Chapter 55
The light dims, becomes a sphere hanging in a dark void before rushing away like a leaf on a stream.
Other lights appear in different colors, whirling past and even through me.
I can’t feel my body, though I still have all my other senses.
A cacophony of voices rises around me, and I’m swept away by a river of force.
I sense Bianca beside me, though I can’t see her. “Sterling!” she calls, and then we’re carried back, back, back…
Darkness. Then, something reaches out, and it’s as though I’m both recalling a moment in time and watching it play out on a movie screen at once.
I was—we were—somewhere else.
Somewhere Outside.
Whoever is reaching out to us wants us to come to them. So we do.
Now they’re the ones Outside.
Their physical bodies are strange, swimming things, but we adapt quickly.
They left behind their cities, their technology, and the glowing orb they used to summon us in the first place.
We play with the detritus of their civilization, until others of them, the ones we didn’t replace, try to kill us.
So we kill them instead.
It’s a hard-fought battle, but we’ve already learned the secrets of the orb. We can move from body to body, though some of them are stronger-willed and fight back against the switch. But in the end, we triumph.
The orb lets us look through time, as through a glass darkly. It’s easy to see the paths that led here, but ahead of us are many choices, many possibilities. All of them include the eventual extinction of the bodies we inhabit, but other species suitable for us to possess arise in the future.
Our choice—no, it’s not a choice. It is merely our nature, and its directive is simple. We are The Ones Who Become, and in order to survive, we must become yet another species, another civilization.
We send scouts ahead into the many futures, switching bodies with likely candidates, looking for the best future for us to inhabit.
Some of our hosts warn their people when we return them, and our scouts are killed when they try to revisit that branch in the river of time.
We learn to use the orb to cloud the memories of our captives before they’re sent back.
It’s an imperfect process, but good enough for our purposes, and most of us return from our sojourns unharmed.
When the time of extinction draws near, we select the best future we’ve been able to send scouts into and exchange places with the species there en masse, leaving their minds to face extinction in our old bodies.
Once in our new time, we quickly kill those we haven’t replaced, before they can fight back.
The cycle repeats again, and again, through the ages of the earth. We Become, we scout, and we Become again.
The Tschchch are the species whose bodies we currently live in.
By now, we’ve learned we can cultivate allies among potential future hosts.
Seldom do they know our true plans—why should we tell them, when it’s so much easier to promise things like power?
In this case, the Tschchch were at war with one another, four factions struggling for supremacy.
It made the job of our scouts so much easier.
As is our custom, we settle into their cities, mimic their lives, because what else would we do? We did not begin existence as embodied creatures, after all, so surely they would know better than us what it’s like to be them.
But another extinction looms. It’s time to look to the future and find a new species to Become.
Bianca’s consciousness seems to grip mine, shocking me back to myself. Then she’s hauling us forward, fighting against the currents, into the branching paths of the future.
There’s something ahead of us, something she’s making her way toward. A beacon, almost.
Visions flash past, and a thousand voices murmur in our ears. Then a scene resolves: a human man in modern clothing, sitting in a chair with a strange-looking helmet covering his features. I don’t know what he’s doing, why I can see him so clearly, but I try to call out anyway. “Hello?”
His surroundings become clearer, as if he’s reaching back toward me. Maybe it’s working?
“Hello? Can you hear me?” I call hopefully.
He’s in the future somewhere—perhaps I can warn him.
“You have to stop them! The Swarm are coming, they’re going to take over our bodies and destroy us!
You have to find out where they’re—no, when they’re—going to emerge and stop them before it’s too late! ”
I think he tries to answer me, but I can’t make out the words.
Then he’s gone, and we’re tumbling through time, toward an even brighter light in the future.
It grows and grows, and as before we’re peering through a narrow aperture onto the world.
There are slick rocks, like a cave, but an opening in the ceiling lets in the light of the stars.
“The stars,” Bianca says. “Remember them! This is when they’re going to emerge again, when they’re done with these bodies. If we can just—”
My consciousness is wrenched violently back, slamming into my borrowed body with an almost physical force. Disoriented, I try to blink—but these eyes don’t have lids.
Trunks and legs are clamped around my body. I’ve been torn away from Bianca, our contact broken. A dozen of the Swarm—Those Who Become—surround us.
Horror crashes down on me like a tidal wave. These bodies they wear used to belong to the Tschchch. The creche, the papyrus Khephnes read to me…
“The worst is the little ones, they…to adulthood and then…”
This conquest was centuries ago, perhaps millennia, it wasn’t clear to me in the vision from the orb. The Tschchch didn’t live that long. Bodies wear out; accidents happen.
So the Swarm keep a fresh supply on hand. Raise them to adulthood, then switch, leaving the mind of the young Tschchch in a dying carcass, while the Swarm member goes off in a fresh new body.
Something breaks inside me, like the night I saw Emerson’s corpse walking up to my post. I want to scream, to run, to escape all of this.
But I can’t. I’m trapped not just in a place, but in time.
Bianca thrashes in their grip, trunk strobing with distress, a thin wail from her mind cutting into mine like a knife. She touched the orb directly—her connection was stronger, and I was just a passenger along for the ride.
“She needs help!” Khephnes exclaims. He’s also being held by the guards, and one of his eyes is damaged, as if he fought back. They have Titus pinned to the floor, and he’s still trying to struggle, the soldier who will never surrender.
“She is not your concern,” one of the Swarm says.
“Do not resist,” another warns. “If the rest of you damage your bodies, you will be chained in place for the rest of your time here.”
I don’t think I can move—my will seems to have vanished, leaving behind only gibbering horror. “They’re not really them,” I say, and repeat it over and over, unable to form any other words, even though it must sound like nonsense to Khephnes and Titus.
“You have lost your privileges,” a captor informs us. Then it turns to Khephnes. “We wished to honor the one whose body you wear—”
“It never belonged to them!” I shriek. “They stole it! They stole yours! They colonize species after species—they steal everything and create nothing!”
“Be silent,” another of the Swarm says, looming over me. I shrink back in fear.
“—but you have left us with no choice,” the first goes on, ignoring me. “You can still be useful as an example. We will return you to the room where you have lived, and execute you in front of the other prisoners as a warning.”
No. No, they can’t kill Khephnes. “Don’t,” I beg, because that’s all I can do.
The Swarm ignore me, tightening their grips on us, dragging Titus from the floor. As they haul us out of the Hall of Records, Khephnes turns all his eyes on me.
“Don’t grieve, Sterling,” he says. “I don’t regret it for an instant.”
“We shouldn’t have asked you to come, I’m so sorry, I never thought…”
There’s a wistful smile in his mind-voice when he replies. “What else did I have to do?”
Then he vanishes behind a wall of the Swarm.
I never see him again.