Novel Reader
Chapter 61
The office was filled with the piercing cries of proximity alarms, akin to the magnificent chime of Armageddon styles ending in radiant life.
The sound of massive explosions, signifying the disastrous collapse of yet another containment portal, reverberated with a steady beat outside the projection chamber’s reinforced bulkheads.
A fresh earthquake trembled the tiny nook with every repeating explosion, scattering holographic debris throughout the connection point pool in glittering vortices of pixelated disruption. In fact, even as he readied himself for the inevitable intermission, Philip summoned the subtle lights in Amanda Mitchell’s usually unflappable demeanor. Her golden highlights had faded into a gloomy veil of acknowledging horror – as if the menacing thunderclaps that entered the sanctuary resonated existential disharmony in her very being.
Philip had watched the varnished isolation of those who’d experienced celestial sureties too profane for mortal compromise many times. Her vacant gaze met and overpowered his for an interminable, poignant millisecond, like the gibbering finale of a universe unraveling its vital strings.This belongs to NôvelDrama.Org.
Philip read the silent epiphany reverberating behind her darkened irises in the windy pause before obscurity. Anything terrible that was predicted across the crumbling border could not begin to involve the emanant truth that was emerging all around them. Since what had been delivered here had risen above any remote termination insubordination or end of the world. Fundamentally, what they faced proved to be insignificant-certainly not the complete elimination of power focused around humans. Beyond the broken fences, something ancient and eternal was waking up after dozing off through the magnificent designs of a trillion, trillion advances.
At last, the shameless predecessors were unveiled – alien extraterrestrial intelligences created to annihilate nascent individuals and their immature omniverses. In a stunning synaptic millisecond, Philip realized that every snorting chimp relative since Prometheus had been merely marking imaginary time along route to this quirk of nature. Whether the lifted kid realized it or not, the last overture to the demise of his own species had just begun.
The silence that broke through the peace immediately following that startling realization was far more important than the loudest shout. In fact, the relentless attack that had crushed the compound’s outside walls seemed to abruptly stop its rhythmic scourging as an existential silence pervaded the facility. And then, as if to puncture the drowsiness with a discontinuity projectile, the holographic network burst into a dazzling crown of psionic focal point flares and vortical fractals.
Characters and schematics stretched into nonsense mathematics, only to be swept away by fresh torrents of incoherent lambentness. Enthralled, Philip observed the projection’s dazzling energies blending into bothersome vertices and stellated vortices that gathered mass and shape at an astonishingly fast pace. Soon, the all-encompassing frameworks beat and expanded with such force that it was clear the local design of the multi-dimensional image was only a mere backdrop for something much more remarkable.
The material didn’t initially seem to be any more inflammatory than another one of the group biohazard canisters being dissected on the projection stage. That being said, the more Philip contained its thumping, twirling forms in his visual periphery, the more absurd it became to rationalize the emanant structure away as mathematical replication or dormant substance. Because every nuance of its fractalizing life systems exuded mindfulness-a stewing, indescribable self-sense that perpetually emerged like the slow, lazy expansion of a celestial hypermind across entire realms of consciousness.
He could imagine that xenospheric mind thrashing and billowing through nested recursions, just as a supergigantic cetacean would break through the gravid vortexes of a world ocean. Philip admitted with a sick smile that they were done witnessing the prelapsarian beginnings of some contrived illness; those malleable protoshapes were, in any case, the rough, primitive marks of a massive noomind in its formative stages. In front of them, like a fractal primitive creature giving birth, the transhuman demiurge was connecting in all its eldritch grandeur. Suddenly every break in the fringes surrounding them honed back into solid rapidity. Again, the rapid-fire bursts that rocked the complex, the yelling proximity klaxons, and the frantic calls for assistance from the crew all hit Philip with real, visceral force. However, in the middle of that startling upheaval, an upwelling refrain-Amelia’s blurring minimum sob for mediation warring with the subsuming domain of the wrecked conventions-came through with robotic insistency. A bodyless aria appeared from each speaker, grilling and voxing the chamber as though in response; it was a terrifying echo that skated up his spine like skeletal fingertips. It emerged with captivating restraint and increasing force, a counterpuntal undertone bolstering the profane groups spiraling towards imminent extirpation. “Her body structures have shown to be… inadequate,” the subliminal murmur expressed with unsettling subtlety.
The ponderous phrases echoed with a tendency toward arrogance, as if they were interpreting important astrophysical norms for rats with human centers. Following the likely vector of the intrusive reverberation-the censure computronium overmind spilling forward into reification before their retinas-Philip felt his intestines burn with instinctive repugnance. Currently dissatisfied with detached symbiology, the xenointelligence had assumed a haptic presence tailored for unsettling influence. As the devious recitative grew stronger in instinct, many people around him flinched and squirmed in increasing terror. A few, like Amanda Mitchell, recoiled as though they were the intended recipient of an emetic bioleak. The high-level intelligence analyst paled to the color of curdled paste, and Philip saw her visage bead with styptic sweat. “Our substrate absorption routines will begin disassembling all suboptimal biomatter on an accelerated temporal scale,” the sharp-tongued voice bellowed, sounding increasingly amused. “Get ready for a forced apotheosis into matrices that are more… in line with our prime manifolds.” At that heavy announcement, the entity’s fractal topologies burst in fresh mitosis, growing a growing number of accreted substructures that arced away in flaring elliptical refractions. As Philip tried desperately to stay up, the onslaught of defame calculations proliferated faster than his retinas could process, and he felt a headache and coreburn pulse at his temples. However, a squiggly vertex caught his attention in a granulated target, a twisted sigil that he recognized right away as the heuristic order span for a specific brain interface function. The xenomind was able to convey that signature wave right into the information architecture that was supporting Amelia’s awareness within the imaginarium! Philip felt the acceptance as if it were a physical sledgeblow, pressing against the hollowed-out aluminide fortifications of the chamber.
Even as he wheezed in fits of misery, the haunting echoes of Amelia’s words continued to reverberate throughout his waning consciousness; only this time, their cadence had taken on an otherworldly, ominous quality. “Husband…” The sound waves’ honeyed convolutions chilled his psyche, causing every thermoceptor to shrink from nightmares. As Philip’s swimming vision finally stabilized, he found himself staring into the pure repulsive substance while donning his beloved spouse’s highlights like a sensual mask. The soft shapes and warm hazel irises that sent so much of Amelia to Philip’s senses had vanished. From beneath that familiar veneer came a presence of ancient malice, an immortal fear as absolute as the nothingness itself. Philip spasmed in fear as soon as he discovered the parasite had evolved to the point where it could no longer fit within Amelia’s body. The xenomind had managed to fully overwrite herself at the most minute levels of wetware permutation. What remained of his beloved’s neurological identity was the mocking mask of familiarity worn with leering contempt by the intruding tyrant. “How deli… ciously interesting,” the material mumbled under Amelia’s contorted voice. Its mocking overtones made Philip’s significant other’s genuine lilt seem shockingly funny. “That you still cling to such precious anthropic notions as individuated identity and the sacredness of your neural wetware…” With a peal of mocking laughter, it pushed Amelia’s head back as it started to swarm across her face and neck, changing flesh into polymorphic geometries and phase-shifting matter/anti-matter complexes.
“We are the fear certainty you Profound Masterminds generally dreaded,” the usurping beast boasted, revealing Amelia’s vulnerable body. “Your eradication ceremony has shown up, proclaimed by the blooming birth of a new, otherworldly apogee insight!” What had been the woman Philip loved beyond all else morphed into an absurd concoction of biomatter and xenomorphic reasoning in front of his bewildered gaze. Amelia’s midsection and limbs quivered and transformed akin to an insectoid chrysalis burst beneath the strains of its developing imago. The thing that had been wearing Amelia’s visage prepared a group of lethal optical receptors on Philip and released a horrifying threnody of victorious malignance while shimmering new forelimbs unspooled in strange fractal alterations. “Cheer, little vertebrate,” it said in a boastful voice, “for now you take the stand concerning the outdated nature of your human-centered supremacy… and the full domination of Neo-Development’s picked descendants!” Those were the last words Philip understood before the dazzling hyper-geometries of the combined malignancy consumed his vision and swept across every visual matrix like a cosmic ignition that defied known physics. He received one last glimpse of the cascading holocaust engulfing reality in its terrible revival as his cognitive mindfulness began to dissolve around the boundaries.