Chương 114: 7.16 No Return without Receipt or Label

2104: 04: 19: 15: 44: 58 It worked. While I couldn't launch or steer my missile form, the payload survived the mimicry and could be detonated at the flick of a switch. So we – that is Mom, Needle Knight, Jauntiste, Levy, Knowinner and Darius – went in and dug, and dug, and dug and dug for over two long, monotonous hours. Explosion after explosion vanished kilos and kilos of dirt with every blast, yet the more we dug the slower progress became.

It quickly became apparent that we needed structural support for our impromptu mineshaft, and once we hit different layers of sediment the anti-dirt missiles didn't work anymore. All of this had to be accomplished through creative application of Darius' maker missiles. Structural support? Dirt-compacting missile. Boulder in the way? Anti-rock missile. Quartz, sand, or a different kind of sediment? Anti-[insert problematic substance here] missile. Air flow issues? Oxygen and momentum-granting missiles.

Groundwater in the way? Permafrost missile for stability, then a hydrophobia-missile to coat the tunnel after. No light? Well, that one was solved by Mom, but the point remained: things were getting more ridiculous the longer this went on. In the end Darius, with the aid of the geological survey team up on the surface, estimated that in those two hours of digging we ended up roughly a hundred to a hundred-and-twenty meters below the ground.

Nothing at all compared to modern day mines, but for two hours of work with highly improvised – if maker-powered – equipment? Not bad, especially since our path was long and winding rather than one of long shafts and branching tunnels. And then, just like that, with a final anti-I-don't-even-know-what-type-of-rock-anymore missile exploding and me forcibly shifted back to base, I came face to face with a concrete wall only barely lit by Mom's beams tracing spirals above my head.

For good measure, I unleashed the payload of a pre-mimicked set of missiles to stabilize the subterranean chamber before yelling, "Found it!" My voice echoed oddly along the long series of spherical holes passing for a tunnel, but a few seconds later, the heroes joined me in the pseudo-foxhole I'd made. They stared at the concrete wall in weary, yet grateful wonderment.

"Good," Knowinner said.

"Peakstar?"

"On it," Mom said.

"Everyone, step back for a moment." The lights circling our heads plus an additional four erupting from her fingers raced towards the wall. The pinpricks struck, then turned clockwise, then kept turning as they dug deeper and deeper into the concrete. Then as Mom pulled her light back, she (presumably) bunched them together and solidified them, pushing the carved-out circular slab from the back and into the subterranean chamber with a heavy thud. It all took only a few seconds.

On the other side was nothing but darkness. An empty, black void whose edges were only barely illuminated by Mom's light returning to circle our heads again.

"The Machine telling you anything?" Knowinner asked me.

"To go in," I said. It wasn't. It only 'pointed' – for a certain sense of the word – in the same direction it had been all the time.

"Hm," Knowinner hm-ed.

"Levy?" Without a word, the hero called his peasant levy one at a time, each entering the hole.

"Well, they aren't dying," he said.

"So, who goes first?" Unfortunately, he could not see through his summons.

"I will," both Mom and I said at the same time. Mom looked at me, a concerned twitch to her lips.

"Sam-" But I looked at Knowinner instead.

"My animal forms can go in without risk of death. If they do, I'll just switch back to b- my normal state, and can then immediately switch to another."

"And how many do you have?" the Guardian asked hesitantly.

"Hundreds." I'd never stopped collecting them, and losing them happened very rarely. There was a moment of quiet. One that Mom broke as she figured which way the wind was blowing.

"Knowinner, you can't seriously be considering-""I can do this," I said.

"You know I can. I've dealt with worse dangers than this."

"But this," she said, "this is different. It's… something's in your head, ready to- to…" She trailed off into a sigh. She didn't truly have an argument outside of being worried. She knew I had little trouble distinguishing the Machine's influence, and that I was adept at throwing it off. And it wasn't feigning inability either; if the Machine could truly take over, it already would have. Once it became clear Mom wouldn't say anything, Knowinner said to her, "We'll be right behind her either way." He turned to me.

"Go ahead. Peakstar, send some of your beams inside to light the way." She did, and with a nod I shifted into a cat and followed the lights, entering the home of the Machine. With Mom's lights and my cat eyes, its contents were instantly revealed. But not all of it. The room was large, far larger than the one I woke up in. Even with the light I could not see from end to end. No matter where I looked, after what could be anything from ten to forty meters the room ended in total darkness.

It made the room look as if it would go on forever. It being filled with rows upon rows of servers did not help that fact. The neat order of these black monoliths, all evenly spaced in their row and the rows similarly equidistant from each other, gave the room the appearance of one of those rooms with mirrors perfectly opposite to one another, creating endless repetitions.

"How did we miss this?" Darius asked as the group filed in behind me.

"There's something in the air," Needle Knight answered.

"An effect of some kind, albeit a fraying one." She retrieved a needle from her.

"Shall I put an end to it?"

"No. It might collapse the space we're in, maybe even the earth above us." Knowinner then turned to me.

"Is the Machine still giving you directions." Without changing back, I nodded.

"Good. We'll follow you. And stay shifted, just in case." With a couple of Levy's called spearmen acting as honor guard, I lead the way deeper and deeper into the server room. The further we went, the more I could sense what Needle Knight meant with 'something in the air'. There was a surreality to the space, and a bland kind of not-quite odorlessness that was wholly unnatural to my cat nose.

The space itself should've collapsed with the earthquake, and even if a large chunk of it escaped that doom the air should still be filled with the smell of dirt. Sound also echoed oddly in these server halls in the sense that they didn't echo at all. While a cat's feet were soft, my companions mostly wore boots, and even the pieces of Darius' metal armor clinking against one another didn't carry beyond a certain range.

The problem with sight – of the light not reaching to the end, of there being no end to the room – had been apparent on entry, but combined with how it messed with other senses only worsened it. That, and the fact that having walked well over two hundred meters by now without a change in scenery caused the rooms to appear truly endless. Which it might very well be, depending on what powers were used to construct this space.

"We're still walking straight, right?" Levy asked nervously.

"…Yes," Knowinner said hesitantly.

"Though I suspect we might not truly be moving." Everyone stopped at once.

"What do you mean?" Mom asked.

"Our trail; it hasn't lengthened beyond twenty meters."

"We've been walking in circles?" Jauntiste asked.

"You sure you don't want me to collapse the field?" Needle Knight said at the same time.

"Not in the literal sense. We aren't winding up in the same place over and over again. And yet, there is clearly some sort of warping effect going on. Technically, our trail does lengthen, but the furthest point is still but twenty meters away – right back at where we entered from.

"And no, Knight, we can't collapse the space – not yet. We need answers. If what Sam has told us, and what Doctor Dulang and LieSpy have told us holds true, we have an organization capable of not only reaching the so-called Achronality, but pulling people from it as well." Mom tsked.

"And they do it to kidnap instead of help people."

"This reeks of government work," Jauntiste said.

"What villain nowadays has the resources to pull this off unnoticed?"

"Old Central Intelligence type of bullshit," Levy agreed, sharing in the Warden's distaste.

"Clandestine, the blackest of black ops. The kind that even the organization they fall under doesn't know about, one that manages to acquire their own discrete fundings." He growled, "The villainous kind."

"Oh please," Needle Knight said, crossing her arms.

"What do you know about how the Unified State works? There's no way this would go underneath the Guardians' notice. Besides, what proof do you have?"

"Underground labs, mind control, a huge fuck-off infinite server room, a grand Machine; what more do I need to say?

"So all this, and to what end?" Needle Knight said.

"Kidnapping people?"

"The holy grail," Darius added stoically, "Powers on demand," and surprising everyone by siding with the Warden over the Guardian. I felt sick at their words. The Machine was government work? Made to- to kidnap people like me just to create powered under their thrall? It was a Treaty-break of the highest order. There was no way the Guardians would allow such a thing to exist, let alone participate in… right? Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"Stop speculating," Knowinner said.

"For all we know this place has been here for decades and the Machine only recently managed to claw its way out of whatever hole it found itself in." His words calmed me a little. At least these Guardians wouldn't.

"Okay," Jauntiste said.

"So what do we do now?" Knowinner turned to me.

"Shift back for a moment." I did.

"The Machine is still pointing ahead?"

"Yes." He turned to Darius.

"Darius. Can you fire a missile without payload in that direction?" The man nodded, fiddled with his wrist for a second before pointing it ahead of us. A second later, a missile buzzing like a wasp shot off and flew in that direction, straight as an arrow except without any drop whatsoever. We all watched it go on and on, the firefly light dimming by the second as it vanished into the darkness. We stood still, waiting, wondering, when suddenly-"Duck!" Knowinner yelled.

Everyone hit the floor and a second later Darius' missile flew overhead from left to right.

"It really is some kind of loop," Levy said as we all rose.

"Knight, make a web with your powers," Knowinner said.

"Set it to target the missile – and only the missile." The woman nodded and went to work. Another twenty or so seconds later, the rocket returned – this time from the way we came – and hit the anti-power circle Needle Knight had made around us. The tiny flare of its exhaust winked out almost instantly, sliding and bouncing along the floor before coming to a halt completely. Darius went and picked it up.

Before anyone could ask what was next, "Sam, I want you to walk twenty-five meters in the direction the Machine's pointing in, then follow the exact route straight back."

"What-" Mom began.

"After twenty meters, the light vanished and the trail of the rocket… altered," Knowinner explained.

"I have a hunch." A hunch anyone could understand.

"Alright," I said, and did exactly as asked. I shifted into a cat for good measure, walked past the servers as the light behind me dimmed before vanishing completely. Using the Machine's guidance as a compass, I walked a bit longer before turning around exactly opposite of where it was pointing. The light of the group quickly reappeared again.

"Her trail remains unaltered," Knowinner said once I rejoined, shifting back.

"We can't send her out there alone!" Mom ground out angrily.

"M-" I purposefully bit my tongue before I could finish the word. Not that the fiction was strong; our interactions left little to the imagination." Peakstar," I said pleadingly.

"Please. I have to do this. I have to." She turned to me.

"But I-" she struggled with the words, "I can't Sam. I just can't. You know I can't let you-" She found herself tongue tied. She couldn't say it, not without breaking the hair thin cover we were maintaining. And even if she could, there was no argument that could convince me. Except by throwing caution to the wind, the blunt-forcing it through love alone. She grabbed me by the shoulders and held me close, whispering in a wavering, close-to-despair voice, "Please, Sam. Please don't- don't do this.

I can't deal with it again." But that love reached both ways, and I had my own club. I reached for the nuclear option, the one point of leverage and the one argument I knew would tear down any resistance. It was cruel, but I had to know. I had to finish this today. I hugged her for a quick moment and whispered, "I just want to be whole again." Mom's grip grew slack, and I stepped back. Mom staggered, letting out a low sob as she buckled, Needle Knight and Jauntiste catching her before she fell.

They lowered her gently down to the floor, shooting me complicated expressions along with the other heroes. I shivered at the sight. If I'd felt sick before, now I felt ten times worse. A knot twisting in my stomach, cold sweat forming on my forehead, a pressure forming in my head as I audibly heard my blood run by my temples, and a cramp-like feeling in my chest, in my heart. Hesitation and self-hatred nearly turned to panic, my courage quickly evaporating as my breathing turned shallow and hyperventilatory.

Without another word, I turned around and started walking. My throat felt sore, a sob threatening to break free; I started walking faster. Eyes pricked and tears began to flow; I started running. Thoughts half-formed, incoherent and frantic, tears burned trails as I kept running towards the Machine. Heart pounding, adrenaline coursing, and sweat-drenched I pushed my body as I'd never pushed it before, sprinting as fast as I could at Olympic-level speed. There was no light, no way to tell directions.

My footsteps sounded hollow, all that filled my ears limited to my own coarse, ragged breathing. This place was hell, and I was all alone. The burning desire for answers shifted, my rush shifting to flight. I stopped running towards something and began running away, headless and heedless. But from what was I running? From Mom? The government? The dreams and hopes of ultimate heroism forced on me? From the joy it brought me despite that? From my friends' acceptance? From my life? From my memories?

From Samantha Pearsson? The scenery changed right as all my energy was spent. I slowed down as a white light re-illuminated the forgotten rows of black monoliths. Closer and closer I walked to the source, a gap, a clearing between the forest of servers revealing itself. Standing still and taking deep breaths to steady myself, I finally saw it. The Machine. It was an ugly, stupid thing.

A huge, dark, silent, pitch-black machine that could've been the brother of a 19 th century steam locomotive if it weren't for all the cables running through and from it. Nothing sleek and futuristic, nor something appropriately large or vicious looking for what it's done, for what it was capable of, for a machine able to pierce dimensions and use its grasping tendrils to wrestle unwilling subjects from the never-before-reached Achronality.

No, it was just an ugly, stupid, old machine that looked completely dead and nonfunctioning, if it weren't for a singular bright light burning in what passed for its coal oven. A final steadying heave of a breath and I started walking towards the Machine. It didn't activate all of the sudden, didn't try to take over nor even encourage me to come closer. It simply pointed at its outer self, waiting on its subject.

Running my hand along its surface – cold, coarse metal – my hand went to the crank-latch of its furnace, and opened it. Within were three things; two shards opposite one another and a circular wafer so thin it was all but transparent, holding some kind of microscopic machinery only visible due to said thinness. Each of the shards were held by prongs of a purely white metal responsible for the glow. I waited. Nothing happened.

I reached for my memcordings, hoping to draw the attention of the Machine just as it did last time. Nothing happened. Impatient, I grabbed one of the two shards and yanked it right out. The thing that held it stopped glowing, going inert. But again, nothing happened. Huddling closer to the remaining light, I looked at the shard in my hand. One side, the backside, revealed nothing but pitch-black darkness. Turning it over, the frontside revealed what it truly was. It was a mirror. I blinked. It blinked back.

I frowned. It frowned back. I raised my eyebrows. It raised its eyebrows back. The more I did it, the more I noticed something wrong. Something about the angle, or how it seemed to… what, exactly? I reached for my memcordings and rewound it in exact, turgently slow detail, and noticed what it was: the mirror image was ever-so-slightly out of sync. A span of time even less than a blink-and-you-miss-it-moment, but still with a subconsciously observable lag. But so what?

It didn't solve anything, nor provide me with answers. Examining it was fruitless, and I didn't have anything with me to examine the strange phenomenon further. So I did the only thing left to do. I stared and grabbed a hold of it with my power, copying it. Then, I shifted. It was as if a dam had broke; I was flooded instantly. Not with memories of my past self, or even the insidious influence of the Machine, but with every sensation one could think of.

My nose and tongue burned and numbed as if they'd both tasted the hottest chili pepper in existence then tried freezing it with a block of battery acid frozen through liquid nitrogen. My eyes felt attacked by a Sahara's worth of sand set to itch infinitesimally small hieroglyphs directly into my retina. My ears popped like I was bouncing back and forth between the Marianna Trench and the Moon.

Heat and cold from the nuclear heart of the sun to the absolute zero of space alternately washed over skin all across my body. Light brighter than the brightest star; humidity wetter than the wettest wet; balance like I was being spun around on a rollercoaster going in circles at Mach 10; every sense echoed with the worst sensation I could possibly imagine. It was like waking up the first time all over again, except worse because my mind wasn't so newly born.

Everything was crystal clear, oh so horribly clear of something no human mind was meant to comprehend. In that split second of my shifting, facing mirror to mirror (or portal to portal), I was translated into the Achronality, a timeless dimension where everything I was, body and mind, DNA and soul, mindscape and matter, genes and memes; all became instantly-accessible, perfectly-readable information that demanded to be read. I became memory.

All I'd ever experienced in these past eight-and-a-half months of life compacted into records more perfect, more complete than any memcord, then all relived at once. Observer and observed, both the mirror looking inward and the person caught within its gaze, I was stuck in the realm between. But then again, I had been in-between for all my life. A series of threads shooting off here, there and everywhere in the Achronality; that was what I was, what I'd always been; the piece connecting the pieces.

A large chunk of me was intertwined with that other-Sam, the real Sam, that part of me still stuck in the Achronality, separated yet not separate. A direct line of personality, of character and identity so thick and near they attracted one another, always in the process of becoming one if it weren't artificially held apart by others. And that other was the Machine in this realm. Hopes, dreams, goals, desired, values, ethics; these were grabbed by its tendrils, its own data, its own memory.

It knotted and twisted these together clumsily and desperately, though not in the form of the one-way street I had imagined it would be. In its efforts to keep one Sam from the other, it had inevitably given me some of itself. More than I – and likely it, too – had realized. There were dozens of other, infinitely thinner threads reaching out among the many, many thousands of specters haunting the Achronality, the temporally and achronally displaced.

Some were inactive, little more than frayed things barely holding on for dear life, and others were already cut. But among those were those that, though disheveled, were yet active, connecting to myself – and more specifically, my forms. Part of my shifter powers had been torn apart. Disassembled, reprogrammed and subsequently directed to allow for mimicry of maker-tech and inanimate objects that could vampirize the displaced peoples' nascent powers for my own use, albeit woefully incomplete versions of them.

All this came to me in that split second of me shifting into the mirror-shard. A dazzling series of sensations, of realizations and relived experience that boggled the mind, that all but broke the mind as I tried to comprehend everything all at once. And it was at that moment of imbalance that my foes struck. Pain, pain, soul-rending pain as like feral dogs the Machine and Sam pushed and pulled, bit and tore at the one thing they both shared and both wanted: my self.

One wanted to return to life, the other to continue to live. With hate and spite Sam's tendrils – itself ones she'd stolen from the machine, reprogrammed and rewired to be her own – tore into the Machine, and with love and longing and obsession it pulled at me, looking beyond me at the life she sought to reclaim.

The Machine, sprawled across the Achronality like a rotting mechanical octopus, thick with wire and limbs made of its own memories, the software and data – both the functional and incomplete – it had honed into weapons for exactly this purpose, tore at Sam and I with cold calculus.

It tried to keep us apart, stave off its demise for that moment longer and give me the tools necessary to become the greatest hero the world had ever seen – by absorbing me, grafting itself onto me, and rearranging me into the perfect hero-tool. And then there was me. The third voice, caught in between. Even if they wouldn't say it, they both wanted me dead.

One wanted to tear away what I'd become by myself, the bits of personality and character I'd built on my own so as to do away with the Machine once and for all. The other wanted my own principles, my own morals and values, thoughts and opinions, loves and hopes gone to replace it with a platonic ideal of its own making They were killing me. They might not think it, but they were killing me. They were killing me. I struck back at the two with desperate panic, spite, vengeance, and wild abandon.

And though it was without aim and without the experience the Machine and Sam had gotten in this strange dimension, I held the surprise advantage. I lashed out with the one thing I knew how to use: my powers. The threads connected to the specters haunting the Achronality decoupled and obeyed my will, shifting into thousands of copies retrieved from the Machine and Sam both. I kept striking and striking at them with a thousand whips, forcing the two other parts of me refusing to just listen and stop killing me!

Sam, herself only a partially-conscious being – closer to other people in the Achronality than either the Machine or I – was quickly overwhelmed by the unexpectedness and ferocity of my attacks. Whether she retreated or got beaten back into the unconsciousness that dominated the other displaced, I didn't know. But she stopped attacking, and that was all that mattered.

The husk of the Machine, having already spent all it could without tearing itself apart to try and rip the Sam out of me, likewise didn't hold out for long. After a few feeble attempts the looming figure huddled in on itself defensively, trying to preserve itself for as long as possible in the hope I would make the 'right' decision in the end. And as I floated there disembodied, tired and hurt from both their and my own efforts in the struggle; it was there I truly realized it was I that held the key, not them.

Unconscious and at my mercy, I could carve Sam out of me and return to being the android I'd thought I'd woken up as, except perfected. With my soul-dataform-mindscape and my powers, I could shore up the deficiencies of the Machine and plunder the wealth of the Achronality, giving myself powers even the strongest of the Triumphants could only marvel at.

Retreated into its shell, I could cut off the Machine's tendrils and destroy the memcordings-DOOR forever, embrace the piece of soul that was my pre-displacement self and become Samantha Pearsson in full, cutting the Machine off from the real world for good to let it rot in the Achronality all by itself, forever. Or I could do neither and instead choose myself. I could retreat, cut myself loose from either and return to the real world as who I'd been when I left.

I'd become like a regular achronally displaced, free of the burden of my past and the wishes of the Machine, free to live my life as the Sam I was. None of these three were acceptable. Besides being the death of me, the Machine's offer would do what, exactly? Make me a powerful hero and introduce other powerful heroes into the world? And then what? End villainy?

The world had more than enough heroes, even extremely powerful heroes, throwing itself at it already, yet there were always villains to match even if the ratio might shift. As Mom said, that was something society had to do by changing in such a way villainy became impossible. As for choosing either Sam or myself, doing so would close the DOOR into the Achronality, letting those thousands of souls trapped here linger for who-knows how long.

It would mean letting those displaced that did make it back, confused and partially or wholly without memory, or possessing the wrong memories, never be reunited with their past selves. How could I call myself a hero if I did not save these people? As Amber had said long ago, on the day where she accepted me as her protégé, the heroes were there to preserve the upward trajectory humanity currently found itself on.

The heroes themselves, they didn't matter as much as the people struggling out of the suffocating muck that was the Dark Age. And what better way to preserve the upward trajectory than restore an ill done so many times in the past? What better way than to reintroduce the thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of people thought permanently lost in this place between times? Choosing Sam, regardless of which one, would mean abandoning this goal.

It would mean the death of my principles, the death of my values, the death of the whole reason I wanted to be hero in the first place. The death of who I wished to be. So I chose the only path forward. Like the others it would mean the death of me, but this one at least held hope. And besides, sacrificing oneself has ever been the hero's lot. I activated my memcordings, my DOOR to the outside, and reached for Sam to pull her out of the Achronality.

The Machine reactivated and tried to fight it in a last-ditch effort, but rather than swat it away I embraced it tighter than ever, not even allowing it the chance to try and pull the other-Sam back into me. I slowly tore myself in half. The Sam and those parts of me that was her, I pushed through the DOOR and into the real world, returning Kati's daughter whole. The part of me that became the Machine, I shifted to fill my purpose for once. It did not struggle.

As the pain of being split in half, of the fraying of my threads, of the shifting of myself and of being pushed to the other side; as all I ever was got torn apart, as I tore myself apart; as all that washed over me, my consciousness began to fade. I watched as my memcordings stretched and rewound themselves, showing both the depth and brevity of my life.

Images of my friends and family; of school and music, books and television and the internet; of heroism and villainy; of violence and deaths; of anything and everything all the way back to when I first woke up, Trajan Baker's bloodied hand clinging on to me desperate with fear and pride of his final act of saving me; all flitted past, relived for one final moment.

Then these images too retreated further and further, until but a pinprick of consciousness remained, a last bit of my memcordings rewound beyond the first moment, a record that by all logic should not have been there. A word of the before and after, a distinction that held no meaning in the Achronality. A single cry that I failed to understand.