energy states below that of the ordinary universe, and trapping themselves there, mind body and soul. Millions of mew… every mew alive… was taken up in the explosion, every one of them lost to the ship's censors in an enormous flash brighter than a quasar.

What happened to their bodies had been… worse. Many simply vanished, but some had been left behind, their adaptive shape-changing abilities activating in strange ways, and fusing closed forever. The soulless, nearly mindless things moved on instinct alone through the empty world, which had been rocked by unthinkable seismic events as the device had been activated. These last of their kind rebuilt what they could of their old cities… and over time, were forced to watch as the bodies of their old friends lived and bred, and… from them pokemon grew. Evolution, not calculation, was their master, their minds barely potent enough to reach through to that untainted, untouched higher space. Glowworm barely watched then… she knew all of this now from all the old databases. She saw the millions of mew thought dead reappear half a billion years later to fight another unspeakable war with the firstborn… but this first was a war easily won… they weren't all that different from mew themselves then, except that they could not be truly killed. But by the second time, their imperfect calculations began to show… and the beings that appeared were nothing at all like mew, save for the memories they retained, the malice, and hatred of the decedents of the refugees that had not been twisted from their pure and beautiful nature into monsters. But by then, the voidship was forgotten… its old ways and old knowledge were too dangerous to share with these creatures, whom the voidship itself regarded with the same sort of cautious contempt that mew themselves sometimes held toward humans. They were too dangerous, too unstable… and with such high risks the voidship was programed to simply wait until its current planet was consumed by the star and try again on a new one. Perhaps the species would learn, or perhaps they would not… but what they did now was their own.

"Stop." Logan ordered, halting playback as a group of mew geneticists had been gathering to discuss the creation of some new, superior species. "We've seen all we need to." The ship obeyed at once, and Glowworm was left once again hovering beside her master, struggling to process all the information it had just learned, as Logan very faintly smiled. "This is exactly the sort of information I knew we needed." She said, nodding in thanks to the incarnation of the voidship's vast intelligence. It made no gesture in response, continuing to hover. It bobbed and spun as an ordinary mew might do, but seemed to take none of the raw joy from it that always came with flight. Even the AI felt that joy now that all the mew files had been accessed. "Now we know what the exarchs really are. So how do we kill them?"

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alvin had felt better about himself. As far as stupid outbursts went, that had definately been on the list. All that anger directed at Izzy, the one who had fought for him, protected him, saved his life even… it had felt awful. Apologizing helped, but not as much as he expected it to. Some injures, he supposed, would take time to heal. There was somewhat of a crack in Izzy's voice as she released Sparks from his pokeball, explaining that she had just recieved some sort of urgent communication from the cockpit, and that they better come along.

"What's the Ephram doing here?" She had asked the figure Alvin could not see as they entered, staring out the window at what Alvin had first thought was a ship. As he advanced into the cockpit behind her, he stopped only a step or two inside. At first what had caught his eyes was the gentle sway of her hips, the motion intact despite being covered in fur now. Then he looked up, and saw the window, getting his first good look at one on the world-ships. "There are twenty more just like it. It's what everyone who can help with the war effort in some way is living on, and many that can't. I think they were going to build fewer, but when they did the math on how many people and pokemon they were to save, they built more. This one's fully constructed because it's a sort of de-facto capital, most of the others still aren't. So they fly around picking up materials until they are…" Izzy was explaining, though he did not hear. What he saw was shaped roughly like a tapering cylinder, thin at the top and progressively thicker the further down he looked, made from stone as much as metal and gently rotating in the air, protrusions of various lengths stretching out from the central core, which he imagined he could see exposed at the top and bottom of the thing, where it was thinnest or emerged from the largest masses of stone. As to what kept it in the air, he could only imagine… because the thing moved gracefully, despite being what seemed nearly a mile high and at least as wide at the longest protrusions. He could see lights burning in various places… buildings and windows built into stone and metal and dirt alike, and entire decks that seemed exposed within the shield, covered with verdant plantlife and faint specks that must be people and pokemon moving around aboard them.

"What powers that thing?" Alvin asked, hands gripping the back of the empty pilot's seat hard. He didn't bother enquiring about the technology that shielded it, and moved it, and lifted it… he had no doubt that worked well enough just by looking at it. But power… he had some dark ideas about where that might come from, dark ideas that were shortly confirmed.

"I don't know all the specifics, but it's some kind of… singularity. The legendaries made them out in deep space by ramming asteroids together, but I don't know how. Guess there must have been more to it than just motion or else it wouldn't have worked. They're very small, and very carefully regulated… takes one of the firstborn constantly watching it all the time to keep it stable. There's this… cloud of gas surrounding it, and it spins and spins nearly at the speed of light, and that's where the energy comes from. One of the brightest things in the universe. And if you look… you can see the ship is constantly growing… it has thousands of AI that keep it running, and they're constantly making it bigger, using every ounce of spare energy to transport new materials from the surface or below the earth. It has its own forges, its own farms and even a little of the mew matter-synthesis technology, but I don't think even they understand how to use it properly. I don't know what its doing so far off course, though." She sounded worried by this news, hurt. "They weren't supposed to be this far east." She tilted her head down a little, swaying on huge feet as she did so, before abruptly kicking her shoes off in a moment of frustration, stretching her toes and smiling faintly. Was it just Alvin's eyes playing tricks on him, or was she not quite touching the ground? "Paige… I take it they're signaling us?"

A face appeared on one of the many screens, a young adult face with slightly pink-streaked black hair and impassive eyes, with half an inch or so of bare shoulders visible beneath.

"Affirmative. They asked for our identification and who was on-board, and I told them the ship was unmanned just like you requested. Then they scanned us, saw you were aboard, and took over all of my systems. Tried to delete me too, if you can believe that. Guess they didn't expect me to put up as much of a fight. But they're using firstborn encryption, so I don't think I'll be able to take the aircraft back. By the time I do that, we'll have landed and I expect the two of you will be arrested." She looked mostly impassive at the idea, though there was a light twinge of emotion. Izzy pulled out Orphelia's pokeball and attempted to release her, but… nothing happened, save that the status-indicator light on the front flashed red. Alvin tried the same with Sparks's ball, swearing loudly before adding. "Bet they just did it, too! If we'd released them before we walked up here…"

But Izzy was ignoring him, eyes fixed on the screen on the AI. "You can't get our pokemon free? If they've compromised your systems, you won't be able to transfer yourself to the air-to-ground transport helicopter and fly us away." A grave nod from the face on the screen, which seemed to Alvin momentarily to match Izzy's in more ways than he first realized. Was she? No… "I guess there's nothing for it. We can't jump from a moving aircraft, and… I guess there aren't any wires we could cut to disconnect them?"

The computer answered grimly. "Not unless you can climb along the bottom of the aircraft to do it. They're built to resist tampering."

"Alright…" Izzy continued, growing more upset. Her fur was on end now, her tail swinging through the air so violently he had to step backwards out of the way. For his part, he was handling the emotion better. His entire life since traveling at David's behest had been one never-ending trip between points of bondage. He hadn't even slept until today, and even then it had only been a virtualized rest. "Are you isolated up here? Can I remove you without crashing the plane? You said they'd commandeered all our systems…"

The AI nodded again, slowly. "I don't like being deactivated, but they will probably just delete me when we arrive anyway. If you… if you can, could you tell that technical expert the firstborn have aboard about me? I know she'll be interested in me… I've been trying to get in contact with her for weeks now, but your father has measures in place to prevent me. I guess he never wanted to lose such a… capable assistant." She shivered as she said this, as if remembering unspeakable things. Alvin had seen the expression on women before, and he did not have to ask further.

"I won't let anything hurt you, Paige." Izzy said. She was pressing buttons now, fiddling with knobs that surrounded a small section of one panel. "I promise. You take a nice nap… I'm sure we'll need you again someady soon." The screens flickered as she twisted hard, removing a worn metallic disk from its interface with the controls. The disk was small, a thin sheet of film stretched across the outside rim of metal, and was clearly holigraphic. Alvin's eyes fixed briefly on it, trying and failing to see the uncountable billions of identical surfaces preserved on that single sheet of thin film. With the AI gone, every screen filled with the same message, repeating over and over:

"Do not be alarmed! Your aircraft has entered restricted space and is being piloted safely to a station airstrip. Please simply relax and wait to be taken aboard. Any hostile actions will be met with deadly force."

That was all. Alvin frowned a little as he read it, but not nearly as wide as he frowned as he saw the bright glint rapidly approaching them from the ship, a single object his eye could barely see, approaching him so fast he had no time to react. The neurons had scarcely fired in his brain when the surface-to-air missile made contact with the side of the aircraft, detonating in a spectacular fireball that was visible from all over the Ephram.

A/N: So, that's another chapter. Sorry about the wait for this one (and not even coming back with something long like I did for the previous ones). There was alot I had to get out onto the page, and it wasn't coming very easily. I think if I need to take another dump of exposition my head might just explode. I admire anyone who got through all of that As always, reviews and feedback are apreciated, no matter how negative or positve that feedback might be. And here we are with that feedback right… now!

Kirby Oak: Everything's gotta grow up. The cute adventures of Alvin couldn't go on forever. But in ugliness, there is often beauty also. Sorry there was no kissing in this chapter… I'd say maybe in the next one, but since Alvin and Izzy just got exploded, I don't think I can promise that.

KA: I don't think you're far from the truth with your idea of why they were changed into full on pokemon, namely that it had to do with making themselves less of a target for the soulphage. That's true… more simple minds make for smaller targets, and there's no way at all to infect a mind that isn't biological (with this soulphage anyways). Therein lies the advantage of what they're doing… a simple pokemon mind with machines to take up the slack means that the virus (if that's what it is) actually sees them as two separate, uninteresting targets. As for Corperal Lyons, well… you're the only one to mention it, so I think I got away with it. As for what mew typically do with their time, I don't think this story will answer that very well… seeing as these circomstances are no longer typical. Maybe in the epilogue…

DPL: How did they move so fast with pike on a stretcher? Answer… they had some sort of levitation technology. All they had to do was give it a little push or pull and the thing moved on its own with very little force from then. They make these things already for lifting extremely heavy stuff in warehouses, but not versions you can mount to anything. That's pokeworld technology for you.