Eve of Dying Life pt2
Gwen Astartes
Gwen stepped out from the Study into the dark mist of the dark forest.
Assembling a tachyonfield fixator had been bothersome (with many side quests) yet finally we had a stable module which was portable and wearable. Gwen had insisted on its wearability.
The outfit Gwen had chosen for this excursion was of IceEleven thread, the purest blue mistakable for luminous white to human eyes. The fixator, fashioned of tachyoconductive Onyxium fibre, was black about her waist; Jammy said it was golden, Dojan disagreed with him, of course.
We could see her though something about this other world had an affect on visible light, making it sluggish. The mist was thickest nearer to the ground appearing an inviting deep grey sheening like seal fur.
She disappeared.
We waited anxiously, though this was the first time in months that Gwen had been able to leave the Study. We were having mixed feelings. On the one hand, Gwen was annoying; on the other hand, due to the extended time we had had to have with her, we had benefitted from her insights (occasionally).
She had done a bang up job on organising the Study’s residences.
Jammy was the first to crack, challenging me to let him go out into the dark to find her, allowing me to hear the discussion that I was having with myself out aloud.
Dojan had activated the portal to run outside without negotiation …
… and, there she was.
The long period of usage by the personal tachyonfield had built up an area of high charge above Gwen’s head; she had a halo.
“Bowen!” Doja cried out happily with an angry relieved maternal edge.
“Hi,” Gwen said with an almost teenage pleasure of staying out late.
Gwen told us of her meeting with La Myseri Chordwoodyer.
My message to them had bought a heated flush to my ears yet I had needed to “reach out”, as villains say, for the good of an unexpected acquaintance.
Their reply? “Send her.”
She had walked the route and come to a circle of carved figures within a circle of trees, and within the circle of figures was a circle of saplings. Veteran, mature, young.
La Myseri could see her, they could walk to her, they could touch her.
Her condition granted her an unusual perspective on the existence of La Myseri.
The same way that the Study had not noticed Undeathly-Gwen approaching and opening the door; La Myseri were not bound by the observer effect as the balance of tachyon and entropon were waging war within Gwen. They still could not look upon each other, though. That is they could not have looked on each other if they had been off their homeworld.
A world they had conquered.
Their veteran older and greater (it would be rude to call them “larger”) relatives had taken root and now exuded their own quantum fug futzing electromagnetic waves though they could physically move unhindered should they have need. The mature Myseri, in this fug, attended to the “sapelings” till they were mature enough.
They sensed the lifeforce of others, they fed on it, they shared it with the Bosquet Selvation, the forest, their family.
They had news for Gwen which had made it safe for her to visit them.
“I’m dead. There is no soul within me,” Gwen told us.
“Your memory?” Jammy asked.
“Just an echo … of Bowen. As the … nanites attack, the tachyons repair, but the tachyons repair only what’s left everytime after an attack, so I’m …”
“Fading,” I said.
“Yes,” Gwen agreed.
“Surely there is something you can do, Navee Ghatta?” Doja asked, implying that she would kill me if I said no.
“Beyond keeping her in a tachyon field till she fades away, there isn’t,” I said risking Doja’s wrath.
“You time stabilised the Grass, they were nearly human,” Jammy insisted.
“They were much more stable, the process of their creation was as duplicates of living humans, live-broadcast surrogates, remote-controlled copies individually encoded genetically with high fidelity. Gwen is the person we know, not Bowen, Gwen is fading.”
Uncomfortable, inescapable, inevitable.
“They wrote a message for you,” Gwen said handing me a note written on fine Chordwood bark.
I read it.
I groaned audibly.
“What does it say?”
“It asks, ‘Do you know anyone who is a specialist in cytology manipulation and preservation?’.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I said.
quangobaud 