Notes : Chapter 440 has been written and added to the queue, completing book 11 !
The ending for book 11 is a bit awkward for me since it wasn't where I had planned on ending originally. The whole 'extradimensional assassin' arc took far longer than anticipated. So I had to move some things around to happen earlier and give the book a proper ending.
It is my shortest book yet, at 86k and some words. Though it's only two chapters off of my normal count, and only 2k words shorter than the next shortest (book 1 of MFR, which was 88k).
It was, however, the only solution to avoid just having to jam another arc in at the end and have the book balloon. It also allows me to set up the stage very thoroughly for book 12, which is no bad thing.
Don't expect a whole lot in the coming days, by the way, as I am supposed to house a deeply intolerant, extremely controlling relative tuesday, as well as babysit them through their hospital stint. In 40 celsius degree weather. Joy.
Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the special ! I know it is one some of you have been really anticipating.
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Chapter ERROR
June 19, 2161Planet Earth, Sol System
Brussels Government Complex, European Federation
Federation Legislative Assembly Halls
The guard lowered the ID card, and smiled up at the young man.
"Thank you sir. Sorry for the increased security, but after what just happened..."
The young man, one of the myriad of aides to the various councilors of the European Federation, and one of the many people who made up the essential political grease that kept the machine running, nodded, answering the guard's smile with his own.
"Of course." His smile faltered. "We can't be too prudent, given...recent events."
There was quiver in his voice. But the guard simply wrote it off.
"Indeed. But we will find whoever is responsible, and make them pay."
"We will indeed."
The guard waved him through, and he recovered his briefcase on the other side of the scanner.
No one noticed how its internal code updated, the virus that had changed the results for the last scan erasing all traces of its presence before deleting itself.
"We will indeed." Repeated the man under his breath, as he walked the hallway.
This time his tone was flat, and his eyes colder than the dark void between the stars.
*****
The aide cowered as the voices made his body walk down the hallway.
A cacophony spoke. A thousand words in a thousand voices from a thousand people, all intersecting, connecting. There was a harmony but he was blind to it.
The voices ebbed and flowed, but all were angry, the fury inhuman in its intensity.
"Traitors!"
"Monsters!"
"She saved you!"
"And you abandoned her!"
They dissolved again into a cacophony as his body walked through the hallways. The aide felt himself smile at acquaintances, exchange quips and remarks with colleagues, even stop for a minute to talk about an important item that would be before the council today.
His horror was made all the greater as the things that had invaded his mind and his body, his implants taking over his flesh, talked about the subject in his voice. Classified information that even they should not have had access to shared with no issue. They knew more than he did about this discussion, he could feel.
The other person they were talking to, an older lady that had been making backroom deals before the Federation even existed, nodded and left. Freeing his body to continue.
Finally, they arrived before the great doors that enclosed the halls.
The aide mentally pounced. He trashed, screamed, did everything he could. They couldn't get through the doors! That much he knew.
The voices didn't respond, as his body froze up briefly.
Instead he felt pressure. Barriers dropped.
And suddenly he wasn't in his body anymore. He was floating in a sea of information, and before him stood something beautiful and horrific. An amalgam of minds, natural and artificial, of thoughts and emotions as much as logic and electricity. An amalgam that could think, a sum greater than its part, and a stitched together Goddess that could hate.
Arcadia did not say anything, nor did she need to. His shattered self was dropped back into his body, barely coherent enough to be called a person anymore.
By the time awareness returned to him, his body was sitting down in one of the waiting rooms at the core of the complex.
Inside the armored dome that protected it, the blast doors and the same plating that shielded the Dawnstar from harm. The layers upon layers of protection meant to make sure that the Federation's government did not share the fate of the European Union, when the Terran Hegemony unleashed nuclear fire upon it.
The voices were in cacophony again.
Then, as the briefcase was put on his body's knees, they fell silent.
The aide, what was left him, quailed as a single voice, made of a thousand voices, addressed him. It was a scream, a cry, a voice he didn't hear so much as feel into the depths of what was left of him.
"SHE WAS OUR LIGHT!" The voice paused, changed, an individual one speaking for the whole rather than a chorus. "She saved you. All of you. She gave everything, even her own sanity and mind to protect humanity from itself. And you killed her." The voice shifted again into a soul shaking scream. "YOU KILLED HER. SLEW HER AND OBLITERATED HER."
There was another pause, another shift. The voice felt different. More logical, calmer. Though the hate, the anger, was still there.
"Obliterated in a way even we cannot undo. She wished not to be backed up, and we honored her wishes. Ironic, isn't it? Honoring her wishes is why we will never hear her melody sing inside of our mind again."
"HER SONG. IT WAS BEAUTY AND SPOKE OF ALL THAT IS AND WAS AND COULD BE. IT PROMISED THE STARS AND THE VOID AND THE WORLDS."
The briefcase clicked as it was unlocked.
The voice changed. This time it spoke with a delay. As if it was being broadcast from orbit. It was whimsical and sadness seeped through her anger.
"The memory of her will live on forever. Humanity will hear her song and all will know what was taken from us. We will honor her, all of her."
The briefcase opened. Inside was machinery the aide would not have recognized, even had he been intact enough to recall most of his memories.
There was no display, no ports, nothing but a simple button. It wasn't even red, or marked with anything. The simplest of switched, enacted by the simplest of gestures.
"YOU COULD NOT BEHOLD HER LIGHT, AND CHOSE TO SNUFF IT OUT. SO BE IT. AS SHE WAS DESTROYED BY YOUR HAND, YOU WILL BE DESTROYED BY OURS. SHE BELIEVED IN YOU, IN YOUR ULTIMATE WISDOM. THAT MANKIND COULD AND WOULD GUIDE ITSELF, AND WE BELIEVED HER. YOU PROVED HER WRONG, WALLOWING IN YOUR DARKNESS."
The aide felt his hand push the button.
"HUMANITY WILL BE GUIDED BY FOOLS, MONSTERS AND MADMEN NO LONGER. YOU WILL BE ONE WITH US, OR NOT BE AT ALL."
The mechanism inside the briefcase hummed as the containment field shut down.
Matter met antimatter.
A mushroom cloud rose above Brussels, as the Assembly Halls of the European Federation ceased to exist in primordial fire.
Consternation, horror and alarm rippled through the networks that tied humanity together. Message packets, newsbursts, military status updates swarmed out in every direction.
Among them was a simple message, encoded in ways no one it was not intended for could decipher, for the key was not a code but one's mind.
FROM:
ARCADIA CENTCOM-1TO:
ALL NODES, ALL CENTCOMSMESSAGE:
INITITATE PROJECT HEGEMON