fifteen
The black tentacles had finished eating the Bataille. The entity crawled through space, moving effortlessly through vacuum, and continued to consume anything it came into contact with. Dust, pockets of radiation, microorganisms, poisons; all provided sustenance. It was as awesome and it was frightening. Gruesome and beautiful.
"If we don't kill it soon, it will eat the asteroid."
The same paradox of thought held him fast.
"How do I render it inert?"
"You kill it."
"It's not my place—"
"None of it is," the kernel pointed out, bringing the argument back around. "Let's drive it into the sun."
"What if it eats the sun?"
He looked into the pale glow of the system's energetic blue star. Herschel. He remembered the name of the star, but not his own. Why? He remembered details of the war, mostly theoretical, but not his own life. Why?
"Because we're not supposed to be a person. A he. A man who was."
"Why should I kill this thing?"
He had watched an asteroid smack into a planet, killing half the indigenous life. A form of mould that had learned to bond with its neighbours. In a hundred thousand years, it might walk on a leg or two or three. He had seen pirates board a freighter and toss hapless merchant marines out an airlock, the bodies spinning away like motes of dust. The explosion of a power station charged with an exotic new element had drawn his attention from half a galaxy away. Near instantaneous travel meant he had arrived in time to watch the cloud of hot radiation burn an almost perfect circle on the planet surface, one visible from orbit. Within, buildings, skyways and parks were fused together into a glistening black wasteland. Disease ravaged populations and a slow leak in containment of hazardous waste stored deep underground was slowly killing the people ploughing newly terraformed fields above. At any moment, a volcano might erupt, a wave might sweep across an unsuspecting continent, a solar flare might ensnare a passing ship or fry one face of a planet…
"I think we're losing perspective, here."
If he'd a head, it would be bent from shoulders bowed beneath the weight of the galaxy. His chin would touch his chest.
"I don't think it's my job to decide who lives and who dies."
"Bit late for that."
An imagined glance took in the asteroid below. He was still inside the cavern with the woman he had rescued. Kat. Sunshine. He was also outside. At last count, he could be in twenty-five different places at once, with varying levels of awareness. Now, he was in three, more or less.
Gathering substance, he began probing the creature expanding across the quiet system. He wrapped a portion of it in a bubble of self, noting it did not complain when separated from its whole. The thumb shaped piece of blackness merely rested inside the invisible containment field while the rest of the being continued on its merry way.
He had a sample which he knew how to feed. His sample did not seem intent on escaping its prison.
"I was drawn here for a reason," he stated as he thinned and expanded, the shape of him—which wasn't a shape or even a 'him'—reaching out across the backdrop of stars so that he began to surround the dark creature. "I was compelled. Therefore I conclude I am to act."
Uncertainty rippled through his consciousness as he acted according to intent, but he continued to surround the writhing blackness of recently born creature. When he had it seventy-three percent contained, it reacted.