A dark room, buried deep in the bowels of an immense fortress,
floating in a place where time and space have no meaning. Within the room,
a table, a holographic projector recessed in its center. And seated round
the table, beings of power. Aliens, scientists, adventurers, men and women
capable of walking between worlds with the merest exertion of will.
All stared, transfixed, at the images floating like malevolent spirits over the table. Atrocity followed on atrocity, a horrendous procession of rape, torture and deliberate cruelty that shocked even the eldest among them. Memories, plucked straight from the screaming minds of traumatized, heartsick victims by the Spectre.
After what seemed like forever, the projector stopped, the last image of the last memory still hanging frozen above the table's surface, until with a shuddering movement, Axel Asher pawed the console built into the table at his elbow, extinguishing the projector. Above our heads, the lights came up, shedding a harsh glow on the faces around the table. For a moment, there was silence. Then, someone spoke.
"I don't think any of us realized how much the cancer had grown." Heads turned to regard the speaker. She stared down at her hands, palms down on the table, and the blood red gem gleaming on her left wrist. She brought the bauble up, regarding it with bitter eyes. The corner of her mouth quirked up, forming a half-smile that had very little mirth and all too much rage behind it.
"All the time we've spent gallivanting from universe to universe, saving the day, kicking butt, preventing things from going wrong everywhere…" She took in a shuddering breath. "Did we accomplish NOTHING?"
From across the table, Jackson King spoke. "At the risk of sounding trite, Blink, I think you accomplished a lot more than you think. Think about it. All those universes you've saved. Hundreds of trillions of souls living in each one. Every one of them has a chance to live a happy, productive life without having to be afraid of space aliens or super- bastards or horrible elder gods from the Infinite Void coming over to kill, rape or maim them just because they've had a bad hair day. That's an accomplishment."
"Jackson," I said, "When Hal and I were down there, he mentioned something about this cancer infecting the multiverse. You and Blink seem to know more about it than the rest of us. What is it, and why is it causing Chaos Marines to crawl out of that shithole of a universe which they have no business leaving to come to that planet to kill my friends?"
Jackson leaned away from me as I grated out the last few words, his eyes widening as he realized the vehemence behind my words. He blinked, then rested his elbows on the table and gave me a sympathetic look. Anybody else I would have blasted into the floor at once for that presumption. But Jackson King had borne his own grief and his own burden before mine. He'd witnessed the deaths of his teammates and had endured the humiliation of seeing their sacrifice trivialized by the powers-that- be, as the world they'd died to protect rejected them and all they'd done for it, then found himself rendered irrelevant. He'd faced all that, and then came back to fight the good fight when he'd found his world still needed him. For all that, I respected him. And accepted the sympathy of a man who'd also known grief.
"It's not easy, I know," he murmured. "You just try to make amends where you can—so that their deaths are not unpaid for. Just like I have."
He turned to the keypad set into the table by his elbow. There was a mechanical-sounding hum as the holoprojector within the table powered itself up. An image appeared above the table.
It was beautiful. Reality in all its glory stood before us, shining like a jewel, multitudinous facets sparkling and shifting according to some hidden order, sending sparkles of rainbow light dancing across the walls of the room.
"You all know what this is." We did indeed. There was not a one of us that had not gaped in wonder and delight when they first saw the structure of the multiverse unfolding before their very eyes. Each universe turned, suspended within a matrix of 196,833 dimensions, the whole structure resembling a giant, multidimensional snowflake. Channels coursed between the universe, blood-red seas of energy that some called 'Hypertime' and others 'the Bleed'.
The hologram began to zoom in on a section of the Snowflake. As the image grew larger, a small black speck gradually became visible. The image kept on going, moving closer and closer to the rapidly growing black spot. Details could be made out now. The—object was the best word to describe it—appeared to be immense. It squatted forebodingly over a space that by a conservative estimate could have contained hundreds of millions of universes. There was a organic look to the surface of the thing, as if it had been ripped still alive from a decaying body and placed where it could grow like a malignant tumour.
There was a soft rustle of whispering that soon expanded into shocked, incredulous ejaculations from all around the table. That thing seemed impossible. There was no way it could have grown to such size without having been detected. But there it was, an immense parasite within the body of reality itself. As we watched, tendrils of organic stuff began probing towards the brilliant thread that represented the physical form of a living universe. As the tentacles touched the thread, it changed. The shining, silver line bloated, in an instant transformed into something that resembled an immense maggot. More tendrils shot out, instantly connecting what had once been a healthy hypertimeline to the main body of the organic mass. Within moments, the space between was filled with the noxious substance. Then, the whole agglomeration gave a sickening lurch before reverting to its former, quiescent state.
"That, ladies and gentlemen, is the enemy. Someone or something messed with one of the variables that influence the structure of reality—and that is the result. An area of rogue space that just keeps growing like a cancer eating away at the heart of the multiverse." King paused to input more instructions into the holoprojector. A series of formulae began to scroll down from the top of the image, overlaying that frightful picture of reality gone mad. "That's not the worst of it, however." He nodded at the formulae. "These formulae describe the dynamics of the cancer. I think those of you here with backgrounds in Artificial Intelligence might recognize them."
For a few seconds, there was a tense silence. Then, from a corner of the darkened room, someone spoke. "Gods alive. That's a neural net. It's sentient."
The room erupted in an uproar. Kang the Conqueror stood up, shouting and gesticulating wildly, nearly striking the men next to him with his windmilling arms.
"QUIET!" Jackson King's telepathic voice cut through the noise like a chainsaw. In the sudden silence, there intruded the sound of a scuffle at the far end of the room. Kang the Conqueror had managed to teleport one of his massive energy guns from his personal arsenal and was waving it about like a madman. Hyperman and Access—the two people sitting beside him—had grabbed him by the arms and were presently wrestling him into the ground. Deftly, Hyperman relieved the Conqueror of his weapon. A superstrength punch to the head left him unconscious and unable to disrupt the meeting further.
Jackson's glare swept the assembly, as if daring anyone else to try and create trouble. Finding no one, he continued speaking. "That's right. The cancer's sentient. It's capable of anticipating our moves, acting to counter them, and acting on its own initiative. Blink's group and mine have both been fighting localized versions of the cancer for the past year. We only realized the true scope of the threat when Hal Jordan popped in on us a few weeks ago. Since then, we've been engaged in intelligence gathering, identifying which areas of reality the cancer was likely to infect." He gave me a wry look. "I must admit, though, that this morning's episode came as a surprise."
The discussion turned to the formulation of a plan to defeat the cancer. A small and rather vocal faction, most of them borderline supervillains like Kang if truth be told, were strongly in favour of starving the cancer by destroying every universe within its reach, in effect creating a giant firebreak. Yet others wanted to attack the cancer directly, punching a superhuman spearhead deep into its viscid guts. King argued, and in the case of the former, shouted them down, explaining, not so patiently, why both solutions were clearly unacceptable. Hal turned up a few hours into the discussion, to give us a little more info on just what we'd be facing. The biggest threat, according to him, came from the cancer's ability to break down the walls between realities. That was what had brought the Chaos Marines over to the unicorns' planet for a round of rape, plunder and destruction. Worse still, it was able to do so almost completely undetected, so the first warning any of us got would be the presence of external forces running rampant over that universe's unprepared inhabitants.
The meeting broke up late, each one of us returning to his own sanctum sanctorum to prepare for the tasks ahead. In the coming months, we would be fighting on battlefields, searching out the enemy in high councils of alien courts, and hunting down the agents of the cancer where they appeared. I would need help carrying out my part in this. There were skills I lacked, powers that I was totally defenseless against. I would need comrades by my side to cover for my lacks. In the morning I would begin my search, and when my search was done, we would ride forth, to avenge the unicorns' world, and every other world that had been consumed by the cancer.
These were the thoughts running through my head as I stood in the teleportation chamber of Vanishing Point, awaiting my turn to transport myself to my own fortress, half a multiverse away. It was then that the man approached me. He was slender to the point of gauntness, his body enveloped in a great black robe that seemed too large for him. I'd seen him during the council, a quiet shadow, always listening but never saying a word.
"You are Stalker," he said.
"Yes," I replied. My face remained resolutely turned towards the end of the queue, and the teleporter circle beyond. I was not in the mood for conversation, not right then.
The gaunt man reached up and lowered his hood, for the first time revealing his face. A remarkable face, it was. His skin was golden, metallic golden. It gleamed in the harsh artificial light cast by the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. White—pure white—curls tumbled from his high forehead. But most remarkable were the eyes. Tiny hourglasses stared back at me from those eldritch orbs. There was laughter in those strange eyes, the nihilistic laughter of a man who has stared death in the face for years on end, and who, in the end, had failed to retain all his sanity. Those eyes mocked me now, mocked the station we stood within, mocked everything they saw.
"What," he said, "no yells of fear, no drawn sword ready to strike down the sinister magician?"
I looked him over, more closely this time than I had done at first. "I know you. You are Raistlin, the Sorcerer Supreme of the world called Krynn. Is there something I can do for you?" As I pointed out earlier, I was not in the best of moods. It was no surprise, therefore, that not a little sarcasm had found its way into my voice and words.
Raistlin's thin lips stretched, skinning back from his teeth, creating a smile that had no mirth in it, only long-remembered bitterness. "So," he rasped, "the brave warrior reacts to the mage as brave warriors always have: with suspicion and anger. Is there an intrinsic flaw, perhaps, in the way their minds are constructed? I come to offer you my help, warrior, if you will only take it."
I took a deep breath, and got my temper back under control. A terrible thing, my temper. It was rarely that I allowed it to rage unchecked, but recent events had given me all too many reasons to allow it to do so. The effort required to rein it in at this time was immense.
"My apologies," I said, finally, "I should not have snapped at you like that. My grief made me impolite. Forgive me."
Raistlin now smiled a real smile. Admittedly, it was micrometric, so small as to seem imperceptible, but it was there, and there was warmth behind it. "I accept your apology." He sobered. "For what it is worth, I sorrow for your loss, too. I was not acquainted with your friends, the unicorns, but their loss is a bitter blow to the multiverse." He touched a finger to the corner of his eye. " To destroy such beauty, when it is already so rare, is a crime against every decent thing."
I nodded. Raistlin was a man cursed with a strange double vision. Whenever he looked at something, he would see it as it would be in the future, as it aged and decayed, and finally succumbed to the inexorable march of time. Everything he saw, trees, animals, even people, decayed as he looked at it. He would never be able to enjoy the beauty of a field of flowers, or a forest clearing, or a pretty girl. Only the unicorns, or their fellow Immortals, would appear to him as they appeared to the rest of humanity. He would feel the loss of such timeless beauty as keenly as if it had happened to him.
"You said you wished to help me, Raistlin. Just what do you intend to do?"
"Hm?" he said. "Ah, yes, indeed. I came to offer you my services as a spellcaster. Each and every member of the Council of Sorcerers Supreme now stands alongside a group of adventurers, ready to lend their mystic might to their efforts. I myself have chosen to stand by you."
"Is that so? Then I thank you. I must say, I'm flattered."
"Indeed? You have no qualms with me standing by your side? Given my reputation, I would have expected some protest from you."
I chuckled. "No, Raistlin. I believe you'll find your reputation around our little community is not what it once was. News travels fast in hypertime. Your exploits with the rest of the Council are common knowledge. If anything, they've shown us you're not the man you once were. Any one of us would be glad to have you by our side."
Raistlin's smile grew broader, one of genuine pleasure. "I was not aware my adventures after Chaos' defeat were known outside the Council." He chuckled. "Perhaps I should be glad they are."
"Indeed," I said. Then, laughing together, we stepped into the teleporter and let the quantum beam carry us away, back to the fortress that was my home.
All stared, transfixed, at the images floating like malevolent spirits over the table. Atrocity followed on atrocity, a horrendous procession of rape, torture and deliberate cruelty that shocked even the eldest among them. Memories, plucked straight from the screaming minds of traumatized, heartsick victims by the Spectre.
After what seemed like forever, the projector stopped, the last image of the last memory still hanging frozen above the table's surface, until with a shuddering movement, Axel Asher pawed the console built into the table at his elbow, extinguishing the projector. Above our heads, the lights came up, shedding a harsh glow on the faces around the table. For a moment, there was silence. Then, someone spoke.
"I don't think any of us realized how much the cancer had grown." Heads turned to regard the speaker. She stared down at her hands, palms down on the table, and the blood red gem gleaming on her left wrist. She brought the bauble up, regarding it with bitter eyes. The corner of her mouth quirked up, forming a half-smile that had very little mirth and all too much rage behind it.
"All the time we've spent gallivanting from universe to universe, saving the day, kicking butt, preventing things from going wrong everywhere…" She took in a shuddering breath. "Did we accomplish NOTHING?"
From across the table, Jackson King spoke. "At the risk of sounding trite, Blink, I think you accomplished a lot more than you think. Think about it. All those universes you've saved. Hundreds of trillions of souls living in each one. Every one of them has a chance to live a happy, productive life without having to be afraid of space aliens or super- bastards or horrible elder gods from the Infinite Void coming over to kill, rape or maim them just because they've had a bad hair day. That's an accomplishment."
"Jackson," I said, "When Hal and I were down there, he mentioned something about this cancer infecting the multiverse. You and Blink seem to know more about it than the rest of us. What is it, and why is it causing Chaos Marines to crawl out of that shithole of a universe which they have no business leaving to come to that planet to kill my friends?"
Jackson leaned away from me as I grated out the last few words, his eyes widening as he realized the vehemence behind my words. He blinked, then rested his elbows on the table and gave me a sympathetic look. Anybody else I would have blasted into the floor at once for that presumption. But Jackson King had borne his own grief and his own burden before mine. He'd witnessed the deaths of his teammates and had endured the humiliation of seeing their sacrifice trivialized by the powers-that- be, as the world they'd died to protect rejected them and all they'd done for it, then found himself rendered irrelevant. He'd faced all that, and then came back to fight the good fight when he'd found his world still needed him. For all that, I respected him. And accepted the sympathy of a man who'd also known grief.
"It's not easy, I know," he murmured. "You just try to make amends where you can—so that their deaths are not unpaid for. Just like I have."
He turned to the keypad set into the table by his elbow. There was a mechanical-sounding hum as the holoprojector within the table powered itself up. An image appeared above the table.
It was beautiful. Reality in all its glory stood before us, shining like a jewel, multitudinous facets sparkling and shifting according to some hidden order, sending sparkles of rainbow light dancing across the walls of the room.
"You all know what this is." We did indeed. There was not a one of us that had not gaped in wonder and delight when they first saw the structure of the multiverse unfolding before their very eyes. Each universe turned, suspended within a matrix of 196,833 dimensions, the whole structure resembling a giant, multidimensional snowflake. Channels coursed between the universe, blood-red seas of energy that some called 'Hypertime' and others 'the Bleed'.
The hologram began to zoom in on a section of the Snowflake. As the image grew larger, a small black speck gradually became visible. The image kept on going, moving closer and closer to the rapidly growing black spot. Details could be made out now. The—object was the best word to describe it—appeared to be immense. It squatted forebodingly over a space that by a conservative estimate could have contained hundreds of millions of universes. There was a organic look to the surface of the thing, as if it had been ripped still alive from a decaying body and placed where it could grow like a malignant tumour.
There was a soft rustle of whispering that soon expanded into shocked, incredulous ejaculations from all around the table. That thing seemed impossible. There was no way it could have grown to such size without having been detected. But there it was, an immense parasite within the body of reality itself. As we watched, tendrils of organic stuff began probing towards the brilliant thread that represented the physical form of a living universe. As the tentacles touched the thread, it changed. The shining, silver line bloated, in an instant transformed into something that resembled an immense maggot. More tendrils shot out, instantly connecting what had once been a healthy hypertimeline to the main body of the organic mass. Within moments, the space between was filled with the noxious substance. Then, the whole agglomeration gave a sickening lurch before reverting to its former, quiescent state.
"That, ladies and gentlemen, is the enemy. Someone or something messed with one of the variables that influence the structure of reality—and that is the result. An area of rogue space that just keeps growing like a cancer eating away at the heart of the multiverse." King paused to input more instructions into the holoprojector. A series of formulae began to scroll down from the top of the image, overlaying that frightful picture of reality gone mad. "That's not the worst of it, however." He nodded at the formulae. "These formulae describe the dynamics of the cancer. I think those of you here with backgrounds in Artificial Intelligence might recognize them."
For a few seconds, there was a tense silence. Then, from a corner of the darkened room, someone spoke. "Gods alive. That's a neural net. It's sentient."
The room erupted in an uproar. Kang the Conqueror stood up, shouting and gesticulating wildly, nearly striking the men next to him with his windmilling arms.
"QUIET!" Jackson King's telepathic voice cut through the noise like a chainsaw. In the sudden silence, there intruded the sound of a scuffle at the far end of the room. Kang the Conqueror had managed to teleport one of his massive energy guns from his personal arsenal and was waving it about like a madman. Hyperman and Access—the two people sitting beside him—had grabbed him by the arms and were presently wrestling him into the ground. Deftly, Hyperman relieved the Conqueror of his weapon. A superstrength punch to the head left him unconscious and unable to disrupt the meeting further.
Jackson's glare swept the assembly, as if daring anyone else to try and create trouble. Finding no one, he continued speaking. "That's right. The cancer's sentient. It's capable of anticipating our moves, acting to counter them, and acting on its own initiative. Blink's group and mine have both been fighting localized versions of the cancer for the past year. We only realized the true scope of the threat when Hal Jordan popped in on us a few weeks ago. Since then, we've been engaged in intelligence gathering, identifying which areas of reality the cancer was likely to infect." He gave me a wry look. "I must admit, though, that this morning's episode came as a surprise."
The discussion turned to the formulation of a plan to defeat the cancer. A small and rather vocal faction, most of them borderline supervillains like Kang if truth be told, were strongly in favour of starving the cancer by destroying every universe within its reach, in effect creating a giant firebreak. Yet others wanted to attack the cancer directly, punching a superhuman spearhead deep into its viscid guts. King argued, and in the case of the former, shouted them down, explaining, not so patiently, why both solutions were clearly unacceptable. Hal turned up a few hours into the discussion, to give us a little more info on just what we'd be facing. The biggest threat, according to him, came from the cancer's ability to break down the walls between realities. That was what had brought the Chaos Marines over to the unicorns' planet for a round of rape, plunder and destruction. Worse still, it was able to do so almost completely undetected, so the first warning any of us got would be the presence of external forces running rampant over that universe's unprepared inhabitants.
The meeting broke up late, each one of us returning to his own sanctum sanctorum to prepare for the tasks ahead. In the coming months, we would be fighting on battlefields, searching out the enemy in high councils of alien courts, and hunting down the agents of the cancer where they appeared. I would need help carrying out my part in this. There were skills I lacked, powers that I was totally defenseless against. I would need comrades by my side to cover for my lacks. In the morning I would begin my search, and when my search was done, we would ride forth, to avenge the unicorns' world, and every other world that had been consumed by the cancer.
These were the thoughts running through my head as I stood in the teleportation chamber of Vanishing Point, awaiting my turn to transport myself to my own fortress, half a multiverse away. It was then that the man approached me. He was slender to the point of gauntness, his body enveloped in a great black robe that seemed too large for him. I'd seen him during the council, a quiet shadow, always listening but never saying a word.
"You are Stalker," he said.
"Yes," I replied. My face remained resolutely turned towards the end of the queue, and the teleporter circle beyond. I was not in the mood for conversation, not right then.
The gaunt man reached up and lowered his hood, for the first time revealing his face. A remarkable face, it was. His skin was golden, metallic golden. It gleamed in the harsh artificial light cast by the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. White—pure white—curls tumbled from his high forehead. But most remarkable were the eyes. Tiny hourglasses stared back at me from those eldritch orbs. There was laughter in those strange eyes, the nihilistic laughter of a man who has stared death in the face for years on end, and who, in the end, had failed to retain all his sanity. Those eyes mocked me now, mocked the station we stood within, mocked everything they saw.
"What," he said, "no yells of fear, no drawn sword ready to strike down the sinister magician?"
I looked him over, more closely this time than I had done at first. "I know you. You are Raistlin, the Sorcerer Supreme of the world called Krynn. Is there something I can do for you?" As I pointed out earlier, I was not in the best of moods. It was no surprise, therefore, that not a little sarcasm had found its way into my voice and words.
Raistlin's thin lips stretched, skinning back from his teeth, creating a smile that had no mirth in it, only long-remembered bitterness. "So," he rasped, "the brave warrior reacts to the mage as brave warriors always have: with suspicion and anger. Is there an intrinsic flaw, perhaps, in the way their minds are constructed? I come to offer you my help, warrior, if you will only take it."
I took a deep breath, and got my temper back under control. A terrible thing, my temper. It was rarely that I allowed it to rage unchecked, but recent events had given me all too many reasons to allow it to do so. The effort required to rein it in at this time was immense.
"My apologies," I said, finally, "I should not have snapped at you like that. My grief made me impolite. Forgive me."
Raistlin now smiled a real smile. Admittedly, it was micrometric, so small as to seem imperceptible, but it was there, and there was warmth behind it. "I accept your apology." He sobered. "For what it is worth, I sorrow for your loss, too. I was not acquainted with your friends, the unicorns, but their loss is a bitter blow to the multiverse." He touched a finger to the corner of his eye. " To destroy such beauty, when it is already so rare, is a crime against every decent thing."
I nodded. Raistlin was a man cursed with a strange double vision. Whenever he looked at something, he would see it as it would be in the future, as it aged and decayed, and finally succumbed to the inexorable march of time. Everything he saw, trees, animals, even people, decayed as he looked at it. He would never be able to enjoy the beauty of a field of flowers, or a forest clearing, or a pretty girl. Only the unicorns, or their fellow Immortals, would appear to him as they appeared to the rest of humanity. He would feel the loss of such timeless beauty as keenly as if it had happened to him.
"You said you wished to help me, Raistlin. Just what do you intend to do?"
"Hm?" he said. "Ah, yes, indeed. I came to offer you my services as a spellcaster. Each and every member of the Council of Sorcerers Supreme now stands alongside a group of adventurers, ready to lend their mystic might to their efforts. I myself have chosen to stand by you."
"Is that so? Then I thank you. I must say, I'm flattered."
"Indeed? You have no qualms with me standing by your side? Given my reputation, I would have expected some protest from you."
I chuckled. "No, Raistlin. I believe you'll find your reputation around our little community is not what it once was. News travels fast in hypertime. Your exploits with the rest of the Council are common knowledge. If anything, they've shown us you're not the man you once were. Any one of us would be glad to have you by our side."
Raistlin's smile grew broader, one of genuine pleasure. "I was not aware my adventures after Chaos' defeat were known outside the Council." He chuckled. "Perhaps I should be glad they are."
"Indeed," I said. Then, laughing together, we stepped into the teleporter and let the quantum beam carry us away, back to the fortress that was my home.