83

Fruition

Youta Karasawa tore his headset off and screamed, “She’s going to breach! Call it in!”

Two technicians in the admin room of Reflect Systems’ headquarters scrambled for the alert system on the far wall. They’d been monitoring Youta’s session, but until he gave the order in person, they were required to remain on standby. When they reached the control panel, they turned two keys that were spaced apart which opened a glass container. One of the technicians slammed the button inside, and a siren started wailing throughout the building.

The screens across the room flooded with data. Seated in his luxury, semi-permanent dive capsule at the center of it all, Youta sat up and stared in horror.

He had tried to stop it, had tried to reason with Rian. But since time moved so quickly in the Penumbra compared to elsewhere, the battle between Rian and Trini and the confrontation atop Yindra’s tower had already ended by the time Youta had ejected from his Vessel and woken up.

He had no doubt that Rian was going to choose Emily’s life over the continuation of Earth. And he was right. It was already happening. Yindra was crossing the Bridge from Miriad to Earth. The data streams confirmed it.

“Help me up,” Youta wheezed to the nurses attending to his vital support systems. Raising his voice had exhausted him. Trembling, he started pulling the stimulation pads, EKG pads, and IVs from his body. The stim pads had helped maintain his muscle tone, but it wasn’t perfect. He had atrophied from remaining stationary for months on end, projecting his consciousness into his Vessel in Miriad. The place where he was more than human.

Waking up into his frail, neglected body was always so painful. It was like emerging from a years-long coma.

A nurse helped him get into a wheelchair. He crossed his arms, pressed against them to quell the bleeding from where the IVs had been pulled free.

The entire room began to shift, slowly descending a hundred-mile shaft into the underground bunker below the headquarters building.

He knew it was already too late. The emergency call currently going out to the Canadian Armed Forces was a mitigation tactic. An attempt to contain the damage, to buy the rest of the world some time. But it wasn’t like he and the others were going to sit around and wait to die. There was still a chance, however slim, that they could get deep enough into the ground before Yindra broke through. The closest thing to the Bridge, on Earth, was the headquarters building—and it would likely be her first target.

Rian, Emily, Youta thought. I’m so sorry. But I’m glad it worked out for you, in the end.

How strange it’d been to see them like that. A human Vessel fused with a novai. According to what he’d seen in the System, it made their consciousness permanently bound to their Vessels. They could relinquish their human selves, sever the link to their bodies on Earth and exist in Miriad forever.

If only Youta could’ve done that too. He’d been so close to finding a way. He just hadn’t worked out the issues in time. The human-novai fusion was proof that it was possible, but he’d needed it to be something that didn’t involve bonding with the natives. If he’d just had more time, he could’ve coded it into the System and bypassed the need for a novai companion.

Rian had grown so much. Nearly a hundred years had passed from Youta’s perspective, and yet it felt like it was only yesterday that he’d held his son in his arms. It was natural, he supposed, to find all these memories running through his mind in what would be his final moments. A final recounting of his life. His accomplishments. His mistakes.

Sure, he had neglected his family for his work. He hadn’t seen Emily or Rian in person in a lifetime. He had faked his death in a traffic accident just to make his departure permanent. To make things easier for both of them. But that was the cost he’d accepted for his life’s work in creating the Bridge and implementing the System on Miriad. He had given up everything to find and create a new world for them all.

It was okay if Rian hated him for it. That was just another sacrifice he’d been prepared to make. He’d been working ceaselessly, without sleep, without eating, leveraging his vital-support system to keep his Earth body alive so that his Vessel could continue working and guiding societal events in Miriad toward a better future for humanity. All to keep the facade going. All to keep the “game” running.

When Reflect Systems had finally developed the most powerful quantum computer ever made, it hadn’t taken long for it to discover Miriad. They’d only managed to sustain one portal at a time, and most of the equipment in the headquarters worked to keep it stable, but even if everything were shut down, the portal would persist for several days before it lost stability. It was only the beginning.

He’d accomplished so much thanks to the time-dilation in Miriad. He had always rationalized it that way—that he would’ve had plenty of time with them afterward. His family would’ve understood eventually. Even if it had taken up until the moment of his death, every second of work would’ve counted if it meant an eternity of life for others. For the rest of humanity. For Rian and Emily.

There was so much to give them. So much left to explore. Things worked so differently on Miriad than on Earth. The physics were malleable. Global systems could be installed directly onto the fabric of the universe. Time and energy were interchangeable. Consciousness could be copied, installed, and recycled. Life itself could persist forever.

They hadn’t just found another world. They had found a place where immortality could be a reality, a place where souls were real.

They had found an afterlife.

If only they could’ve expunged the natives. It was a horrible thought, he supposed, but when immortality itself was on the line, what did it matter? He would’ve been forgiven for his crimes eventually. He would’ve been praised for the eternity that would follow in human history. Time could only work in his favor.

They had tried, by god. They had gamified the entire operation, disguising the war as a video game, of all things. But it had worked. Mirage’s player base was millions strong. And it was easy to censor the violence involved by altering the senses of the players. They didn’t need to see what they were really doing—to themselves or others.

He couldn’t have imagined what the optics would’ve been like, trying to get Parliament to approve the genocide of a foreign world. This way was so much simpler.

The operation, on the other hand, had been anything but simple. The Loyalists had been a troublesome annoyance for years. And before that—before entry to Miriad had been opened to the public—it had been Onsolia that was the problem. Onsolia had fought back against the invasion led single-handedly by Colonel Blair.

Zeniyon.

What a legend that man had been. A hell of a soldier and even a hell more of a scientist.

It had been in the early years of the operation when it had taken all their resources to create a single Vessel from outside of Miriad. But it had worked, and Blair alone had infiltrated Onsolia with ease. The initial months had been peaceful. Blair had worked to shift sentiment toward mining temporal energy, but he was met with opposition, ostracized for his apparent greed. The Onsolians were simply ignorant of what their world was capable of. Eventually, they had cast him out.

And that had been the end of negotiations between Miriad and Earth.

Nowadays they could create Vessels with ease from inside Miriad. Blair’s work was proof that it was possible: he had cloned himself over and over again, replicating his consciousness into androids that he constructed himself, using raw materials from Miriad’s environment and non-linear temporal tricks.

Of course, Blair had encountered some difficulties. It seemed Onsolia was more clever than anticipated. They’d opened a temporal rift backward in time solely to kill Blair shortly after his exile, but this was only discovered on Earth after it had already happened. The footage of the assassination attempt had been unrecoverable due to temporal interference. It was only several years later that it became apparent that it was the player base of Mirage performing a superposition attack against him on Onsolia’s behalf. Onsolia had ingeniously pitted them against themselves.

Blair had survived in all possible outcomes, thankfully. But even with the mysterious properties of Miriad’s physics combined with Blair’s militaristic prowess, he had failed his primary mission: his subsequent war against Onsolia resulted in mutual destruction, and the temporal fallout had distorted the flow of time, causing a hundred years to pass in Miriad from Earth’s perspective.

That was when Youta had stepped in. Armed with the System he had designed, he had crossed the Bridge to stabilize the temporal discrepancy between their worlds.

And then he’d set out to conquer Miriad.

Not even gods could stand against him and his System. One by one, he had hunted them down. The god of strength, Goam, had fallen first: a test of Youta’s power. The Four hadn’t yet become aware that he was attacking them, and so Goam had been off-guard and unprepared. There was hardly a struggle.

In a fit of spite, Youta did to him what Onsolia had done to Colonel Blair.

Youta opened a rift in time shortly before Goam’s death. By the insight of the System, Youta realized that killing one of the Four would release a tremendous amount of temporal energy—enough to shift the alignment of several parallel universes such that whoever was present at that moment in time and space would gain some of Goam’s power.

And so the groundwork was laid for the player base. For Reflect Systems’ future soldiers.

The remaining three gods had been far more troublesome. Ezre had fought back with everything he’d had, destroying nearly a fourth of the continent in the process. Aetheria was nothing but a wasteland afterward. But Youta had nonetheless succeeded in opening another rift before Ezre’s powers consumed himself.

By the time Youta was coming for Altir and Yindra, they had already joined forces and were fleeing north.

He struck without remorse, bypassed Altir’s protective spells with ease. But what he hadn’t anticipated was Yindra’s power of deception, her ability to hide from his System’s insight. He had only minimal intel on each of the Four. If he’d known how cunning Yindra was, he would’ve struck her down first, and that was perhaps his greatest mistake.

By the time Youta had her in his grasp, Yindra had already amassed a wealth of power, stealing temporal energy from the future and straining the fabric of reality to a breaking point.

It shouldn’t have been possible, Youta thought even to this day, to this moment. What energy had Yindra drawn from? What would happen in the future that would allow such a thing? In hindsight, he supposed, had it been her future self—her current self, the one who was about to unleash Hell on Earth? But she wasn’t any weaker now; she’d only gotten stronger over time. And now that she was on her way to Earth, it couldn’t be her future self at all unless she returned to Miriad, but he couldn’t make sense of that.

Nonetheless, during their past encounter, Youta had sensed that the stability of the universe was at stake. Yindra had threatened to destroy everything. All of Youta’s plans had been about to falter. All his work about to vanish.

He struck with narrow-sighted panic.

Trading positions with Yindra, Altir had then placed herself in the way. She died instantly but accomplished all she needed to: she sacrificed herself to buy Yindra enough time to release her energy and shatter Youta’s System.

The Undoing, as they eventually called it, was not the death of the Four but the fracturing of the System. Everything it touched had then scattered through space and time. The remnants of the dead Four reappeared as nullshards across Miracia. Temporal energy became more easily accessible, and the System became irreversibly entwined with the past and future.

The maneuver had drained Yindra almost to the point of death, and a sliver of the broken System had even lodged itself within her. But she survived. And she fled. And Youta had watched her go, powerless to stop her. She’d hidden up north after that, in what would become known as the Penumbra. And while Youta worked desperately to repair the System, Yindra began her work as well.

She built her tower directly beneath the Bridge and began attempts to destroy the portal. Failing that, she fractured the space around it instead. Temporal energy poured in from those cracks in space-time, empowering her and the creatures native to the area, making them far stronger than any other on the continent. But the further they strayed, the weaker they became, and so their territory was limited.

Yindra worked to close off the Penumbra from the rest of the world and used the fragment of the System within her to counter Youta’s and the other GMs’ attempts at coming near. And so she’d remained, hidden in the shadows, biding her time to exact her revenge.

They’d lost almost all oversight on her since then. But now it was clear what her plans had been. She had created secret backdoor routes to the Penumbra—in the form of the Sacred Quest, Fata Morgana S, and the Y-Locator item. She had marked certain players, assigned Loyalists to accompany them and gradually pull them to their side of the conflict.

With that System fragment Youta had unintentionally given her, she had even gone as far as manipulating software on the other side of the Bridge. She had used it to secretly install a message into the implant they’d given Rian. Youta despaired at the thought of what she could do in person, on Earth, given access to the Internet. The entire world’s infrastructure would crumble in an instant. Everyone’s fears about rogue AI were about to come true—even if, he supposed, it was actually an enraged alien goddess from a parallel reality fused with an AI.

Drawn into the moment again, Youta shuddered as a technician shouted, “Spatial anomaly detected! Something’s coming through the Bridge!”

The nurse at Youta’s wheelchair muttered in fear, “It’s her.”

“No,” Youta said, sighing. “I know what it is.”

“It’s not her?”

“She sent something ahead of herself. I saw it in the data a few minutes ago.”

The walls began to shake.

It was ironic, Youta supposed. Colonel Blair had ventured into Miriad as part of a reconnaissance mission to see if a full-scale invasion was practical. But in the end, with the army that Blair had created in the form of Pyce, all he’d done was to propose another question: whether something resembling Earth’s military could withstand a counter-invasion from Miriad.

As the ceiling caved in on him, Youta supposed the rest of the world would have to find out the answer to that question.