BECMI Chapter 451 – Severed in Time, Severed in Reality

“It’s technology on a massive level, but probably self-empowered and maintained with nanotech backups that can repair temporary breaches, with workarounds that can compensate for any single failure,” Thor grunted, also studying the layouts as he tapped his Hammer. “If that’s a Pattern, then I believe at the center of it is going to be our next Node… and the primary power source and focus for this effect.”

“For the throat!” Sif grinned, red hair fluttering as if alive.

“For the middle,” Dama Adama added, nodding agreement. “Anyone this desperate will be willing to cut their losses and exclude a failed node from the Formation. If it fails, it will be cut free, and if necessary, the outer areas will be sacrificed to maintain the center.

“They might be able to rebuild from the center out, but if the center folds, the whole thing loses its focus and will collapse to what it should be. Chaos will reign, swallow everything, and it will become what it has been staving off.”

“Magical Weapons and spells against a high-tech society. It’s like the previous worlds were trying to get us some experience against them. Does this mean the final world will be a viable tech society?” Chardon asked, hand on his RapierAmoure’s hilt.

“That is unlikely,” I murmured, shaking my head. “This looks to be hard tech, but much of the technology we’ve been seeing on the earlier planes has been biotech, and misaligned biotech at that. Aberrant influences upon it, wild mutation without regulation.”

“You’re saying this could be a laboratory for an Immortal watching all this like some sick bastard?” Sif sniffed, as the others all made faces.

“They are like frozen examples of science going off the rails, getting worse as we went deeper. This here is soulless scientific efficiency at its worst. Biotech going bad looks a great deal like Aberrant material corruption.”

“Things from Outside Creation are generally eternal, and would ignore time,” Dame Adama pointed out thoughtfully. “You said you saw no trace of them on the Far Shore…”

“There was also a lesser Entropic Immortal living there, and it would have been after the equivalent of thirty million years passing from today. Add in the closeness to the Sphere of Death, and I don’t think even Aberrant influences are going to last overlong. We just… have to expect a lot of stuff needing to be vivified in the next one, I imagine.” Because ethically orange and blue creatures weren’t limited to Aberrants, either.

“How to approach this?” Molniya asked, looking back to Thor and Dame Adama, who tended to come up with the strategy.

“Straight for the middle, using magic to evade visibility and sensors. Computers don’t get bored, so they likely have alerts for motion and visitors.” Thor waved at theIllusionary Wall, one-sided and semi-solid in front of us, that I’d thrown up automatically after emerging into this world. “I’m betting without this, they would have registered visible anomalies and sensed motion out here that shouldn’t be here, prompting drone responses.”

They probably would not be happy to discover we had a rather impressive array of Federation-level tech weapons, used as needed, the Avatars having no actual revulsion to employing mortal technology instead of magic and cold weapons if it was appropriate. But that was a problem for the locals, not us.

“Disksand UpcastMass Invisibilityto cover techno-sensors, got it,” I nodded. “High enough not to create a dust cloud, not fast enough to create an air ripple, and hope they don’t have scattered light dispersal sensors that will overreact to dust and air movement away from the cities.”

“Properly paranoid wizards. Have to love them.” Sif reached over and tweaked Helos’ pointed ear. The dark-skinned elf promptly yelped and turned around to flail at her dramatically in outrage.

Not too bad, or she might not let him meditate in her Null for some peace and quiet.

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I kept it down to about forty mph, which was fast enough to get us up even with the outermost of the domed cities in about an hour, meaning they were further away than expected, as well as larger than expected. I kept my altitude to about a hundred meters, the level terrain only broken occasionally by a crevasse, short dune, or weathered short cliff of gray-orange rocks dropping down, worn by the long winds and corrosive dust.

Primuskept a wind tunnel around us to keep most of the pressure of the omnipresent dust and foul air off, everyone in single file to take advantage of it. Everyone was on their own Disks, facing different directions, while Duum was actually on my shoulder and watching the sky.

Unsurprisingly, they had watchers a few dozen miles up, too. It appeared the sky went up at least as far as the radius of the demiplane did.

Still, we left no trail, left no wake in the air, and optical distortion trackers didn’t seem to think we were anything different than a random crosswind.

The Severance field permeating everything made my eyes twitch, fingers tingle, teeth ache, nose burn, and ears ring. It was VERY annoying, but if you didn’t have higher-end sensitivity to profound energies, such asDetect Magicat XII,Above and Beyond the Weave of the World, you could totally ignore it and think nothing was wrong at all.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

This was the ruin of a world subjected to extreme and uncontrolled science, everything harvested from it that could be… and then it had died as its timeline came to an end, for one reason or another.

Yet its inhabitants had enough power and knowledge to engage a quantum flux field of unprecedented scope, basically convincing the universe they were already gone, existing and not existing at the exact same time.

In a universe without magic, it probably wouldn’t have worked, but Chaos clapped its hands in delight, allowed it to manifest, Weird Science did its thing, and did so successfully.

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The central domed complex was twice the radius of the other domes that we could see spread out in the distance in a pattern something like an octagon, with silvery roads/rails/tubes connecting them, all of them crackling internally with fields and flows of quantum flux that were nauseating me.

Ahead of us was also the location of the last Portal, so for some damn reason, the Immortal who had anchored them here had put a magical device right in the goddamn heart of their technological empire.

“What’s your assumption on why there was no trace of them on the Far Shore?” Sif asked me from right next to me, her Disk leading the others, Dame Adama on my other side.

“Time. They ran out of energy, components wore down, and they weren’t able to replace them. Plus even if they solved the aging problem and made themselves functionally immortal, they still had organic origins and no transcendent energy to buffer themselves. Cell replication failures would cascade over the eons, turning them into warped things in mind and soul, and their bodies would wear out if their minds simply didn’t go mad over being unable to escape their fate, only stave it off.

“Of course, another Immortal could have come rampaging through and upset all their apple carts, too. Trapped in a world with time flowing at x10k multiplied by four thousand outside, up to today? Forty million years is longer than the lifespan of just about any species of creature, and we haven’t even looked for numbers of living things. Add another thirty million to the present of the Other Shore…” I just shrugged.

“Ah.” Dame Adama looked around keenly. “You think this is mostly automation…”

I nodded slowly. “I think the population is frozen in stasis to stave off the effects of years, and rotated in and out to maintain this effect. They are hoping to outlast their imprisonment, and don’t truly realize just the situation they are in.”

“Cruel and absolute,” Dame Adama mused. “Would this be part of the anti-science bent of the Immortals, manifesting itself?”

“I have a ninety percent certainty that this Severed demiplane was once a Prime Plane timeline that collapsed. If we traced it back, we’d likely find a nexus event or three where something powerful chose magic over science, and the fact that it was probably an Immortal likely created the branching and allowed the timeline to endure as long as it did,” I answered.

Sif looked around with a frown. “Could you tell if that was Nown?” she asked grimly.

“With the right spell and time to Cast it, yes. I’ll put it on the list of things to work on. It is unfortunate that researching X+ Valence spells has to be done on the world your magic is based on, or you get unfortunate micro-errors in the Casting that can go boom at inopportune times, or I’d make use of these time-accelerated realms just for spell research.”

“Too many interlaced factors,” Helos piped up from behind us, watching off to the right side. “From the first step, you’d have infinitesimal errors, and they start compounding through the iterations of the spell formula. By the end, the spell is unstable, and any fluctuations are enough to disrupt it. Given the energies involved, spatial collapse and mana ignition are among the least of things that can happen as you start drawing energies from multiple planes and sources… and things go boom!” he confirmed cheerfully.

“And if it wasn’t so risky to the Caster, yet another weapon in the Wizarding arsenal,” Lunia added from beside him, watching the scenery past alertly, yet serenely.

“How true!” Helos agreed cheerfully.

“Slow it down,” Sif said, the green eyes of her cat-like Mask narrowing as she sat up. I obligingly reverted to a gliding stop, minimizing any disruption in the airflow. “Mile ahead. There’s a security perimeter.”

She had better eyes than me by default, which her Mask only improved. I started flipping through off-spectra in the techno-bands automatically as everyone waited, only inching forward slowly as I wielded expanded visual ability and layered it with extraDetects.

“Paraflow field and inertial shifter. Cute,” I murmured to nobody in particular. “One is measuring the passing of matter in the quantum field. Anything varying from norm probably triggers an alert. The other registers any variance in gravity by the passing of cloaked or uncloaked matter, basically seeing if anything is retaining inertia that can be dampened in the area, and flagging it if so. Although… yes, down in subspace band Quorhi, there’s some neutrino weaves in the etheric substrata, looking for spatial distortions around and through the perimeter.

“None of it is measuring incidence of photons passing through. My Lady Lunia, if you couldSunjumpus all past it?” I asked coolly.

Null and Source were sucked in as the Avatar of Aru raised her hand, reaching out to grasp the unforgiving and warped orange-red light of the dying sun or star or whatever was reigning in the sky here. She sent us shooting by and past the screen of technological sensors ahead of us, riding on the bouncing light all around us to do so.

We flashed back into materiality a half-mile past the screen, only five miles to the outer edge of the Dome now.

There were emitters, glowing crystalline devices raised up on slender poles of crystallized silicon diamond, resonating with temporal absolution that was vibrating at a cool right angle to the proper temporal tide of this place, magnifying the effect that was being generated from inside the dome.

“Slow and careful, but I don’t see any mass or gravity or inertial sensors around us,” I told the others warily, who just waited patiently. They were unafraid of tripping the alarms, but they were also all wily combatants who understood exactly how devastating they could be if an enemy had no knowledge they were coming.

“There is no Nature to speak of here at all,” Arbor murmured, his eyes half-closed. “Aye, so dead even Death is mostly ignoring it,” he had to sigh. “This is the end result of science used without moral restrictions, much like a Deadworld.”

The others all agreed, with the caveat that here was no life, and we weren’t worrying about Anti-Life…