Shades Of Forever

After finishing breakfast, we adjourn to the sitting room. I take a minute to fold my blanket up so we have more space, and then MacWillie and Huckens join me on the sofa, the frame groaning slightly as MacWillie plops down at the end opposite me. Great Grandpa sinks gratefully into his favorite armchair, draping his home quilt - a thick length of crabroach silk embroidered with small yellow flowers - over his lower body. I examine the two engineers.

"So, the plan for today is to search for stuff from the wrecked ship? To build, uhm, an 'infonet receiver?'"

MacWillie nods, Huckens a half second behind her.

"Aye. Me and the lad will accompany you to the crash site, see what components we can scrounge up. Your 'Box' is sure it'll have what we need?"

Tell the person who tried to hunt us down and failed miserably that despite her massive level advantage, I am still 472% more capable than whatever malformed shard of reality is currently infesting her psyche. My creator's ship will contain sufficient materials.

"...yeah. Box says everything we need will be there."

"Good. In that case, let's get to it."

MacWillie abruptly pushes herself away from the sofa, Huckens following suit, the two of them not even bothering to wait for their digestion to start working on the stove circles. Must be an engineer thing. I turn to Great Grandpa Axe.

"You'll tell Broom and the others what we're doing?"

He nods.

"Be safe, Sky."

"You know I will, Great Grandpa."

His lips quirk and he shoos me towards the hallway leading to our front door. MacWillie and Huckens fall in behind me as we walk out into the early morning bustle of the village, the Chief Engineer still wearing a set of father's clothes so tight it looks like she's going to burst out of them with every step, Huckens nattily adorned in some of mother's forest leathers. The toolbag hangs around his hips once more, neatly fitting through the loops in his white and brown streaked pants. I wave at some of the villagers in passing, but my stride is measured and aimed at the path leading to Watcher's Hill.

"Your people certainly start the day early," MacWillie remarks, watching a girl my age, Opal Breeder, wrangle a group of little ones towards the Memory Shrine.

"There's a lot to get done," I tell her, stepping aside to let a pair of rushing Bakers carrying thick leather armor pass by. Must be a crabroach silk harvesting day. "The little ones need to learn, food needs to be made, water needs to be purified, broken things need to get fixed, Idiots need to find their melty rocks." I beckon them onto a side path leading away from the village square. "This way."

We start hiking up the switchbacks that lead to the top of Watchers Hill, the crimson canopy gradually thinning out as we approach the top. It's one of the only uncovered areas in the entire forest, dotted with scattered trees like hairs on a balding man's scalp. When we reach the summit, I take a moment to breathe in the pure air, head tilted slightly back, eyes on the lightening azure overhead.

...we would have reached the crash site by now if we had detoured around the hill.

"...yeah. We would have."

I turn a slow circle, enjoying the vista. The distant mountain range to the west stretching up like grasping fingers, Fishhook lower than it used to be, snow capping all the peaks. Foothills undulating north and south, a scrunched up blanket of deceptive geography. Endless flatlands to the east, mottled in shades of green and red and gray and brown, extending away from the forest like diseased skin, the rising sun blazing orange above the horizon. Beside me, Chief Engineer MacWillie whistles long and low.

"Hell of a view."

Huckens doesn't contribute anything other than a wide-eyed stare.

"That's why we're here," I eventually say. "This is my world. Was my world. Everything you can see from this hill. Everywhere you can walk in the forest." I gesture to the green canopy stretching below us, crimson underside hidden in the dawn stillness. "Everything you can't touch above." A wave towards the wispy clouds stretching overhead. "This was it."

We stand in silence for a moment longer, then I start walking towards the backside of Watchers Hill, retracing the route Wires and I took the night the starfly upended our lives. It's still vivid in my mind, the burning aurora descending overhead, reducing everything to noise and light and joy and terror.

"We went through this part of the forest, Wires and I. No one usually comes down this side, because there's nothing past here but old forest and the end of the valley, but that night, that's where the starfly came down."

I pause next to a scorched patch in the undergrowth, squatting down to run my fingers through the dark ash and pieces of broken glow light. Shoots of new growth are already reaching up through the tiny scar, and I let the debris trickle through my palm.

"Neither of us should have been here. We should have done the smart thing, gone back to the village and told Broom, or Dirt, or Torch. Let the people who knew what they were doing take care of the new thing that appeared. It shouldn't have been us."

I stand up and continue onward, leading them through the trees. Too soon, the undergrowth thins in front of me, revealing a battered expanse of churned up dirt, twisted metal, and impact craters unshielded from the clouds above, a path of destruction leading up a small slope.

Apart from the violated landscape, it could be any other stretch of land bordering the forest.

"This is where we fought the first violation." I laugh, somehow the only emotion capable of piercing the fog draping my mind. "We were so scared. It was horrible, but we killed it. Wires collected the reality piece because he was the Idiot."

I close my eyes, still able to picture the swirling depths of that unnatural grey orb, then reopen them.

"It's also where he died. They shot him with a pulse rifle. The Corporate Marauders." I wouldn't know that except for Box. "He fell apart, like a tower of blocks toppling over. He looked so confused."

I continue walking up the slope, MacWillie and Huckens trailing silently in my wake. I pause halfway up.

"This is where I lost my arm. I think."

I take a few more steps. Funny how the hill is so small, yet in my memory it seems to extend upwards forever.

"This is where they shot me again. In my leg."

A few more steps brings me to just below the summit, mangled dirt and grass spreading to either side. I look back at them, remembering the past.

"This is where they shot me in the head. I remember the sky tilting above me, and then I was falling."

I step onto the narrow crest, straddling the past and present. The depression in front of me is filled with fire and smoke and wreckage, hidden beneath the veil of midnight skies, a maddening chaos of pain and guilt that somehow led to my survival when I should have died. My breath catches in my throat.

A hand lands on my shoulder, heavy without being oppressive, and the vision fades.

"Aye. There's debts that need paying."

The solid presence of MacWillie next to me seems to draw the iron weight out of my lungs, up through my throat in a silent eruption of grief and anguish. When I can see again, the dawn light illuminates a placid field dotted with dark piles of debris, some still smoldering even days later, others quiet in their towering magnitude. More signs of battle dot the churned up earth, slashes and slices drawing deep trenches across the soil, gouged divots and blackened grass evidence of the fury let loose. I take a moment to breathe, then place a hand on top of hers.

"Thank you." I think of Wires drawing the invaders' attention, of Box telling me about biomass and necessary actions. "Not all of them are yours."

She regards me seriously, like she knows what I'm talking about, like she's watched those she's cared for disappear in front of her eyes, for all that we're from such different backgrounds we might as well be different species.

"Aye. Let's get to work."

The next ten minutes pass in a fairly boring manner, MacWillie asking Huckens for certain tools from the bag, taking a quick look at them, then instructing him on whatever it is he's supposed to be noticing. I spend the time trying to recreate the frenzied battle Box guided me through after I rolled to a stop against its initial housing, but nothing seems to trigger any sort of recollection.

Intense trauma is frequently accompanied by localized memory loss, Sky. If you want, I can try to reconstruct the events from an extrapolation of the surrounding engrams.

"...no. It's okay, Box. Thank you for offering."

Instead, I sit back on the downslope of the hill, staring out at the wreckage below. Nothing moves in the growing daylight except for shadows slowly shrinking. Under the glare of the morning sun, the starfly is somehow less and more impressive. Less in that it's clearly a manufactured thing, evincing none of the organic randomness of the natural creatures inhabiting the forest; more in that it's clearly a manufactured thing, evincing none of the organic randomness of the natural creatures inhabiting the forest and yet it moved through the sky above the sky.

I don't understand how these layers of black steel and shiny metal and wires pointing every which way could possibly fight their way free of a planet's pull, but they did. Someone made them for that purpose.

Non-causal engines for the faster than light and orbital stuff, plasma thrusters for normal maneuvering.

"...light has a speed?" I shake my head. "No, don't answer that. I believe you." MacWillie and Huckens walk up to where I'm sitting, the latter poking at the pane of glass they used to measure the trees yesterday. "Hey, MacWillie, Huckens. Find anything?"

"Aye, me and the lad have identified several sites that have the parts we need, but there's a catch." Her tone is serious, a change from her usual jocularity. "We're also picking up signs of non-causal flux."

"What does that mean?"

It's Huckens who answers.

"Means the universe is thinner down there. Easier for reality to break through." He turns to MacWillie. "Chief, I still don't understand how you know it's going to breach. There's non-causal chop everywhere around here. Except for the forest, I guess."

"Experience, lad," MacWillie answers grimly. "Seen more than a few engines try and shift bad after a heavy draw. Looking at that wreckage gives me the same feel."

"If you say so, Chief," he replies, doubt lacing his voice. "It's just, the sensor's not showing any breach indicators."

"Aye, and that's a lesson for you to learn today, young master Huckens. There's a time for listening to the machines, and there's a time to listen to your gut. reality doesn't play fair, but your integrator can help you figure out when shit's about to hit the impeller."

She's right. I'm picking up anchors down there. Two... no, three of them. Don't tell her I said she was right.

Three malignant red dots appear in my vision, each in one of the massive wrecked sections of the starfly.

"Box agrees with you. There are three anchors."

I point out the structures to MacWillie and Huckens, and she purses her lips.

"Figures. That's where we need to scavenge the parts for the receiver. Probably drawn to the components." She turns and spits. "The lad and I won't be able to get down there until they're cleared out. We're not specialized for that kind of combat."

I'm not detecting any other signs of violations. If we act quick, we can take out the anchors before reinforcements arrive. Their boundary dissolution isn't manifesting past the wreckage they're hiding in, so they can't be very powerful.

I relay the information to MacWillie, and she frowns.

"Aye, if you think you can do it, it needs to be done. Be cautious, though. My gut's telling me there's something more."

While I admit she was right about the anchors being there, her gut isn't a reality sensor. We'll be fine, Sky. Let's go make numbers go up!

I push myself into a standing position with my limbs.

"Okay. Box thinks we'll be fine. You two take cover behind the hill just in case it's wrong."

I'm not wrong, Sky. This is a quick in and out. Easy levels.

MacWillie and Huckens wish me luck, then head to the other side of the hill, just the tops of their heads peeking over the top. I crack my knuckles, then start running down towards the wreckage, dashing past the smaller pieces of debris spotting the lower part of the hill. I reach the bottom without incident and make my way towards the closest anchor. It's tucked away in a chunk of ship nearly as tall as one of the elder trees, wide entrances periodically climbing its height. The other two are farther off, in a reasonably straight line. I should be able to-

The world flickers around me mid-stride, peaceful morning sunshine shifting into an inverted sky of churning sickly yellow liquid, held impossibly overhead as I skid to a stop on a blasted plain of sticky glass. Eyes peer at me from underfoot, changing color and shape as they blink. Three figures regard me in the distance, hulking forms twice as big as MacWillie.

The closest is a spinning wheel with a flaming head in the middle, five eyes above a misshapen nose that constantly drips wriggling blobs of ichor, all of it floating a meter off the viscous ground. Beyond it, a cluster of wires wraps around themselves in an impossible knot, so loosely tight it squeezes the air around it into a warped lens. Red lightning flickers between the gaps in almost patterns. The farthest figure paces back and forth, a hunched over humanoid with gray skin, back always facing me, whispered muttering drifting from its hidden front despite the distance. No matter how it moves, the orientation of its body never changes.

Below them, a tide of violations slither and claw their way towards me, a mass of bodies without end.

...I was wrong, Sky.

"No shit, Box."