Chapter 52: Cold, Hard Data
Perspective: Dr Veronica Mercury
For the first time in weeks, Dr. Mercury didn't feel like she'd drop dead if she closed her eyes for longer than half a blink. The sleep deprivation had been getting to her but what other choice did she have, really? She not only needed to ensure that the machine was supplied with the appropriate amount of crystals, but she also needed to constantly check it for possible damage or other imperfections. It needed to work guaranteed. Fire's suicide mission and arson certainly had thrown a wrench into her schedule there.
Of course, it was the other sibling that cost Dr. Mercury most of her sleep, that paradoxical mage, Shadow. Both Dr. Mercury and Claw had spent considerable time trying to make sense of what little usable data they were able to sift from various sensor logs. Up until now the only useful insight hadn't even come from the sensors, but from Claw's knowledge of how approximately Shadow came to be and what she was capable of. Dr. Mercury had spent some time with Claw thinking on how to get better, more useful measurements on Shadow's true nature and sure enough, they had found a way.
The Tower was gradually shutting down its portal facilities since almost everything they needed for the machine had been gathered. One such facility was located in a desert some ways away from the Tower. Naturally, this meant it would be a target for the rebels sooner or later, so they decided to make use of this. The both of them had spent an entire day setting up a highly sensitive array of sensors in a freshly dug cavern beneath the compound, which transmitted its readings directly to Dr. Mercury's central analysis hub. Their hope had been that if they just created enough of a threat at the facility, the rebels would be forced to launch a full-on assault instead of an infiltration mission. This would prompt the Entity to respond, which in turn would require Shadow to answer it.
What exactly these sensors found, Dr. Mercury would figure out soon. She was currently walking the corridors of the lowest areas of the Tower, on her way to her personal lab. Despite her tight deadlines she had been able to get a full night of sleep after returning from the facility. Claw had remained, apparently to antagonize Kay to trigger some change that he was apparently destined to have.
Dr. Mercury unlocked the door to her lab and stepped inside. She really had to clean up some of the mess she made over the last few days, research documents and sensor printouts littered most free surfaces, the rest was occupied by equipment that should be in a cupboard, not wherever it was currently.
"Later." She said to herself. "There is data to be analyzed."
And to do just that she sat down at her workstation, booted it up and located the data transmitted from the portal facility. As expected, the sheer amount of it was staggering, they had crammed every type of sensor they could think of into that cavern, multiple sensors of each type where possible. There was one sensor among them that she had developed for this exact occasion, she had even sacrificed a few crystals for it. That sensor would look beyond the boundaries of Nexus, into the emptiness between worlds, Dr. Mercury hoped that it would be the key to learning more.
She smiled. "Alright, tell me your secrets."
It took a good while for all the data to be fused together into a singular model, which took the appearance of a 3D reconstruction of the facility based on what the sensors picked up. The level of detail was immense, although the model only concerned itself with matter density and energy emissions, so color and sound were entirely missing.
Now that Dr. Mercury had her model, she could slowly step through the timeline to observe how the battle played out. She had to give it to the rebels, they had some elite troops on their side. She fast-forwarded until she reached the segment where the Entity appeared. This was where the difficult part started. Many of the sensors couldn't be cleanly visualized as part of her model so she had to look at the raw output or some statistical representation thereof.
While the Entity was not the subject of her study, Dr. Mercury decided to take a deeper look into what kinds of readings it caused nonetheless, after all she had already established that Shadow shared some traits with it, knowing what exactly those were would be useful in understanding how Shadow worked.
The data on the Entity was interesting to say the least, the pattern of the readouts remained the exact same across time, no matter how many decimal places Dr. Mercury looked at. This continued right up until the shielding material of its armor. The only place where there was a transitory space were its gloves, there the readings fluctuated between ambient noise and the strict order the Entity imposed.
These were no new discoveries, but they confirmed what she already knew about the Entity. Something interesting she found was that there was another, infinitely small speck of this impenetrable order some distance into the facility. She assumed that this was Claw, the Entity didn't control him directly like it did with possessed subjects. It just seemed to maintain a token presence, possibly to keep Fire suppressed.
Dr. Mercury slowly stepped forward through the timeline, up until Shadow came flying in from outside of the sensor range. The extradimensional sensor picked up a vague presence, manifesting in an amplification of the ambient static. However, the magnitude of this presence grew immensely moments later, just when Shadow and her immediate surroundings completely dropped off the conventional sensors.
The presence was larger than expected, extending almost halfway across the facility. It also didn't have a distinct border, its frayed edges bleeding into the surroundings and erratically moving about. She stepped forward a few more seconds, right up to where Shadow clashed with the Entity.
"Fascinating." Dr. Mercury said, talking to herself in true evil scientist manner. "They aren't overlapping at any point, they can't even interact with each other beyond collision."
Beyond these initial observations, Dr. Mercury spent several hours analyzing every detail she could of the interactions between Shadow and the Entity. More accurately, she studied them individually and tried correlating some points. It was obvious that the Entity had control over the spatial topology of Nexus but surprisingly, Shadow too had some degree of influence, if only at a local scale.
Eventually Dr. Mercury moved on to later parts of the fight, observing the happenings on the inside of the building. She saw the assassin chase Claw down and cut him in half with one swing. Claw wasn't dead but he would be if he remained that way. For a split second, almost too short to be picked up by the sensors, the Entity's presence on Claw expanded and fully enveloped him, bending reality to put him together again. In that brief moment the sheer amount of energy the Entity had given Claw also became apparent, if Claw had been capable of magic, he'd be nearly unstoppable with such power.
She also made another observation. In the time when Claw had been cut in half, Shadow's presence was magnified hundredfold, but then returned to previous levels as soon as he was mended.
Dr. Mercury stopped analyzing the data to contemplate. "So that explains why the Entity is keeping Claw alive. If Fire's body is damaged or otherwise compromised, she gets stronger." She paused. "Hmm… maybe stronger isn't the right word. More unstable would probably fit better. Then again, they're synonymous in her case, increased entropy either way."
A thought occurred to her. So, if that injury caused her power to spike that much, what would Fire permanently dying do? Even the Entity would have to respect such an immense increase in power. The Entity was order, Shadow was entropy. Dr. Mercury didn't have to think to know which of those won out if the power gap shrunk. But didn't the Entity say that she was no threat? Not even conceptually? Something about that struck Dr. Mercury as odd.
She opened a file containing her first test run of her new sensor, the subject of which had been the Entity's void plasma that sat at the center of the machine. From what the Entity had told her, it was completely separated from its main body. It did exert a certain influence on its surroundings, miniscule compared to Entity itself. Scaled up, this influence was what allowed for possession and absorption, as well as control over Nexus' reality. She now compared this to the new readings on the Entity, the influence was shielded by its armor, but its strength was still measurable. She now just needed a third data point to compare it to.
Scouring her measurement archives, Dr. Mercury came across early tests she had done a long time ago, before she was head researcher. The project that laid the groundwork for her new sensor. That was what she had been looking for. The measurements on the Entity's pull weren't accurate but they at least gave her an estimate. The Entity's immediate area of influence depended on how much matter it controlled. The small blob of void plasma influenced next to nothing, its glass container was enough to completely negate its influence. The Entity itself was known to be able to exert influence on people through direct touch or at short distances, but its control over Nexus reached way further than that.
Dr. Mercury stood up, she needed to use the intercom.
She said into the microphone: "Hello, Dimensions? I'd like to talk to General Issa."
Moments later the voice of her colleague could be heard. "Veronica, what do you need?"
"Just estimates on Nexus' mass at two timestamps. I don't need exact figures."
Issa replied: "Sure, just send a message with the timestamps and I'll have someone take care of it. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes, we're not under much load."
Dr. Mercury found that Issa was true to her word, exactly four minutes after her initial message she got a reply with the data she had requested. Now it was only a matter of letting the computer fit a function to the three points, with generous wiggle room for the old, imprecise measurement. Only having only three data points was far from ideal and thoroughly unscientific, but it was all she had to work with. At least she could constrain the fit by assuming that the function would be monotonous. It didn't make sense for the Entity's influence to start declining at random mass thresholds, the Entity was weird but not that weird.
The calculation was fast, and thus the result took Dr. Mercury by surprise. She had expected a vaguely polynomial curve, hypercubic at most. Instead, the curve was exponential, at the very low end of estimates. The implications flashed to her mind instantly, but it took her almost a whole minute to comprehend them in their entirety.
She felt fatigued, as if she had gone another few days without sleep. Her head swam.
She slowly vocalized her thoughts, as if that would make it easier to accept.
"When we start the machine… the worlds the crystals came from will collapse into Nexus. They will take their neighbors with them. At that point Nexus will have enough mass to expand the Entity's influence well past its boundaries. The Entity… will take off its armor and exert its pull again. At that point it will be enough to reach worlds the machine couldn't."
She took a deep breath.
"It's a runaway reaction. More and more worlds collapse into Nexus, the Entity gets more and more powerful. Eventually… it will unite all of existence in Nexus and then... then its influence will make it absorb all sentience. The Entity will be all."
Dr. Mercury shook her head. She had to keep this knowledge to herself. Saying anything to anyone wouldn't help. At the best she wouldn't be believed, at worst she'd be possessed by the Entity and forced to continue her work. She had been digging her own grave this entire time, not just her grave, the grave of everything and everyone. And if she hadn't done it, her successor would have.
For the first time in her life, Dr. Mercury felt entirely at a loss.
She was too absorbed in her own personal nothingness to notice the vague outline of Freak passing through the edge of her vision as he phased out of the room.
