Chương 212: LOG-203.

Gems were interdimensional daemons. It was something I had begun to suspect over the course of my life as one. As more and more data either fell into my lap or was otherwise handed to me throughout my various careers, from independent spy and Fawn Coordinator, all the way to Diamond Adjutant and eventually Reef Overseer.

Of course, daemon was an almost catastrophic oversimplification of what a Gem's existence truly amounted to, but it was close enough for my admittedly limited mind to grasp, and so it served as an acceptable term. The Warp. Essence. Lightforms. Gemstones. The harvesting of 'lifeforce' alongside other resources from a given planet slated to function as a colony world.

I had been granted all the different pieces to a puzzle I hadn't even known had existed, yet one that now glared back at me as I dipped my hands upon its roiling surface. As Viridian, I hadn't known what the Warp truly was, beyond another dimension that proved convenient for faster than light travel. As Star, I still hadn't understood, though I had gotten far more comfortable in terms of using it to my own benefit.

But as Yellow Diamond's Pearl, I had held access to almost every single system and data repository the golden sovereign herself used, and though I had only looked at everything once, those singular instances were enough for me to immortalize everything without fail, stored away in the Gem equivalent of a memory bank for later use. … In essence, the Warp was infospace. A separate plane of reality in which everything that was material left an echo of itself. Physical objects created shadows.

Gravity wells influenced and generated corridors that were either easier or harder to travel through. Living things left imprints of themselves that joined into an almost invisible ecosystem naked to the mortal eye. The Warp was effectively a mirror to the material universe. A harmless one that was inhabited by generally benign entities that knew how to mind their own business, to the point that it took centuries of focus from a rather obsessive Moissanite Theta in order to even uncover their existence at all.

Naturally, as my second species were wont to do, the daughters of Homeworld had exploited the everloving fuck out of that fact, likely since the very first days that White Diamond herself had come into being. Gems were native to the Warp. Or at least to some indistinguishable level of it. Our minds and consciousnesses, our memories, everything that made us us, sat there, floating about as clouds of psychodigital programming.

But unlike the entities we shared the space with, we had anchors that allowed us a level of interaction with the material universe that no other being could achieve. Gemstones. Created from physically harvested resources and supercharged with Diamond essence, they were supercomputers so advanced that they were all but indistinguishable from magic to all but the most intelligent and knowledgeable of observers.

They served as beach heads into reality, from which our infospace selves could produce avatars of hardlight, ones that we then could pilot at will. It was such a natural, borderline instinctual process that most Gems (my previous self included) didn't even know they were native to, and technically still in the Warp. Controlling and driving drones that they genuinely believed to be their own bodies. How it related to things like cracks or even shattering, I wasn't quite sure of yet, though I did have a few ideas.

The fact that I was technically floating about somewhere as a cloud of data was also both concerning and yet… weirdly comforting. Regardless, those same clouds were where life essence came into the picture. The gemstones just needed raw material torn from the ground to be made. One could produce them by the trillions if they truly wished, but they would not be useful nor alive, let alone actual Gems. No, what was special about their construction were the aforementioned Warp echoes inherent to life itself.

Everything living, from a plant, to a walking, talking, thinking sapient being, left an imprint of its existence in the mirror dimension. Eternally distant, yet also intrinsically linked. One could liken it to a soul, perhaps. Or the inherent proof that life was somehow special and unique in a universe where it was supposed to be statistically unlikely. Unfortunately, as had become the case, such a beautiful system couldn't exist without someone deciding to predate upon it. Love what you're reading?

Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. Gestating Gems, given a spark of false life by their patron Diamond's essence, tore those souls apart and cannibalised them for parts, attacking anything around them before stitching together what remained into a fully functional infomind. A consciousness.

And then, over a period of a hundred to a thousand years, or sometimes even more, that consciousness would finish linking to its material anchor, and a newly born Gem would pop out of the ground, ready to get to work. The implications of it all would have been utterly horrifying had I awoken to it with fresh, human eyes.

But as my talons clicked against the prism in front of me, poking and prodding it and inspiring the occasional flash of light, I could only lament that I had become so jaded, so changed, that it was just another confirmation of my previous assessment. Gems were existential parasites. Hostile to anything that wasn't another Gem. Stars, it was blatant in the very virus-shaped injectors they used to help themselves propagate.

Inherently artificial Warpforms, daemons, all collectively feeding upon material and immaterial life itself to produce more of their kind. So what did that make me? A parasite gone rogue? Some bizarre Gem equivalent to an eco-terrorist? A flavour of human supremacist that couldn't even call herself a human in mind anymore, let alone body? … Irrelevant, at least for the time being.

In spite of it all, in spite of my own thoughts turning against me as the alteration White Diamond had put into my head continued to spread, I would do my best to remain myself. And… perhaps a hundred or so years of therapy would help me figure things out afterwards, once I got back to Earth, ensured it remained intact for at least the next while relative to my own immortal lifespan, and retired. But for now, the important thing was the prism. One of a dozen, but the first that I was attempting to… modify.

Prisms were kind of like Gems. Similar in that their power and existence originated from the Warp, manifesting within a material gemstone. Alas, they weren't sapient, bar perhaps Light Prisms to some limited extent. Instead, prisms were simply energy sources. Raw, wild, barely tamed energy sources, but glorified batteries nonetheless.

Entire planets or even solar systems could be drained of life to produce just a single incredibly powerful specimen, and even then there was a not insignificant chance that its Warpform would tear itself apart and collapse under the weight of its own raw energy. Those were Light Prisms, more often than not. Dangerous, weaponised, and sapient to at least some degree. No doubt very similar to the Fire Prism that had likely ruined this colony. The blank vessel in my hand wasn't like that.

More likely, half a continent (or equivalent mass in terms of life energy) had gone into its construction. I couldn't exactly be certain, considering I wasn't truly looking at its Warpform, but rather peering at a digital representation of itself, shown to me through its own programming. A single one of these shiny rocks could, at their weakest, power a space station. A battlecruiser. A seed colony.

And I had over a dozen of them just sitting in a stars damned bucket, abandoned in a lab underneath an extremely malfunctioning Atoll while trapped in the middle of nowhere. Time had… gone by rather quickly, in hindsight. There had been visitors. Violet. Patina. Shell, under supervision from the aforementioned Pearl. A few of the locals, even. They were all just… living, in the levels above me. Talking. Dancing. Painting. Having fun and trying not to let dread control them.

All of them, all holding out hope that Viridian, ever resourceful, ever stalwart, ever tireless Viridian, would somehow conjure up a solution that would see the big bad threat outside dispatched, and every single last one of them saved. What else was I to do but try my very absolute best to deliver? People. The Gems were being people.

And I wasn't, because I couldn't afford to be anything less than the discount supercomputer White Diamond had sought to turn me into over the course of her thrice damned modifications. In twelve hours, I had figured out how to directly interact with a prism's programming, bypassing my own legacy code's limitations and convincing myself that I was just making adjustments to a particularly unique Pearl.

In twenty four hours, I had created a working theory as to what it was, and how Gems related to it, based on my countless memories. In a glorified garage in the galactic boonies, I had just barely managed to come to the same understanding of the Warp that White Diamond's Moissanites had no doubt achieved eons before me.

In thirty six hours, I had successfully reprogrammed a tiny segment of code within my first subject for the sake of testing, and had encouraged it to use some of its near limitless energy to emit light. The subsequent flash would have burned a human being's eyes out, and perhaps even set fire to their hair while causing severe photochemical damage to the skin beneath. Thankfully, I wasn't exactly a man anymore. Such weakness had abandoned me the moment I'd first woken up as a Pearl.

In comparison to the sack of flesh and meat I had once called my body, my lightform endured the process far more elegantly than its predecessor would have, just as it had everything else life had thrown at me as of late. Pausing, I resisted the urge to grit my teeth, and filed the slipup away for later evaluation. There would be a reckoning, once I finally had the time to pour over every single one of the involuntary adjustments performed upon my mind. … There.

It was now forty eight hours and counting, and I had asked Atoll to direct Head down to what had become my laboratory, once the Pearl in question was amenable to speech, something which had taken some poking and prodding from Khaki, according to Violet.

And yet now, as the doors behind me hissed open, and a giant figure just barely squeezed through in the eerily silent way that characterised Batch Two's largest members, all I could think about was what Moissanite Beta had requested of the Nacre that had run this facility. Enhanced telekinesis. All of the local Pearls exhibited it, to some degree. Paint often made brushes float through the air during her sessions.

Khaki had assumed it was natural to our kind, only to be surprised when Patina had pointed out that she couldn't do the same. In comparison, Horn, Eyes and Head could fire blasts of pure force so potent that they could disperse the burning holoforms of our enemy, effectively destroying them. Hands moved, and fingers twitched as I stared at the immense figure now standing in front of me.

'Greetings Viridian! I was informed that you had need of my presence, in what way might I provide some assistance?' Slowly, my eyes fell to the modified prism held in my hand, its power coursing through my lightform, energising it. Powering me. Enhancing my mind. …And with any luck, it would enhance the Pearl in front of me as well.

"I have a proposition for you. And for your Batchmates." Home. I was going to make it home. No matter what it took.