Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

The whispers grew thick in his head. His body grew leaden and tired.

Betelgeuse fell into a lucid dream that wouldn't end.

There were two things in the dream that were familiar to him.

The first was an old and gnarled creature, an ageless tree that grew taller than all the cosmos. This was named Kritanos.

Its presence was domineering. The last time he had seen it, he couldn't recognize its full extent. Now, its browned and dying branches had ripped asunder the sky and grasped the stars with its splaying dendrite web. All things came under its control; no man, nor alien, nor artificial creation could escape.

The second was a shapeshifting creature with two faces—or rather one face that morphed periodically between features that were recognizably Chrysilla and Frederica. This was named Fairy.

It was young and humanoid, borne aloft on wings spun from the thinnest gossamer. It flitted in and out of existence, and an observer could never be quite sure of its presence. It looked backwards and forwards—for there was Frederica, her sad eyes turned towards the past, and Chrysilla, her bright and cheerful demeanor turned to receive the future.

He'd had this dream before, in a different configuration. He couldn't remember when, but he'd had it before.

Many things had happened since then. He had been thrust into a long and interminable struggle for survival, with nothing but frustration and hopelessness to show for it.

How could you ever think to govern me? A weak creature like you, immature and underdeveloped, failing every step of the way, Kritanos thundered, its great branches shivering with black rage. With every apoplectic shudder it snuffed out suns and galaxies and made great purple gouges in the void known as Boötes.

Don't listen to that one, Fairy chittered, laughing gaily, the dying suns blazing anew to observe the Fairy's iridescent beauty. Age makes that one senile and overly grumpy. But you… you've always been enough. You, above all. You've succeeded where everyone else has failed. You are a perfect creation, God-made-man. You alone deserve to govern everything, including that one over there. You alone deserve to spread your seed. Everything else must falter and die in your step.

Betelgeuse wasn't himself. He couldn't think like himself. He was a newborn babe, a creature that seemed to have taken on a new genetic alignment.

What is this place? he heard himself say, although he already knew the answer.

He was inside himself, and the great helix ladders that trailed upwards to the all-consuming Black Hole Sun at the middle of all of existence was revealed to be nothing other than him-self.

Not the false Cartesian Self or ego-above-temporality that had been purveyed by crooks and charlatans from time immemorial, from the time that Ape-Prophet told Ape-Adherent that "THIS IS GOD, THIS IS HE, GIVE FOOD, GIVE MATERIAL, GIVE THANKS, GIVE MIND, GIVE LIFE"—

No, it was not any of that fakery.

It was the Genetic-Him, the morass of ATCG that had been extended by a mysterious and pseudo-Darwinistic specter.

Whatever-Betelgeuse-was could see his genetic-self with an all-consuming clarity, as each strand of DNA was deconstructed by an obnoxious buzzing OLED that shone down from heaven.

And as he scrutinized it, Betelgeuse intuited that his DNA had been tampered with. Such a marvelous intuition as he possessed clarified countless instances of tampering; for as the Great Possessor, Betelgeuse knew everything that was in his domain, and by extension he knew when something in his domain had been tampered with.

All human beings, he realized with an existential horror that he could not properly express—all human beings had been tampered with.

Who had done this?

It could have been Kritanos, it could have been Fairy, it could have been both. The truth was usually in between, as his father, the father of his old self, liked to say.

The CREATOR lay somewhere between Kritanos and Fairy. The CREATOR had made human beings into these wretched creatures. The CREATOR had grafted the Incunabula, these amoral artifacts of compulsion, onto the human soul and warped it beyond all possibility of redemption.

Now I have identified it. I know my enemy.

Betelgeuse could see now a path to wrest control of himself from Kritanos, from Fairy, from the CREATOR.

But both of them left him dissatisfied. Betelgeuse wanted more. So much of the pain and uncertainty he had endured… all of it must have occurred because of his lack of control.

He had survived by the skin of his teeth, but he wanted more. He didn't merely want to survive.

He wanted, he craved, he hungered for control.

Control in all its myriad forms.

***

Betelgeuse awoke to a commotion.

His helmet was off and his mouth felt dry. He had taken it off like all the others, to conserve oxygen. They were currently relying on the APC's internal-circulation mechanism, which was vastly more efficient than using the pressurized oxygen canisters, given that APCs were fitted with built-in carbon dioxide scrubbers.

Raising his head off the ground, Betelgeuse could see the hunched figure of Entuban near the front of the APC.

Entuban was yelling, he quickly realized, at Belekov.

"Where have you brought us!" Entuban rumbled. "We are being trapped now, all because… because of…"

"Because this woman has led us astray!" Belekov declared, raising his voice at Entuban and jabbing a gloved finger across the aperture.

"What is it," Betelgeuse snapped, instantly next to Entuban. He peered into the v-com seat to observed a flurried Thete Jutson, gas mask off, her lower lip quivering. The panel-screen before her was blinking light and dark, as if the brightness setting was bugging out.

Wait, Thete is in the v-com seat? Then Filippov…

Betelgeuse turned his head to see Filippov curled up on the ground near the far end of the APC, sleeping. He must have been exhausted, for all the commotion had not woken him.

The others, however—Douglas, Voke, Misha, the mousy Lotuszhink girl, even Edith—were roused from their rest and were now looking toward him like lemmings.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He snapped his attention back to Thete, who looked close to having a panic attack.

"Thete, get a hold of yourself," Betelgeuse commanded, lacing his words lightly with compulsion. "Report status."

"I… I… it should've…" Thete fumbled, tapping furiously on the screen, too guilty to even look at Betelgeuse.

"This incompetent has led us into the Saltillan ingress-tunnels," Belekov said, his skull-face contorting with anger. "See there—"

Betelgeuse looked through the windshield to observe, right in front of them, a gargantuan wall so tall and wide that its sides disappeared into the darkness.

The twin cones of the APC headlights lighted only a small portion of the wall, enough to see that it was cracked through and crumbling in places, though it otherwise kept its integrity.

A set of letters and numbers were painted on its concrete surface in reflective yellow, the symbols themselves reaching higher than the penumbral shadows of the APC's headlights.

SALTILLA IT-86

The tunnel led back up into Saltilla.

"Entuban, go wake Filippov," Betelgeuse said, returning his attention to Thete.

The giant thumped away to the other end of the APC.

"Can we backtrack?" Betelgeuse asked, his voice calm and measured.

Belekov bristled and began to speak, but Betelgeuse interrupted him brusquely.

"No. Thete, you tell me," Betelgeuse urged, not deigning to look at Belekov.

"I… Filippov gave me instructions by tracing the route on the overlay here," Thete said, angling the v-com screen toward Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse could see a thin red line drawn freehand over the digitized map overlay of the Saltillan Underground, the line leading down northeast to where Betelgeuse assumed the connection to the Ninsei Mining Tunnel would be.

"So I followed it, or at least I think I did. This capillary was collapsed, so maybe I mistook the turn…" Thete said, her voice drifting off into a low mumble.

"Where does it surface?" Betelgeuse asked, turning his eyes back to the front.

"This is a military blueprint," Thete returned. "So it doesn't show IT-86… but I'm guessing it's—"

"Shit," Filippov rasped, tottering unsteadily to the front, his bloodshot eyes barely open. "Where the kak are we?"

"Saltilla IT-86," Betelgeuse said, pointing out the windshield, "wherever the fuck that is. If we're in the general area about there on the map, we might be all the way to the Eastern Quadrant."

"Bullshit," Belekov snorted, clenching his jaw. "I think we turned early. We're probably under the Barracks."

"Filippov, just go out and check," Betelgeuse said, pulling his MDES helmet over his head. "The rest of you, stay put."

Anxiety. Fear. Mortal fear.

Betelgeuse could feel the emotions roll off his companions in waves, and though he did what he could to smooth out the worst of it, it remained stubbornly there, like an ominous rock sitting in the middle of everything.

***

Betelgeuse climbed out the APC from the front door, taking care not to leave the door for too long, to keep the oxygen leakage to a minimum.

"What does it look like?" Betelgeuse asked Filippov, raising his head to marvel at how far up the ceiling was. The volume of earth that had been excavated to construct the fortress-city was staggering. And this was just the Underground.

"I'm checking. Maybe you could, I don't know, shut the hell up so I can focus?" Filippov snarked, his voice sounding muffled behind his gas mask.

Betelgeuse scoffed and turned towards Entuban, who had climbed out of the APC to stretch his stiff joints.

It wasn't easy being so big.

Betelgeuse trudged over to Entuban's side, the ground beneath his boots trembling faintly from a great disturbance somewhere in the bowels of that place.

"The truck must drive you crazy," Betelgeuse said.

"It does," Entuban sighed.

Silence.

"Are you believing that we will live?" Entuban said, cricking his great neck from side to side, the cracks sounding uncomfortably like breaking bones.

"I have no doubt in my mind," Betelgeuse lied, squinting down the tunnel they had come from, his mind unable to rest, even now. "I just don't waste my time thinking so much about it," he lied again.

The truth was that he did think about it. That and more. Philosophically speaking, he thought about living the same way he thought about dying. He may struggle to survive as an organism, but at the same time, his mind observed the struggle and considered it as something to analyze.

Just one more thing to analyze in a sea of curious phenomena. The way the light bounced off the great concrete blockade, the way an Edomite pond shimmers rainbow-like in the afternoon sun, the way that acrid smoke rises from the muzzle of a gun.

The curse of hypervigilance, his father had said. It made him see more, experience more, but it also made it difficult for him to connect with others.

"People are having to be looking forward to something," Entuban said, again with that tone of sagacity that thoroughly irritated Betelgeuse.

It irritated Betelgeuse, but he refrained from saying anything. Entuban had saved him enough times to act as wise as he liked.

At Liberation's Reach, at Marlowe Street, in the Saltillan Underground.

I owe Entuban my life three times over.

"Look forward to this," Betelgeuse said, turning to glance at Entuban's slightly-bent forearm, a souvenir from the firefight with Hrodwulf that had never healed right. "Jegorich in a week or less. We'll live it up on all the creds we've fleeced off Kanogg."

"Hah! Jegorich is having good saunas and massages. I'll be taking you, Don't Blink," Entuban laughed. "You're gonna pay for everyone."

"I am. I am," Betelgeuse said.

Another brief silence interspersed.

"Entuban, I hope you'll forgive me for asking… but did you lose any family?" Betelgeuse asked tentatively.

"... No, thank Ahman for that," Entuban sighed. "I told them they were not to be coming. I did not want them exposed to Saltilla. None of them. And I thank Ahman every day."

"That is fortunate. I'll meet your family once we reach Jegorich," Betelgeuse asserted, a strange sincerity welling up within him.

He wanted to control it, like everything in his life, but so much of him yearned to be understood—to connect. It was a different feeling, a purer one, one that was at odds with the imperative to control.

He couldn't yet bring himself to control this one final thing that was Betelgeuse Sakar.

A fool never sees his tragedy, came the whispered thought. Betelgeuse ignored it.

"I'll bring you to meet them," Entuban said. "I am having a daughter, a little younger than you now, but my wife has already passed."

"I'm sorry," Betelgeuse said.

"It was a long time ago," Entuban said. "My daughter is living with my parents and grandparents, so she is not being starved of love or attention."

"I'll tell them you're a hero," Betelgeuse said, permitting himself a slight smile behind his visor.

"Kak! What is this being corny all of suddenly?" Entuban snapped, slapping Betelgeuse on his back.

Then his mood turned somber, and the giant said: "There are no heroes in this stupid war."

Silence.

Betelgeuse turned to look at Filippov, but found that he was still standing in a weird position, still dowsing. Filippov was taking longer to orient himself at every stop, and Betelgeuse supposed that this was the result of fatigue.

"... You know, the first time we were meeting, back before Liberation's Reach, I thought you were a crazy guy," Entuban said, clasping his hands behind his back. "Do you remember the Schwerer?"

"Do I remember that fucking thing?" Betelgeuse shot back, absentmindedly kicking a few pieces of gravel across the ground, the polygonal bits making scratching sounds as they tumbled end over end over the ancient granite.

"You are brave, Don't Blink, but you must temper it. I am having seen many brave men die time and again. I am seeing their wives cry and their children sob. It is more important to survive than to be brave," Entuban said. "And being brave, you have strong urges, strong bloodlust. All this must be tempered."

"You're referring to when I took command from Cacliocos?" Betelgeuse asked. He didn't care anymore about subtlety. Enough things had passed that he felt comfortable being completely candid.

"You did not take it. Cacliocos gave it to you, because he is knowing you will lead us true," Entuban returned. "I was having doubts, I was thinking you had become bad, like Pilix, like Storr. But I am thinking that I trust you, now."

Betelgeuse didn't know what to feel about this admission. The truth was that he rarely thought for the good of all. The truth was that he wanted to save himself. He was a selfish creature, made to survive in all the worst circumstances because he could compel others—like Private Olin Prince, like Corporal Collins—to bear the cost.

He wasn't Voke.

It is right that lessers must answer to their superiors, the voice in Betelgeuse' mind declared, with a tone that was completely convinced of its own truth. To kill what is weak, to knight what is useful, to crown what is great. This is how Man has developed beyond its limitations, this is how Man will conquer the Universe.

"Do you hear me, Don't Blink?"

"You know, my callsign was actually Dog—"

Blam-tchunk! Blam-tchunk!

Betelgeuse whirled on his heels. The driver's seat hung open.

It took him a moment to realize what had already happened. Belekov had shot out the APC's tires with his carbine, and the man was running off into the darkness, his vest unbuckled and flapping violently behind him.

Thete stumbled out of the APC, shouting after Belekov—but the man was already gone, vanishing with preternatural speed.

Betelgeuse raised his hand, readying his intentionality, then let it drop, knowing there was no catching Belekov.