"We Were Scientists..."

[Girth]

But this was not science.

For generations, we had searched for answers. We unraveled the puzzles, the mysteries, the nature of nature and existence itself.

Though answers were found, some questions remained unanswered, even unanswerable, questions that climbed from the fog of our ignorance to loom before us like peaks of some ominous mountain range, growing more daunting, more humbling with every principle we uncovered.

And as the questions took shape, we knew, as we had always known, that they distilled down to a single query:

Why?

Why do these laws exist which govern our universe?

It was a question to end all questions, but to stop questioning was and is unthinkable. We knew, somehow, that the question of "Why?" would always remain, and if we answered one aspect of The Question it would only lead to another. But that did not stop us from digging. We dug through answer after answer until we were no longer digging but diving.

The device was our hunger incarnate.



We called it the Ocean of Answers, though every answer was a question. It read, in a sense, information from other dimensions of existence, other planes or universes, bound by different physical laws, if any. Some argued that we created these universes in the process of reading them. I suspect that they exist--though not by our understanding of existence--apart from us.

In any case, we measured the Ocean of Answers. We recorded irregularities. ...of what? We did not know. There was no vocabulary and the instruments behaved in unexpected ways.

We were learning a new science. A series of truths and patterns at odds with reality. Rumors came down from the overseers that we had piqued the interest of The Mother.

Do you know what happened then?

[WateryHell]

> Expansion of the human race throughout the galaxy universe.

[SeptimusMagistos]

The Singularity?

[Akumu]

Mother instructed you to find the best of all possible universes, and remake this one in its image.

[bobthepen]

Yo mamma is Deeeeaaaaaaaaddddd!

[Dragon Fogel]

>Explosions. Big ones. Lots of them.

[BurntSquirrelMan]

They came. The Old Ones.

[gloomyMoron]

> Destruction.

Knowledge is a great power, and a hidden weakness. Our thirst for knowledge was too great and too limited. The Mother wanted The Ocean of Answers for herself. There was war.

[Leibowitz]

Having fulfilled its purpose, the universe began to shut down.



Up above, without a fuss, the stars were going out.

[Dfaran]

>Suddenly, you realized what the flaw in Reality itself was - and you began to grasp that maybe, just maybe, it could be fixed.

[SleepingOrange]

The Mother summoned the chiefs of the Ocean project, and imparted some of the ancient stories that her caste were solely privy to. Most of our number shrugged them off as ancient myths, baseless mysticisms with no truth or reason, but those of us who had dove most often into the Ocean of Answers saw echoes of our findings within her words.

[Girth]

The Singularity?

We uncovered an irregularity in the Ocean. A change in the patterns we'd come to recognize.

Was this the other universe's equivalent to an object? A person? A planet?

We focused our attentions on The Singularity, painstakingly transforming our metaphorical darkened window into a polished glass door. A portal.



A human sage once wrote a novel entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The sage, a mathematician by trade, presented an irrational universe, where laws of nature behaved in unexpected ways, and logic as we know it was violated as a matter of course. Individual events and sentences might be sensical enough on their own, but taken as a whole the universe was inconsistent and unpredictable. So we felt as we mined the depths to probe and analyze The Singularity, understanding little about its nature, save that it was (most of the time) distinguishable from the universe it inhabited.

The Mother summoned the chiefs of the Ocean project, and imparted some of the ancient stories that her caste were solely privy to. ...those of us who had dove most often into the Ocean of Answers saw echoes of our findings within her words.

The Mother paid us a visit.

You hyperbarics do not know an equivalent to The Mother. All lived to serve The Mother, and that logic, those laws of physical nature which bound The Auzat to her for all time, still exists strong within me to this day, no matter that my devotion is nonsensical and irrelevant in this universe.

As I was saying, The Mother visited us.



Our minds were hers, and she absorbed our chaotic truths. In her wake she planted calm assurance, drawn from the long memory of our people, thoughts, stories, myths... ancient mysticisms now more relevant and meaningful than ever, as scientific truth disappeared into the illogic of The Ocean.

She assimilated our truths and our queries, our answers and our mysteries, and she synthesized a directive.

We followed that directive as one, the impulse as good as our own.

We opened the portal to The Singularity.

>Explosions. Big ones. Lots of them.

It is impossible to familiarize oneself with a universe that obeys fundamentally different laws. Our very logic of understanding is dependent on those principles which define our existence, and such a logic is inadequate, wholly inadequate, in comprehending a universe built on different rules.

That is to say, nobody expected the explosions. Though I suppose we had no right to be surprised.



The Ocean's rules, its patterns and principles, the laws of its existence, extended through the portal and into our own universe.

The patterns came to life, The Singularity took on form and meaning, even as we lost ours.



I experienced simultaneous darkness and light, colors that do not exist, complete and utter blindess, visions of our entire universe held aloft and turned sideways, blended, mashed through a prism and torn apart into bundles of energy and matter.

And the hunger.

Something dormant awoke.

Patterns spread and devoured.

The Singularity shrieked through my fingers and whispered in my phantom skull: RELEASED! ENERGIZED!

I comprehended all in a flash as a pattern enveloped the tangle of thrashing molecules I once called my body.

The patterns were parasites, they fed off of informational reactions that occured within the laws of their universe. They needed the connections of minds and thoughts to create coherency, and they derived energy from that flash, that reaction.

The parasites had almost utterly destroyed The Ocean of Answers long ago on whatever axis corresponds to our understanding of time. They had devoured its inhabitants until only one remained... The Singularity. When only that one thinking consciousness remained, the parasites--lacking any source of energy-- fell into dormancy.

Our portal, when it allowed our minds, our cursedly curious, scientific minds, into The Ocean, had awakened the dormant parasites, and a universe of insatiable patterns attacked our thoughts. With The Ocean's laws superceding our own, the parasites were destroying us.



The Singularity itself was being destroyed as the parasites pulled all this newfound information from its consciousness and combined it with my alien understanding to feed off the resulting reaction. Other parasites were just as quickly translating my knowledge to the other Auzat and The Mother, feeding and multiplying. I could feel my mind being devoured.

I had so little time.

I had to do it.

I had to...

[Dragon Fogel]

>Go insane.

[Leibowitz]

> Forget

[Pivot]

>Go insane.

Second. Also, oh my god you're General Grievous.

[DelitaHyral]

>Kill everybody.

[SleepingOrange]

Sever The Mother's connections to all of our minds by force.

[Akumu]

> Dive into a universe where no true communion of minds is possible, starving the parasites.

[gloomyMoron]

> Give up. To fight that which fed off of knowledge, that used our connections to reproduce, and that would be the end of our universe as it was the end of their previous universe (perhaps not even their original home) I had to give it all up. Knowledge. The Mother's connection. My life as it was.

[Girth]

> Dive into a universe where no true communion of minds is possible, starving the parasites.

I had to find a way to banish the parasites to a universe that would starve them.

With what life and existence remained in my ancient, phantom body, I seized the portal's controls.

It was not enough to throw my deteriorating consciousness into another universe. I had to pull everything with me.

My fellow scientists. The Mother. All the parasites that were spreading through our universe.

I broke it.



The universes inverted.

There are no words to explain what happened, no thoughts that can comprehend the experience, least of all my own. I struggled against snakey limbs of color and time. I thrashed my way destructively through nettles of light and information, tasting cold hunger against my spine.

Time carried no meaning.

The Ocean of Answers held universes I had never tried to comprehend, and now my existence conformed to unfathomable natures, warped and inconsistent.

I was a singularity against the ravenous patterns.

Can you sense where I am going with this, klesta of mine?

[Dragon Fogel]

You somehow became the singularity that you detected?

[bobthepen]

> You are, yourself, your universe.

[Varkarrus]

And then. Zorspoink. The Non-Euclidean Bat.

he came like darkness in the night.

He was the 10th dimension. All powerful. He was creation.

[This Works]

You became something outside reality?

Dad, I know you're lying! We get broadcasts from The Mother like every bilun.

[Girth]

You somehow became the singularity that you detected?

Ah, you are close. I was a different singularity, in a different universe... but I was detected, and--more importantly--I was rescued.

At least in a technical sense.



It must have been a scientific vessel. It had connected to the Ocean of Answers from a different angle, along dimensional axes beyond my comprehension, from a different time, perhaps a different dimension than my own. It saw me, a singularity against the ravenous patterns, and it drew me out.

I do not know how long I was imprisoned.



I was tested and sampled, probed and prodded, awakened, pushed, scraped, crushed, sliced and tormented.

I believe I died. Each time, I was revived by the ghosts and machines.

Finally, the tests presumably complete, I was caged with a creature. The machines or ghosts were watching me, I knew.



The creature wheezed and gargled, gazing at me with its single, lidless eye.

The Mother was gone, but my mind slid across that fact, that nonsensical statement. I ate my rations when they came and knew not my purpose.

Then the parasite joined us and everything changed forever.

The vessel had crafted a pocket dimension, like a glass orb of insanity, in which the parasitic pattern was confined.



But it synthesized our thoughts and feasted upon the energy of comprehension. Its universe and its laws held no sway over us here, beyond the confines of its personal prison, and we were not devoured.

Rather, we were enlightened. At once, the creature and I could communicate. That is to say, we shared thoughts involuntarily.

Its world and its people had been swallowed, much as the parasites had devoured mine.

I learned that this creature before me, which called itself the Iriyo, had been a great leader of its people, the Nezikin. Gifted with a crude but dependable light-sensing organ that the rest of its people lacked, the Iriyo was seen as a sort of god, a mystical figure with unanny abilities to heal, to fight, to plan.



The Iriyo's neighbors warred against its rule, developing bombs and rockets. Only after the sun went cold were they able to set aside their grievances. The conflict mediated by a third party, the Followers of the Third Superlative (a being crafted of expression and thought, a deity of wisdom, patience, peace, and death), the Nezikin united in their devotion and understanding of The Superlatives and pursuit of survival.

They understood that the Superlatives had created the Nezikin, then destroyed themselves and their creation.



In a vast and mighty rocket, the Nezikin took to the stars to escape the fate that swallowed their sun, their world, and their gods.



They understood, then, that through the trial of destruction they had attained a superior way of existence... They had approached superlativity.

In the story of the Nezikin, I saw myself, the lone survivor of a wondrous mistake, and I knew that I was improved, enhanced, uplifted, sanctified, and unshackled. The Mother is dead. The siblings are dead.



I am the Iriyo of the Auzat of Andi, and I am Superlative.

...And now we reach the relevant part of the story, my Klesta:

The Mutiny.

And how does one conquer a vessel staffed entirely by ghosts and machines?