Back | Next
Contents

NEVER ENDING,
EVER-GROWING

Erica Ciko



It shouldn’t surprise anyone than when seeking stories about lost civilizations and ruins among the stars, a lot of our contributing authors turned to HP Lovecraft, least of all that Erica Ciko gravitated toward that Eldritch direction.

Few authors have proven more dedicated to modern cosmic horror than Ciko, be it stories that have appeared in places like Cosmic Horror Monthly and the Tales to Terrify Podcast, or her work editing Starward Shadows Quarterly. Many are quick to use Lovecraft as a brand, but she can count herself among the authors who really know the roots...as in a grim way, so shall the protagonist of her story.

***

On paper, we were “contractors” for Verdant Dreams, one of the original forty-five mega-corps to survive the Great Implosion. But everyone from the anxious arms dealers hanging out at the spaceport gates to the underage kids running drinks in the casinos knew what we really were: Mercenaries, and shitty ones, too. Why else would we be bumming around in the Nightside’s stagnant backwaters drinking and staring at our comm-bands all day, waiting for the static to crackle through?

We sulked in the shadows of Torvyn Station’s rickety black hangars and crumbling apartment blocks for so long that we started to think that our corporate overlords had moved on and forgotten about us—they probably had, for a time—but just like the Tier-1 species they’d sent us to eradicate so many times on our terraforming missions, they always came crawling back in the end.

That’s how we ended up here, on a rickety ghost ship with one foot in the grave, on the way to a world that was already six feet under: A world no one else dared to go to but us.

“Once the last holdout of the Arachni Plasmadroids, Vaenmyr is now one hundred percent sterilized of all alien life and terraformed to the Verdant Dreams standard,” the ship’s infostream reassured us over the comms, conveniently forgetting to mention that our destination may have now been sterilized of all human life, too. “Its rich Terridium reserves make it one of humanity’s most valuable outposts in the Nightside Arm. Level 8 Clearance is required for access to all ports in its capital prefecture, Eleventh City.”

“Must be the first time a twisted old hunk of garbage like this ever got Level 8 Clearance . . .” I muttered to no one, staring out the window at the gargantuan turquoise planet far below, its misleadingly tranquil seas of mist hypnotizing me across the sea of stars. By the way its writhing clouds and stagnant seas ominously swallowed up my entire field of vision, I was surprised we hadn’t already entered Vaenmyr’s orbital space. Any minute now... I thought with a sigh, for a moment imagining I could hear the hum of its thousand tiny, pulsing rings.

“All it takes is one glance at the ugly thing to know there’s something wrong with it, eh?” A perky-but-rough voice piped up from over my shoulder, distracting me from the doomed world’s enigmatic beauty. It belonged to Valison, one of the few Verdant Dreams rejects I’d actually bothered sharing a pint with back on Torvyn now and again.

“Up until a couple weeks ago, people used to call this place Blue Heaven,” I replied coolly, staring her down. There was something I liked about her curly red waves licked with white-blonde streaks, and the somber, soul-penetrating stillness of her glassy blue eye almost made up for the fact that her other one was bionic and hideous. She was different—alluring, even—but something about the way she smiled made me wonder if I’d wake up missing a kidney if I let her advances go too far.

Besides, I was probably kidding myself thinking she’d ever fall for a guy like me. The only thing I had going for me was a razor-sharp jawline: At least, that’s what my mother always called it when I was a kid—and she meant it as an insult because it “matched my wise-ass mouth.” You could find my messy brown hair on every other guy at the spaceport, and it wasn’t like I was in great shape or anything, either. Maybe she had a thing for dead and perpetually bored grey eyes?

“Yeah, yeah . . .” She shrugged as if she cared more about the dirt caked between the treads of her boots than she did about Vaenmyr. “I read the brief, Alyx. ‘A dreamworld sanctuary for the richest, smartest humans while the rest of us rot, no one but diplomats and celebrities ever get in.’ Blah, blah, blah.”

“Bet they never guessed it was a one-way ticket.” I smirked, feeling my stomach drop as the orbital balancers finally lurched on.

“If you ask me, bastards got what they deserved.” She scowled, her tight-fitting expedition suit forming a sharp silhouette against the haunting blue sphere. “They walled themselves off for all those years, living in their precious little ‘heaven’ and locking us all out: But the second things go south, they’re begging the outside world for help.”

“They aren’t begging for anything anymore,” I teased, clutching the guardrail of the viewing deck until my knuckles turned white. Even after all those years, I still hadn’t gotten used to the nauseating, scrambled-egg effect the landing drivers had on gravity. “Thought you said you read the brief: After the distress signals started popping up all across the globe in tandem, everything went black all at once. No one’s heard a word from anyone on Vaenmyr for three weeks, and no one has any idea what the hell’s going on down there—even the President’s Mansion in Eleventh City is giving off nothing but static, I guess.”

“Huh . . . Weird,” Valison muttered, her robotic red tangle of an eye suspiciously studying the behemoth world eclipsing the backdrop of howling stars far below. “Could it have been some kind of new Insavatu WMD, or . . . ?”

She brought up an interesting question, but the hum of the landing drivers—or maybe it really was the ethereal, eerie rings that ensorcelled the dying planet—was growing so loud that there was no way she ever would have heard me if I bothered answering her. And besides, I didn’t want to ruin the “true midnight” of our arrival, as my father used to always say. He was talking about that fleeting, precious liminal space that exists only in the infinite void in the moments before you touch down on some unknown world you’ll hang out on for a couple of days and then never see again.

There was nothing like it in all the universe.


Most of us had the gut feeling something was off when we noticed the huge, blue tendrils covered in spikes that wove an impenetrable cage across the planet’s smog-filled atmosphere—but by the time we realized the pulsing net of energy was designed to let outsiders enter but not leave, it was far too late. The only way out was down.

Every sensor on the entire rig had gone haywire from the moment we passed through that electric blue nightmare veil, and as soon as the screeching started, all the essential tech but the landing drivers had gone totally dead. From the moment our derelict ground into the half-collapsed hyperhangers of Eleventh City, it was chaos.

Blue lightning tore down wildly from whatever those things were in the sky, seeming to pierce not only the rolling jet-black clouds but the core of the planet itself. Half the crew cowered in the bowels of the ship, and something told me right away when I smelled the burning ozone and sick, static decay that they were better off rotting there—this was going to get ugly, and cowards would only slow us down when shit got serious. The rest of us staggered out onto the doomed ghost of Vaenmyr—once the crown jewel of the Nightside arm, but now just a mind-bending cacophony of rubble—like something straight out of a painting done in a psych ward by someone on a bad acid trip.

“This can’t be Vaenmyr. We’ve slipped through the cracks to another dimension,” a gruff female voice behind me rasped. I ignored it. What use was it wasting time on other dimensions when all that mattered, all that ever would matter, was the one I was trapped inside right now?

So I kicked my way through the twisted rubble of the metropolis with all my breathing gear strapped hastily to my face—far more careful than half the crew, who decided to forsake their respirators since Vaenmyr was “Verdant Dreams Standard.” Idiots, all of them. Whatever those glowing blue flecks of dust in the air were, emitting static electricity and vibrating weirdly, I didn’t want them anywhere near my lungs.

But soon, my filters locked up like the rest of the equipment we’d dragged out of the ship—all the minor tech was as dead as the fission drivers, so we had no choice but to stagger alone into this energetic storm that was somehow strong enough to tear down countless skyscrapers, but gentle enough that it felt like little more than a summer breeze against our expedition suits.

“No wonder HQ hasn’t heard a peep from Eleventh City for the past three weeks,” Valison muttered. “What the hell happened down here?”

“Looks like the innards of s-some kind of monster!” Wailed a hopeless greenblood from behind my left shoulder. “That’s what they’re saying on the ship! We’ve been eaten!”

By the way those pulsating, crystalline blue tendrils of energy rippled through everything from the pavement below to the ruined sky bridges far above, I half-wondered if he was right. But logic soon prevailed over braindead fear, and I spun around and grabbed him by the scruff of his suit and hissed into the nuclear winter, “That kind of fearmongering bullshit isn’t helping anyone, you know that? This is where we are, whether you like it or not, and we’re still alive for now. And until we get our GeoTech working again, we need to keep our heads clear. Stop panicking or crawl back to the ship to die with the rest of them.”

He didn’t whimper any more, then—I’m not sure if I’d actually scared some sense into him, or if he only kept his mouth shut to avoid getting smacked.

Soon forgetting he existed, I pushed my way through the rubble, pausing every now and then to gaze up at that sickly buzzing blanket that seemed to envelope the entire sky. Ghastly tendrils snaked down from it, some thicker than the largest building I’d ever seen, and some thin and wispy. Something about them reminded me of the spindly webs of neurons on posters in the back-alley plastic surgery clinics back at Torvyn Station.

“Dendrites . . .” Valison whispered, making me wonder yet again who she really was before she threw it all away and joined our little circus. But what did it matter here, inside this neon broken snow globe that the richest diplomats in all the galaxy once called home? Here, we’d all die the same death whether we were brain surgeons or junkyard scrappers before we came to Verdant Dreams—and looking out over the dust-drenched mass graves caressed by hungry black veins, it seemed like the locals had learned that the hard way.

“Once the last holdout of the Arachni Plasmadroids, Vaenmyr is now one hundred percent sterilized of all alien life and terraformed to the Verdant Dreams standard.”

The ship’s infostream ricocheted off the walls of my mind in a mocking echo as I slowly absorbed that complete and utter failure of human domination—that dead, otherworldly hellscape that had somehow managed to strangle the apex of all mankind’s accomplishments and turn it inside out in a few short weeks. Goes to show how futile all of it is. The terraforming projects, the salvage missions, even the headhunts: None of it meant anything when you were staring straight down the throat of a nightmare ghost city threatening to swallow you alive—and with good reason, I thought, glancing down at the Verdant Dreams logo emblazoned into the chest of my suit with a gulp.

Those brilliant seas of azure that beckoned to us through the windows of the ship and lured us down into this mess to begin with haunted me even more than the graveyard of human accomplishment that rotted in every direction. Blue planets were so rare, especially out here so far from the Galactic Centriole: It seemed a shame to ravage them as our humble overlords had. Suddenly, I was swallowed up by a hollow well of sadness, and I wished more than anything that I could see this place—no, all worlds I’d ever walked upon—before they’d been tarnished and stripped and manipulated into the Verdant Dreams nightmare vision. But I knew in this lifetime that I never would, especially now that all of us were trapped here.

As if sensing that I was about to abandon all hope, the tendril that had been snaking its way across a nearby decimated sidewalk wriggled eerily close to the side of my head, radioactive dust still fresh on its shivering tip. It emitted a cloud of luminous neon spores, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that even though it didn’t have eyes, it was staring me down.

Before the Incinerator Mines crashed down, back in its glory days, did this place resemble the Earth in more than just color? I silently asked it, as if it was my dearest, oldest, only friend. But then I realized how stupid that was, and focused instead on some moron blowing into the vents of his handheld GeoTech navigator, like that would somehow reverse its static rigor mortis.

Each second that passed with this shaky-handed, wide-eyed basket case of a man fumbling with the useless hunk of metal, I felt my blood pressure rising another five points. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I reached out and snatched it away from him and began to fumble with it on my own. He didn’t protest, simply retreating back into the shadows of some decrepit, halved skyscraper, as far away from the gleaming tendril as possible.

I, on the other hand, gave in to the indescribable urge to slink the slightest bit closer to it with the GeoTech in hand. If these things were dendrites, or at least some kind of bio-organic neuron system as it was slowly starting to appear, they must be some sort of conduit, right? The tiny little hairs standing straight up, as if caught in some endless wave of electrical charge, sure seemed to point towards it. And it wasn’t like things could get much worse at this point, so what did I have to lose by sticking my hand within gripping distance of this—

“Holy shit, it actually worked.” My mumblings were choked out by the violent BEEP—BEEP—BEEP of the GeoTech reboot, but when the screen fizzled to life once more, a strange and indecipherable mess of symbols had replaced the usual Verdant Dreams logo. My hope slurped down the cracks in the ground like water rushing through a storm drain, but soon, the weird messages faded away, leaving nothing but a faded map with a flashing red dot smack dab in the center of it.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: But even though I should have been overjoyed, there was no way in hell I trusted any of it. Then, my suspicion was quickly eclipsed by a brutal, metallic roar far off in the distance. I would have recognized that deranged howl in any alien hellscape, in any panic-fueled delirium. The ship’s thrusters were commencing their warmup sequence.


After we poured back onto the ship and examined all the Nav boards, everyone was shocked to find that, of all things, the ground-penetrating radar was one of the first systems to kick back on. A mysterious signal—not a distress beacon, as we all expected, but a landmark pin usually reserved for cave salvage missions—had popped up out of nowhere and flooded us all with blind hope again. But there was one problem:

It was coming from the center of the planet, far too deep for an old rust-bucket like this to excavate. We had some crude archaeology tools on board for our salvage missions, sure. But at the very least, we’d need one of the blasters from the Verdant Dreams Mothership colony to bore a hole even half as deep as the signal. Unless, of course, the ground around it had collapsed like everything else on this mind-bending psychedelic nightmare world that used to be the pinnacle of all the galaxy. That was our only hope.

So just like that, I was a back-alley archaeologist instead of a washed-up mercenary, clinging to whatever faint chance there was that this necrotic, ethereal virus had eaten enough of the planet away to reveal whatever was screaming for us to come closer from every screen on the ship.

When I saw the domed spires like rotting onions with radioactive, wispy tails, black and dominating on the eastern sky, I knew I’d either completely lost it, or we’d all just won the worst lottery in all the multiverse. Even from so far away, I could tell we were coming up on something I hadn’t seen since the moment we landed on Vaenmyr: A fully intact building that had somehow survived whatever the hell happened down here.

As we drew closer, I realized the tendril-swamped megastructure had not only survived it, but prospered in it: Luminous with blue fire on the horizon and as enigmatic as a forgotten dream, its endless, spined wings sprawled in all directions, larger than several cities. I couldn’t tell if the ghastly veins of energy licking out from every tower were mocking us, or beckoning us in. We hovered over flaming piles of rubble taller than mountains, awestruck and silent in the shadow of a gnarled, trunklike braid that twisted skyward from palace’s depths—so absurdly tall that it seemed to pierce the stars themselves.

“It must have been beneath the city all along.” I exhaled with a sigh of amazement, something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Did it know we were coming? Even Valison couldn’t hide the wonder in her eyes when I glanced over and gazed into them and saw that bastion of weird, wild despair gleaming back.

The radar was going crazy, now—a pure, terrorizing cacophony of flashing red, howling in all directions. The autopilot dragged us down through the ravenous storms of mist, and every hair on my body began to stand on end. In that moment, it felt like I was being watched by a thousand lurking eyes. The ship settled onto a platform spun from some empyrean blue crystal that I’d never seen in any salvage mission or sketchy pawn shop. Terridium? I silently wondered. When I looked out the windows and glimpsed nothing but that primordial, blood-curdling storm of blue, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the source of every disturbance on Vaenmyr: The reason the planet was sterilized, and the reason all of us were trapped here, too.

“I knew it . . .” Valison scoffed, unable to take her eyes off the wonders unraveling outside as the ship settled into the bizarre medium below with a hideous, grinding bang. “It’s an Insavatu energy weapon, hands down, and Vaenmyr was the testing ground.”

“Why is everything always about the Insavatu with you?” I wasn’t sure what made me say it, but it felt like those ice tendrils that now pounded against the viewing glass were gently gliding through my veins as I whispered, “What about the Arachni Plasmadroids? They were here first. If anyone had a grudge, it would be them.”

“Bullshit,” Valison argued, hatefully slamming her gloved fist back against the glass. “You’re the try-hard loser that always reads the briefs: The Arachni are extinct. You really think they could survive a hundred thousand Terrorboric Incinerator Mines blasting down for all those years, Alyx? No one could: No one does Terraforming like Verdant Dreams.”

In that moment, I couldn’t figure out why, but I hated her. It might have been how she sounded like one of those soulless pamphlets we were forced to read back on Torvyn to look busy when the Archons came around . . . Or maybe it was just the fact that that she wasn’t showing enough reverence for something that was clearly far beyond the bounds of any human—or Insavatu—imagination.

“Terraforming, sterilizing, it’s all the same: And none of it means shit if the race you’re trying to kill has an underground temple that’s bigger than any waystation I’ve ever seen,” I said, gesturing out the window, expecting more of the same . . . 

. . . But instead of the contorted, razor-sharp spires that beckoned hungrily to me on the way in, I was faced with an ethereal, bioluminescent forest of wonders. Every tentacle of terror had shrunken down to a blade of tall grass, swaying gently in the electric breeze, framing a sparkling path kissed by golden vines that led up to an archway of pure, pulsing energy in the side of the megastructure.

It was the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen, except for the idyllic tree that overshadowed it all, sprawling up majestically from the heart of the Palace: Its decadent, limpid branches sprawled across the heavens and made the legend of Yggdrasil, which had endured since long before the Earth was blown away to a formless cloud of dust, seem pale.


Ten of us had abandoned the ship—and the crew holed up inside it—for the bleak, enthralling unknown of the megastructure before us, and after passing through the gateway, five of us remained. Whether the others were vaporized instantly or whisked off to some dimension far worse than here, I’d never know—and I didn’t care, either: I was far too fixated on drinking in the wonders of the sprawling cavern that awaited us beyond the veil.

To call it a “room” would have been irreverence bordering on blasphemy: For there was no beginning or end to it, at least that I could see, and instead of four walls, or even a ceiling, there were only bizarre static glyphs that reflected back symbols that not even our most advanced Translation Interfaces could decipher. It seemed to grow infinitely large then shrink back to the size of an atom with each passing second, but somehow that didn’t stop us from wandering through its still-beating heart and inspecting the unimaginable wonders that lurked within.

Most curious of all were the sprawling statues of segmented, hundred-legged beings that seemed to know no beginning or end. As chaotic and majestic as the ruins themselves, they defied both physics and biology with their contorted segments of spine. I wondered if they were carved in the image of the Arachni Plasmadroids, the original denizens of this wretched planet—or even stranger still, if the Plasmadroids had built them in homage to some forgotten gods whose names no human being would ever know.

We all wore backpacks stuffed with crude excavation gear older than we were—except for the deconstructors powerful enough to bore a hole straight through even the thickest coffins, those were Verdant Dreams standard issue—but even those were useless in this wonderous realm of pure energy and living crystal.

“The carbon meters are completely worthless on this stuff . . .” Valison muttered with more than a twinge of disappointment. “It’s reading like it’s a million years old or something . . . But there’s no way.” She finally gave up, chucking it with disgust onto the gnarled leg of the nearest statue: To her dismay and my amusement, it instantly evaporated inside the glimmering, hollow webs of its toes as if it were never there at all.

“Yeah, at this rate we might as well drop all our gear right now and travel light,” I shrugged. Unlike the rest of them, I didn’t give a shit about “figuring it all out”: I was more interested in wandering around and taking it all in—especially since the crackling energy gateway we’d entered through had now completely fizzled away, making it glaringly obvious that we were never going to leave.

“Whatever this place is . . . We’re trapped here, and it looks cool, so why not stop screwing around with these hunks of junk and enjoy it?” I suggested, my eye suddenly catching a checkered mess of pulsing lights that had randomly materialized on the floor not far from the toes of my boots.

“What do you mean, ‘whatever it is’?” Valison demanded, finally giving up and climbing to her feet, staring between the darkly gleaming screens that surrounded us on all sides and raising her eyebrow as if it was the first time she noticed them. “You really think there’s a chance it’s anything but an Insavatu WMD store at this point? Get over yourself already!”

“Bullshit,” I snarled back, my eyes darting again to the weird pattern of dancing lights upon the floor that seemed to draw me closer and closer by the second. “You think the Insavatu just slipped past Level 8 Clearance and built something like this while the Federation was sleeping? You said it yourself: This thing’s been down here for over a million years.”

I didn’t say it out loud, because I knew Valison would spit all over it thanks to her fake bravado—and maybe even to preserve her sanity—but this place belonged to the Arachni Plasmadroids. I knew it from the moment those eerie, alien symbols burned their way into my brain from the nightmare screens on the wall, and the mind-bending ruins of those frozen “statues” all but confirmed my suspicions.

Everything I’d ever read about them made them out to be primitive Arthrodroids without the capacity to feel, or think, or do anything but swarm—at least that’s what Headquarters wanted us to believe, so we didn’t question why they blew all their colonies to dust with a million megatons of Terrorboric fury.

But, standing there in those alien ruins, I realized that Headquarters was full of shit and always had been: The Arachni were never dead at all. They’d been living in their kingdom of shadow far beneath Vaenmyr all along, and now they were right in front of us—hovering far over our heads with their thousand feelers, their silent screams resounding from the peaks of their abysmal temple to chaos, or whatever twisted god they served back when mankind’s ancestors were still mucking around in the primordial oceans waiting to bud their first limbs.

Still riding the vapor trails of my morbid revelation, I made my way for the flashing checkered pattern at last, not caring if it beamed me up or vaporized me to bits from the second my boot brushed against the first square. Some kind of switch, I sensed as a luminous aura of comfort and wonder rushed up through my entire trembling body, and my foot sank down into the aether just like Valison’s carbon meter had.

No one tried to stop me as I crept recklessly forward, my other foot now rooted as firmly in place as the first in the churning celestial goop. I wasn’t sure if anyone else even noticed what I was doing: Somehow, it seemed like this eerie, indecipherable pattern had cropped up to consume me and me alone.

The tingle of warmth and excitement captivated me so intensely that I hadn’t noticed the entire chamber around me beginning to twist and boil. Instead of unrecognizably foreign symbols, the screens now flashed wildly with images of shattered worlds and hungry quasars, wringing out the death cries of long-lost civilizations whose dread and fear coursed wildly through me even here, across the stars and countless galaxies away.

As everything faded to a blackness darker than the tomb and older than time, all I could think about was the sudden, haunting realization that had begun to eat me alive from the moment my foot brushed the electric dream pulse of the switch:

Where did all the tentacles go?


“Wake up,” A strange-yet-familiar voice insisted, cutting through my tranquil sleep like a knife in the dark. There was something about it that reminded me of Valison, and for a moment I wondered if she was there—but, even without opening my eyes, I could sense that I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life.

“Go on. Explore.”

I didn’t want to, but I finally gave in and stirred. I found myself entombed by walls of glass that narrowly separated me from a tranquil blue ocean that produced a constant, gentle flurry of bubbles boiling up towards some unseen surface, far above. Countless strange, swaying pedestals that held glimmering azure diamonds more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen lined the walls of the long, straight hall that sprawled out before me. I had no idea where the antechamber of the ruins had gone or how I ended up here, but in comparison, the low ceiling and narrow walkway were almost cozy—

At least, they would have been if I hadn’t realized that the “pedestals” were actually the same creepy blue tendrils that ruled the world outside, protruding from a hypnotic celestial blanket that pulsed where a floor should have been. I ignored the strangeness of it all, along with the constant pounding in my head as I shakily staggered to my feet, unable to take my eyes off the nearest mesmerizing, multi-faceted diamond resting in that cradle of feelers and goo that seemed to beckon to me from both a few yards away, and the ends of time itself. From the moment I realized I was strong enough to walk again, I knew I had to have it—so badly that if I couldn’t walk, I would have crawled.

A strange fusion of sadness and longing drove me as I made my way towards the tendril and the otherworldly treasure it clutched so lovingly with its countless hungry suction cups. Something about its mind-bending, multi-faceted surface reminded me of the crystal altars outside, but it was of a much finer quality—as if whatever I saw out there was but a shadow of this crown jewel of all the multiverse. I expected resistance when I reached out to steal it from its slimy keeper, but to my surprise, the appendage surrendered the beauty to me without the faintest twinge of resistance, almost as if it wanted me to have it.

From the moment my fingertips brushed its crystalline blue surface—as enigmatic as a sapphire, but a million times clearer—my ears were filled with a vile and raucous screaming that I instantly knew I would never forget: The words, if there were any, were completely unintelligible—but I knew by some instinct older than language or empathy that the countless creatures begging for their lives were in a great deal of pain. Great catacombs spun from some bizarre fusion of silk and metal flashed across my vision, collapsing under their own weight, ravaged by blue tendrils and white-hot flame just like Vaenmyr.

I’m not sure how I finally managed to separate my fingertips from the relic’s shivering surface, but when I returned to reality, I’d collapsed to my knees, and the diamond was cast aside and splayed open on the aether before me, hemorrhaging an impossibly complex web of circuits out upon the constellations of the floor. My stomach heaved worse than it ever had from the landing drivers, and my brain felt sick from all the spinning—but as horrific as the visions were, for some reason, all I could think about was dragging myself over to the next tentacle as quickly as possible to learn what secrets it held.

These memory archives, or supercomputers, or magic gems teeming with infinite wonder—whatever they were, they were unlike anything I’d ever seen, anything I’d ever dreamed before. Whatever technology made something like this possible was far beyond the capability of any human or alien in the Nightside Arm: At least, any that had ever been accurately archived.

My slime-drenched hands shook with something between euphoria and dread as I reached for the next diamond, smoother than bone licked by water for a thousand years, and brighter than a dying star. This time, there wasn’t a cacophony of screams, or even a torrent of blazing fire: There was only blackness and a sick, biting, bitter cold that made me clench my teeth so hard I involuntarily cast it aside yet again. Only afterward, when the artifact rolled magnetically back to rest at my feet, did I realize it wasn’t the cold that made me involuntarily chuck the diamond against the tunnel of glass, but the emptiness.

That was what all of them had in common, I soon learned, after what could have been an hour or a year of exploration in that time-lost hall: I mucked through countless weird, vile, ravaged worlds, void of everything but the stagnant dread that lingers long after a flawlessly executed genocide fades into the most distant well of memory.

Well, that, and the tentacles.

Slinking down into the muck between two conjoined pedestals, my eyes bloodshot and wide, I finally began to wonder if I’d seen enough: But then, the same distant, echoing voice from the beginning—the one that somehow reminded me of a bad impression of Valison and every other human being I’d ever metrevealed itself again with an intriguing suggestion.

“Why not try that one?”

Somehow, I hadn’t noticed it up until that moment, even though it stood out from all the rest in stark, blood-red ferocity: I was far too exhausted to even lift my hand, much less drag myself across the hall over to the foot of that shivering tendril up which sticky cobwebs crept. But as if commanded by something greater than itself, the tentacle crept slowly, eerily towards me and laid its gift across my lap, leaving a wet and stinking trail in its wake as it retreated back into the shadows.

Finally, something that made sense.

I stared in awe at the ziggurats of old Mesopotamia, ringed by piles of broken bodies sacrificed in Marduk’s name. They transitioned seamlessly into the pyramids of Egypt, built by our Insavatu rivals in the formation of all the darkest constellations, and then to sprawling medieval towns at the edges of dismal moors, in the shadows of castles that housed the ancient bloodlines that would eventually pave the way to the stars.

The scene soon shifted to mankind’s first journey to the skies, in a rickety old tin can that made our ship outside seem like a decked-out Federation dreadnought. Then, I drank in what I imagined must have been mankind’s very first shattering of the old Earth’s atmosphere, with two figures in primitive, comical white spacesuits staggering around blindly on some rock out in space.

I nearly choked with awe when I realized the true gravity of what I was seeing, but suddenly, goosebumps appeared up and down my entire body and I knew that something was off: After drinking down so much agony, so much merciless death, these visions of teeming, resplendent life were almost irreverent in comparison. Why was this well of memories so different from all the rest?

But before I could contemplate it too deeply, the entire hall began to spin and boil, and the glass that separated me from that great, vast ocean was suddenly replaced by pulsing holographic screens not unlike those in the antechamber of the ruins. I tried to shift around to get a better look, but it was like my legs weren’t there anymore, instead replaced by something as alien as all the worlds I’d drank in within the diamonds—something sticky, something wet.

I glanced down to investigate, and it almost seemed like there were slime-covered blue tendrils where all my limbs used to be, but the sight didn’t stop me from drinking in the atomic glory now exploding in full force behind the screens which made all the previous mushroom clouds look pale and grey: A thousand megatons of nuclear fission gone wrong, splayed out across the sky like a veined spiderweb between city, after city, after . . . 

It isn’t too different from the webs we saw out there, really, I mused, moving on from the death of the Earth as quickly as one might recover from swatting a wayward fly. And, for a moment, I fancied I glimpsed the ghost of those same spectral, glimmering tendrils somewhere through the ashes of the dying Earth, but when the smoke cleared and revealed a new galactic age of exploration and freedom unlike any humanity had seen before, I knew it must have existed only in my imagination.

Strangely, the entrepreneurs and pirates and government drones in these visions didn’t seem as soulless as the creatures in the previous exhibits: They were more like real people, laughing and screaming and crying with joy as they staggered out of their bunkers and into the metallic coffins that would take them away from the doomed world and toward the infinite stars.

The stirring sulfur clouds of Venus soon paled in comparison to the hypnotic rings of Saturn, and before long there were as many wayward ships as there were stars in the sky: And mankind continued to multiply and conquer, along with those creeping, watchful tendrils that somehow seemed to snake their way into the backdrop of every victory, of every celebration. Strange...I never read a word about them in the history books.

But I saw them now whenever I closed my eyes, and every time I drew a single breath I felt them making their way up through my lungs, caressing my innards, showing me these sights I never deserved to see. I was getting closer to the present, now, closer to the truth . . . But would my body hold long enough to—

“First contact with the Insavatu . . .” I mumbled in words that were not words, but a perfect audial manifestation of those garbled symbols that lined the entrance hall. I wondered all along if and when it could come, but never dreamed I would see it with my own eyes: Their sickening, blood-drenched glyphs flashed across the starstreams, blowing entire colonies to dust with their Terrorboric Fury that we would later reverse-engineer. Humanity’s darkest moment wasn’t the nuclear annihilation of the motherworld, but the plague that those damnable demon bats forced down upon us all. And then, among the immune, the Eternal War broke out: The one my crew and I were still fighting to this very day. So, it was no surprise that those abominable, mutated bastards had led us here to die, or so my dead friends thought . . . 

. . . But all along, I’d known the truth, and now I was staring it dead in its six eyes with nothing but a nanometer-thick holographic screen separating us—and it wore the skin of a hungry Arthrodroid demigod with pure, plasmatic fire vibrating between each and every one of its infinite shivering electrons. It was a perfect living replica of the monstrous statues we’d admired in the hall before leaving the old world behind. I knew, even before I gazed into its crimson black hole of a face with its hideous, contorted features flickering in and out of existence, that it was the master of these ruins: And I knew that it had been waiting for me for centuries, or maybe even longer.

“You were here before...they came,” I buzzed to it telepathically, unsure of when or how I became capable of communicating in its completely bizarre and garbled tongue. In the next exhibit, I knew from the placid and rare blue sky that I was looking at Vaenmyr—but instead of the cloud-piercing skyscrapers and bridges that spanned entire continents that I’d come to know from the mission briefs, there was nothing but sprawling crystal mountains and meandering rivers of blissful cerulean nectar.

It nodded calmly, confidently, and the air around it crackled and hissed with the faintest twitch of it its feelers. “Long before,” it hissed without words, but there was something about the sprawling moors of untouched blue grass and the sublime blue hills filled with multitudes of its kind that was so mesmerizing that I had a hard time understanding the gravity of its words.

“It was beautiful here . . .” I muttered, this time in my own tongue, but it violently slashed at my throat with a frenzied, segmented leg, and I knew better than to spew such indignities in this sacred museum of memory ever again. I couldn’t help but wonder yet again why they kept such detailed archives of all mankind’s greatest accomplishments if they loathed us so—but any questions I had on the matter seemed to dissolve before I could even form them, and I watched as the Arachni Plasmadroids basked in the wonder of their sublime Blue Heaven for ages uncounted instead—before the Verdant Dreams contractors burned through the ethereal rings that guarded the planet since the dawn of time and commenced their terrorization.

The Terrorboric Incinerator Mines fell, and the rivers evaporated, and the crystal mountains exploded into a million broken shards, never to glimmer beneath those empyrean golden rings again. And from the ashes of the shattered Arachni kingdom rose a very different kind of monster: Humanity, victorious and thriving, cloaked in metallic thermal protection suits, ready to pump the atmosphere full of oxygen and erect razor-sharp monuments to dystopia and conquest where crystal mountains once stood. Worst of all, as if to rub it in the faces of the “eradicated” natives of planet Vaenmyr, they carved their skyscrapers from resplendent blue Terridium.

And they thrived, for a time, as they did on every world they terraformed, and warped it into their strange and irreverent image. They laughed, and they multiplied, just as they had at the drawn of the age of galactic exploration—and the most revered and well-regarded of their kind slowly began to flock there.

Until the tendrils rose up from beneath every crystal bridge of Eleventh City in perfect unison.

This was it, I abruptly realized. This was what happened a few weeks ago, when the final distress signal rang out from the President’s Mansion and all communication lines went dead.

I couldn’t explain why, but the satisfaction that crept up inside of me then was eclipsed only by the glory of those slimy, vengeful appendages that emerged from beneath every building, from the heart of every center of human prosperity. And towering far above them, presiding over the shattered skyscrapers and ruined paragons of human engineering, the braided tree trunk that guarded the entrance to these ruins glowed with more enigmatic majesty than ever before. Every last one of the “tentacles” writhed out from its wicked heart, with the Arachni Plasmadroids swarming between its ancient layers of bark, feeding them, guiding them.

“So it wasn’t an energy weapon, an Insavatu illusion, or even a monster...It was a root system.” I psychically projected in that forgotten language, quivering not with fear but with excitement as it finally all made sense.

“Never ending, ever-growing,” it nodded in fervent, electric agreement.

“Valison was right: Each branch was a dendrite, snapping sinister and ready to fire in the nuclear winter,” I mused to myself, nearly forgetting that our minds were one now as the glitching echo of my own thoughts faded into static unison with the monster’s own. “Hiding beneath the surface, killing time, waiting to take all of Vaenmyr back.”

The gargantuan magma centipede leaned so close to my face that I could feel my eyes and skin boiling away as it whispered,

“Not Vaenmyr. Everywhere.”


I don’t remember what it felt like before the roots took hold, and I don’t miss it. I, too, am just another morbid memory for my hosts to drool over, now, and I’ve grown quite used to all the pleasures that spring to life inside my illustrious prison of Terridium: Through magma-seared, screaming red tunnel vision I see everything the past and the present have to offer. The future is yet obscured to me, though I’ve asked to see it countless times. Perhaps there are some dimensions even the Plasmadroids can’t see, though somehow I doubt it as my host gives me a tantalizing glimpse of the world outside.

A ship, crushed as easily as tin can beneath the boot of a giant as a massive branch slams down from above—now one with the rest of the soulless wasteland, the descendants perish, and all transmissions go dead. But that’s far from the end of it, and it’s certainly not the beginning, either:

It started long ago on the walls of this very monolith, when the first Plasmadroids emerged from the Outer Dimensions before the first precursor cells to all mankind had stirred at the bottom of some nameless black ocean. From their teeming curiosity sprung a tree that would grow to penetrate not only this world, but all worlds—at least, that’s what my new friends tell me as I sink deeper and deeper into the hive, into the slime pits below, where there’s nothing but roots and boiling red lava pulsing up into the mother tree like blood through human veins, fueling her, making her stronger and hungrier with each passing second.

Through the millennia, untouched by human or Insavatu kind, free to grow and thrive relentlessly, her gleaming blue root system wormed its way through the entire planet. And there it lurked, biding its time, even when the Verdant Dreams contractors blew the surface world to dust.

After all, what were a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years to something that exists beyond the bounds of humanity’s understanding of time? And what is time eternal in the shadow of sweet revenge?

“It’s beautiful,” I buzzed in mind-splitting telepathic harmony to the lava centipede who trapped me here, shivering with delight as the roots hardened inside my veins, infiltrating me completely. It was as if the absorption of my soul and body gave the demented garden the strength it needed to penetrate the atmosphere at last, tearing through the dreamy blue rings of Vaenmyr and bleeding out into the silent vacuum beyond—past Torvyn Station, and the Verdant Dreams Mothership, and a thousand terraformed worlds. The tendrils choked them all slowly, mercilessly, from the inside out, spinning their dominion across the entire Nightside Arm as easily as a spider spins a web in some forgotten corner.

I recalled the innumerable, eviscerated planets that were once too much for my feeble organic brain, and I finally understood why mankind’s diamond was the black sheep in that trophy hall of extinguished civilizations. It simply hadn’t earned its place yet—but now, its fate was blasted in ten-trillion-bit technicolor upon the glimmering walls of my eternal prison, written by tendrils that exploded all the way to the interdimensional battlefields at the edge of the galaxy where man and Insavatu had ripped at each other’s throats for countless centuries. Every last dreadnought was shattered with a single sweep of a stray crystalline vine, and I knew the war was finally won.

Awestruck, electric, and fading as quickly as the vapors of all mankind’s memory, with my last shred of energy, I sorely whispered to my guide: “Is this all a dream? Or...is this just another memory?”

My host said nothing, but its night-black lips curled back into an igneous, indomitable smile.


Back | Next
Framed