Day Twenty-Four

...Succussion Rift-Eater, that same thing your guardians were involved in. The same thing, always > Newer shifts his voice downwards to mocking profundo. < "We should have gone faster, we shouldn't have sacrificed the latter spiral so soon, we should have brought in another galaxy," and so on and so forth. I mean, it's a shame, it really is, but do they have to keep talking about it? And telling us that we should get everything right because they didn't? I want to succeed as much as anyone, but this is our first project and some issues are— >
I pause in the middle of disentangling a planar field. < Newer? >
No response.
I switch to his siblings. < Iris, Moon-eye: Stumpy. What happened to Newer? >
No response.
I try contacting my own siblings. < Blue? Squeaky? >
Nothing.
The field tingles on my arm; I pull away. It can't be them. No chance that four Links would fail at once.
It's me.
It's me.
A vice grips my head, squeezing, and I stare up into the blankness where should spin stars. They said I was recovered. They said it was a minor maladjustment, a small resurgence of the sickness, and it wouldn't come back.
No Link? No Link.
< Blue? Squeaky? >
They know where I am, don't they? They always know where I am. They'll be able to find me.
But space isn't static; everything moves. Echoes-Die alone is hurtling out of the galactic plane at a speed of 726 kilometers per second, and my Builder is in orbit around it, itself traveling as the star flees, and what if my armor fails? What if I lose power and I drift away and I can't get back to it?
< Blue? >
I wind all six arms into the open prong and cling.
< Squeaky? >
They said it was gone. I know this has happened to other people, but not us. Never us. Never me.
And it is only me.
Me, only.
< Broad-Leaves? Heat-Traces? Swift-Runs, Squeaky, Blue, please. Please. Answer. You're there— I know you're there. This isn't a trick, right? You're not testing me? >
Far away the flat disk of Echoes-Die gleams solid against space.
< This is a cruel test, Heat-Traces. A cruel test. I do not approve. It's just a test, right? Squeaky, Blue, tell me it's just a test >
My Builder arcs around me, a second golden curve below my feet and a third rising behind. It doesn't have a name. If it did, it would be called Stumpy.
< Don't leave me here > I call, then aloud, "You can't leave me here!"
My vocoder vibrates but there is no sound. Beyond-reds gush from my jaws and curl away, an eruption of wispy color against the dark. I hunch closer against the Builder, chest panels shuttered so tight that I can feel the creak, and watch it.
Before it spreads, and fades. And dissipates.

"Stumpy? Stumpy?"
"Broad-Leaves says he can hear again. Try that."
< Stumpy? >
I try to focus. The sickness, all over again. My head hurts. My chest hurts. My mandibles twitch, and I can't stop them.
< ? > is the best I can manage.
"Stumpy, you're going to be okay < can you open your eyes? >."
"I— I—"
The merest of slivers. A metallic blob that might be a Silence Hunter.
< Squeaky? >
"That's right. Broad-Leaves fixed you < although he said you won't feel well for a little while >. We're back on the Bright Sun."
"I'm here, too," volunteers Blue. < And you don't look well, either >
< Thanks >
< I try to be honest >
Arms coil around mine. "Why didn't you get back in the Builder and come back to us?"
"The—the—" Stop it, mandibles! "The Builder?"
Why didn't I? That would have made sense. That would have been an eminently reasonable thing to do, instead of waiting for them or another bond to retrieve me.
It was right there. Ready.
"I don't know."
"Hardly better than us, really," says Blue. "We must have lost two days work calling for you." After a moment he admits, < We weren't even the bond that picked you up >
< Thanks >
< I try to be honest. Squeaky, don't I try to be honest? >
< Blue, you're agitating the patient >
< But honestly >
I tilt my head to the side. The slab again. An experience common to all modern Silence Hunters, it seems. In the old place they were only for emergencies. Like if someone were caught in a radiation jet.
It is hard, and molds to my movements, and exudes a faint scent like corroded metal.
"Is it the sickness again?" I mumble.
"We think so," says Squeaky. "Nothing else could have caused it, that we know." The arms tighten momentarily, then release. "You're not the only one. There have been a few other relapses.
"All Links?"
"No, all kinds of things. One bonded fell from city center when his armor failed and caused a collision when three others tried to catch him."
"Ah."
The ache hasn't let up. If anything, it's spreading. A cold convulsive shuddering, weighting all my limbs, and that vise... Someone gave it teeth. Not a sickness, not exactly, and not quite a wound, but rather a contradiction. Our machines are failing, and we, too, are partially machine.
I labor under warring impressions: that my internal systems, such as they are, operate, and that madwork is not what operates them. I live sustained by knowledge, wounded by ignorance.
A century hence, at times, I will still find myself wracked by paradox.

We were the Second Generation, born to disaster, and we took our frailties in stride. Merely another instance of the Gap-Shift, a pain and a hindrance but bearable. We were more willing to accept the unknown and in return the unknown accepted us more fully. We were not native— we will never be native— but we managed.
When you enclosed my people you wondered at our ability to cut through madwork as though it didn't exist. To withstand the greatest of shocks, reflect the harshest of glares; we denied you, an act that should have been impossible. What is this power, you asked, and even now you covet it. A cautionary tale: to shatter the certainties of others, you must shatter yourself. Madwork unravels around us, warps, falls away, fades— and with every cut a storm of razors erupts within.
The First Generation suffered most. A trillion years of ingrained belief: this is how the universe works. Even when the universe disagreed.

Is it suicide when it is done by mistake?

Is it genocide when it is done in ignorance?

We watched you go about your lives and we hated you. No one would admit it, of course. You were animals. You were clever animals, certainly, with your space sails and your cities and your remarkable expanse— half the galaxy, at least, and increasing even as we searched— but who would envy an animal?
You, too, suffered sickness. You wandered aimlessly, your only goal to reach outwards. You fought among yourselves. You aged. You died. You were at home in your place, and you never dreamed that one day your home could turn against you.
You and your kind, my scribe, provided us with a great deal of amusement. And fear.
We liked the feathered ones the best.

"No, no, go back. Look. Look at what it's doing."
"How can it do that?"
"Strings?"
"It's not even moving its wings."
"Maybe they have a lighter-than-air component. Hydrogen. That would explain why we saw that other one explode."
"But nothing touched it. Certainly nothing hot. It just... whooomph."
The recollection darts between all concerned, a probe-gathered recording of a feathered creature balanced on its tails and conversing or dancing with two others of its kind. It gesticulates, sharp, darting motions with all four wings, and then, without warning, erupts into a brief pillar of flame. The other two watch calmly, and when it's over sweep up the ashes and depart.
"Maybe that's what happened to the other Silence Hunters. Whooomph."
"I think there would be some crackling first. Or a few minor explosions."
"Static electricity. You would have warning. Don't know what you would do about it, exactly— < Help, I'm catching fire and I don't know why! > — but not... whooomph."
"Kkk-ka-WHOOOMPH?"
"Wshhh-krakrakra-KOW-whooomph."
We gaze up at the new recording, projected from the wall of an unused concert hall. The vast majority of halls are unused, now that we've built tens of thousands of them for the use of only five million, and this hall is one of ours. We designed the arches to be more malleable than most: this projection is a test, a moving picture formed of shifting panels and changes in charge, following the course of a far-distant probe as it wanders.
The natives come in all shapes and sizes. Not quite so varied as those in our records, but varied enough. The most common are small, four-limbed animals with vestigial gliding fins and crested ears, their legs bent backwards and covered in fine fur. Fangs jut from their mouths, visible even when their jaws are closed. These creatures we call "Wonder-Conquerors," for their ubiquity. They, too, wear armor- or at least an appearance of armor, studded with ribbons and flowing bolts of cloth.
They are responsible for the gargling, and it is the gargling (with modifications) that saturates most of the probe's records.
Almost as common are the winged ones, the "Feather-Pyres," which either congregate in groups or roam alone, one to each vessel. They have their own version of the gargling, higher-pitched and littered with clicks and clacks and whistles. They act almost like Silence Hunters— hovering, shifting things without contact, surrounding themselves with shimmering plays of heat and power— but these abilities derive from no obvious source and there seems to be no limit to the possibilities.
The one projected on the wall has produced food from nowhere and is now eating it, beak slicing through the outer skin. Reflections of lumpish fruit glitter in each facet.
Others include many-legged gray monsters with no eyes and wide, blunt-jawed mouths; larger brown-skinned variants of Wonder-Conquerors with wild manes; limbless serpentine creatures with hide like crushed glass and three mandibles ringing needle teeth; stretched ribbons of plasmas and shaped electric fields colored red and blue and orange-yellow, writhing and changing as we watch. Creatures like rocks, creatures like