THEREVEN: GERMINATION
Director Cole Thereven slams into a Eurtec alley wall, his twin pistols slippery with sweat.
The neon purple and blue lights of Eurtec disorient him; he can't tell if his pursuers are still rushing towards him in the distance.
This assignment had seemed so simple — the Foundation Eurtech diplomatic team had requested his presence for a highly delicate arrangement, given the past successes of the Department of Anomalous Communications and Relations in dealing with extreme deviant psychologies. And he'd charmed the Eurtec underworld delegation for long enough, and the progress was going fine, and it seemed like it would be another great success for Thereven and DACR — but then he'd accidentally chained together a series of kill words, and the Eurtec cops' cybernetic kill implants had activated, and he'd barely escaped with his life.
(did it even make sense for Eurtec to have an underworld, wondered Cole Thereven. The Silicon Nornir were the weavers of fate, a hybrid between deitic and machine intelligences, running the city in the name of the Global Occult Coalition, the Foundation's sole rival for the fate of the world. He'd hoped to have a chance to speak with them while he was here, but that seemed out of the question now. But why would they allow crime in their perfect city?)
The rain hammers his head. His breath is heavy, but he has no chance to rest. They'll be upon him soon.
He kisses his guns — Candor and Connection — and hurries deeper into the alleyway. To his dismay, it ends in a chain link fence, and he can't climb it with this much rain and with guns in hand.
The alleyway lights up with strobing red. They've caught him. But Cole isn't one to give up.
He swivels around, shooting wildly as he does so. And he falls, gracefully, in a rain of their plasma bullets.
And so Cole Thereven dies.
Again.
Cole Thereven was always destined to meet the mysteries of the universe face-to-face.
When Cole was a child, his family took a trip to Japan. Japan, of course, is famously racist and xenophobic, especially against other Asians, and Cole just so happened to be Filipino. So while the Thereven family was able to enjoy the benefits of tourism in Japan, the endless food, the shopping, the ancient shrines and high tech cities, being there was a sad and constant reminder that the technological paradise of glorious Nihon was for other people.
Cole wasn't satisfied by this, even then. On the final day of their vacation, he snuck away from his parents to see what the real Japan was like. He passed by a Japanese elementary school and spied some kids some age. He was always a gregarious and friendly child, and while this worked very well in his quaint midwestern homeland of Wisconsin, it served him less well here.
He said hi to the Japanese schoolchildren, and they responded in Japanese, which he did not speak. They grew ever more derisive and he responded in more and more panicked English, which ended with him being shoved into a sewer.
This could have been the end of Cole Thereven, there and then, but even at such a young age Cole was resilient, persevering, and unwilling to give up. On sight alone, he followed the sewer along the walls, facing the wind, hoping to find a way out. Every step he took seemed to bring him deeper into the darkness, but he refused to let that stop him.
And then he reached a set of stairs.
The Stairs.
He began to climb. There was a faint hum in the distance, the sound of the wind or perhaps the city above. As he climbed, that sound seemed to get louder and higher.
He wondered, with every step, if his parents missed him, and if his family worried for him. He felt bad to worry them, of course, and mad that his sense of adventure had landed him in such water. Most of all, he missed them, and his tummy was starting to hurt.
There were mushrooms on the side of the stairs, bright green, and they smelled like candy, so he ate some even though they were glowing. They didn't look like poisonous red mushrooms, so he thought he was safe. And in any case he knew that if he didn't eat, he would die anyways. The mushrooms gave him strength to keep climbing, filling him with an endless vigor.
He kept following the stairs upwards. The higher and higher he went, the higher the hum grew. He felt confident he was going the right way. But the higher he went, the harder it became to keep going, and the more he stopped to eat the green mushrooms, but not the red ones.
He wondered how he hadn't made it back to the surface yet. He hadn't fallen that far when the bullies had shoved him into the drain. Surely he would have reached the surface hours and hours ago. But still he kept climbing. The stairs kept going up, and the noise kept getting louder, so it made sense, didn't it?
But as he took another step upwards, he saw a great big twisted claw — and a great big clawed flipper, reaching for his head, and he stumbled backwards and fell, and thought he would be falling to his death, tumbling down hundreds upon hundreds of flights of stairs — but he crashed to the ground after only one flight of stairs, and he saw, atop that single flight, a dark and looming shadow, staring at him with bright red eyes, and he knew his death was come—
But then a figure, clad in blue overalls and a rusty brown t-shirt, jumped past him towards the stairs, wielding a wrench in one hand, reaching into a utility belt with the other. From that utility belt the figure pulled a welding torch, and brandished it at the shadow atop the stairs. The foul demon of the stairs roared in agony and stepped upwards into nothingness, fading from sight, and as if to dismiss it for good the noble warrior jumped towards the darkness and jumped on its head.
It roared in agony, falling to its belly as it faded into the distant darkness.
The valiant warrior came to Cole, and to his mortification he began to cry. He was tired and lost and had had a very stressful day. "I want my mommy!"
The man said, in slightly accented English. "Hey. Hey, it's ok, little boy. Are you lost?"
Slowly, Cole nodded. He knew talking to strangers was dangerous, but it wasn't like this day could get any worse.
"It's alright now. I'll get you out of here and to your parents. You can trust me. I'm a Plumber."
Cole knew that Plumbers were usually pretty good at fixing pipes and toilets, so this made him feel better. He pointed at the stairs, which looked like a normal pair of stairs again. "What was that?"
The Plumber looked at the stairs with a troubled look upon his face. "Something me and my friends have spent a very long time dealing with," he said soberly. "You're lucky I came here when I did — that's a very dangerous set of stairs you found yourself on."
"I meant the turtle," Cole said.
"Some things are too dangerous to know about," the Plumber said, his bushy mustache twisting with his frown.
But Cole didn't believe that. He'd heard the roars of the demon as it was driven away, and a part of him had felt a kindred spirit with the beast. It hadn't sounded angry, or hungry, or mad.
It had sounded lonely, the keening of a wounded beast, trying to find others of its kind but repelled from this reality by guardians who didn't know better.
The Plumber led Cole out of the sewers, and by nightfall he had been reunited with his parents.
But that encounter stuck with him.
There were places out there, locations that didn't make sense, and beings that dwelled at their edges. And the default poise of the guardians of this world, the Plumbers and the Electricians and the Carpenters and Masons, was to beat them back into the darkness. To seal them beyond the gates, to prevent them from entering the light, when there was plenty of room under the sun for any who could endure it.
He could promise them a better future.
Cole infers what happens to him next after he wakes:
The Cyberserkers of the Silicon Nornir seize Cole's corpse, steal his pathetically outmoded guns — who uses lead when lasers are available? — and bring him before the Nornir for forensic analysis.
The Interface Room is sleek silver. It would be too dangerous, and completely unnecessary, to bring a Foundation corpse before the Silicon Nornir themselves.
The nanoprobes will be more than enough to extract intelligence from the fallen Foundation representative.
Cole jerks awake.
He knows the Nornir probably anticipated something similar to this, but not exactly like this. Immortal or resurrecting Foundation doctors are nothing new. The trick is determining the nature of their immortality. And he's not going to give up his secrets.
Cole, for his part, seems rather pleased.
"I wasn't expecting to get an audience this way, but it's good enough for me. Now, why don't you tell me about yourselves?" he says to no one in particular, expecting the Nornir to hear and respond.
They do not. He supposes it's rather foolish of him.
The Nornir, after all, are not true gods. They're supercomputers — great and alien intelligences that connect things in unintuitive ways. A deitic intelligence is often similar, of course — when you interact with a god, you're not interacting with the whole entirety of that god's power in one place at the same time. So much power would probably burn most humans to a crisp. You're interacting with a tiny sliver of a god's power, shoved through the lens of your cultural expectations, warped in a way you can understand.
But it's odd, really, how often the GOC and Foundation employees he's talked to think of the Nornir as actual beings instead of a tripartite supercomputer.
Lights pulse, silver droplets flowing through fiber optic. A distant bass hum punctuated by beeps, the occasional high pitched whine of spinning discs.
Why is he here?
They must want his system — his proprietary method of negotiating with anomalies, no matter where they come from. Cryptid, Deitic, Time Displaced, Bestial, and the kitchen sink/generalized sentience. It's brought him great success in the past. The Silicon Nornir must want his methods, so they can connect to other beings more easily and bring them into the fold of the GOC.
He can't allow that.
They've taken his guns. Without Candor and Connection, Communication is impossible. Only trickery and force remain.
Cole's never used a computer before, but of course he's first in line when his university gets one.
These are the machines of the future, after all. A computer is a way of connecting to human beings across the world, speaking to them, getting to share experiences. In the future, computers might even be able to translate between languages, removing one of the last barriers between the unity of all mankind. If computers are common by the year 2000, there's a very real chance that they will usher in an era of world peace.
When his 30 minute time slot begins, he's sure he doesn't want to waste a single minute of it.
He finds a "language and cultural exchange" Usenet group. He can't wait to introduce himself.
"Hi. I'm Cole Thereven, 23, University of Manitoba. Studying for my PhD in Psychology. I am very glad to have a chance to talk to people from all across the world."
The instant he hits enter, a response pops up.
PSYCHOLOGY??????????????? ???????? ???????? ?????????????? ??????????????? ?? ?????????? ??????????????? ??????????? ?????? ????????? ????????? ???????!?? NEWSFLASH BUDDY YOU NEVER MET A REAL PSYCHO LIKE ME. THE ONLY LANGUAGE I SPEAK IS AMERICAN AND KICKING ASS. KIDS TODAY NEED THEIR VACCINES, PARTICIPATION AWARDS, AND STAR BUCKS BEFORE THEY CAN GET GOING. ME? I WAKE UP, BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THE FIRST GREMLIN THAT TRIES TO TEST ME, AND IM READY TO GO. FIGURE IT OUT.
—HOGSLICE
Cole's a little surprised at how fast this seems to work, but he's really quite interested in what this fine fellow is saying. He's especially interested in this "star bucks" — might it be some way of sending money over the internet, or could it be a fascinating pagan religion?
"That's interesting, Hogslice. Are you a martial artist? I did Tae Kwon Do when I was in elementary school. My teacher always talked to us about the importance of discipline and respecting your opponent."
The instant he responds, HOGSLICE replies.
THAT'S FUCKING BULLSHIT BRO. YOU DON'T NEED TO RESPECT YOUR OPPONENT YOU JUST NEED TO WIN. WINNING IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS. DONKEY PUNCHES, GOING FOR THE EYES, POCKET SAND. YOU USE IT OR YOU LOSE IT AND I NEVER FUCKING LOSE. THE ONLY DISCIPLINE I NEED IS THE DISCIPLINE TO CURL MY FIST. HONOR IS FOR PUSSIES.
—HOGSLICE
It's 1999, and the concept of the internet troll is not yet common.
"How can you say that?" Cole types, furiously, his heart palpitating. "How can you be like this? Doesn't it hurt you when you hurt other people? Do you really believe this?"
ARE YOU CALLING ME A LIAR? ARE YOU MOCKING ME?
—HOGSLICE
"I just"
Cole pauses, not sure how he intends to finish his sentence. His hands shaking with adrenaline, he types the next phrase carefully, watching the keyboard closely to type every letter.
"I just don't believe you're like this for real."
OH, I'LL SHOW YOU HOW REAL I AM. IT'S ON.
—HOGSLICE
Cole frowned, wondering what anyone could do to him over the internet. He gets his answer when a hand grabs him by the hair and smashes his face into the university's computer.
He groans in surprise, though that quickly becomes groans of pain.
In between his impromptu bouts of facial reconstruction surgery, he catches a glimpse of his assailant. To his surprise, it looks like he's being beaten to death by professional wrestler Scott Steiner.
The man himself.
The glass of the computer shatters; the machine silences with an electronic pop. "HOGSLICE" proceeds to smash Cole's face into the desk, the wall, and his other fist, in no particular order, multiple times apiece. Soon, Cole knows no more.
He is in a place that is not a place; a place that is endless void with streams of swirling fate and blood. Before his eyes, he dreams of himself. He sees a green mushroom that he had seen before only in a dream
Behind it, in the middle distance, is an image of his face, floating in the void, and next to it is a burning numeral: XIII. Before his eyes, it ticks down: XII.
In the distance there is a steady beep. It is not the annoying drone of an alarm clock, but something more soothing. Rhythmic. Ominous.
He turns and exits the unplace, and awakens in a hospital bed.
The attending nurse's eyes open, and she seems to cry tears of joy, and she calls her colleagues. That he's awakened is miraculous. He's escaped from beyond the reign of death.
There are some people who only speak the language of violence. Cole learned that lesson the hard way.
EURTEC is under extreme GOC control. It's a GOC project for human development, under the eye of the Silicon Nornir.
The Department of Anomalous Relations and Communications is roughly under the various diplomatic functions of the Foundation, and Cole's rather proud he's managed to keep it independent. The relationships between the Foundation and GOC are governed by an ever-increasingly complex network of treaties and agreements, starting with the Koln Agreement in the 1940s, with the addition of the House Accords and the Cartegena Agreement sometime in the adjoining period, among others. Cole was hoping his presence here could be leveraged into a nice, shiny diplomatic agreement with his name on it — the Thereven Compact, or something like it — but alas, the whole thing had been a trap.
Now he sits beneath the watchful machine-eyes of the Silicon Nornir.
They're silent.
Cole's familiar with the silent treatment. His wife started doing it to him once their daughter fell ill. He's also learned not to be the first one to talk.
But he's familiar with machine intelligences, as well as deitic ones. Gods have patience on the span of centuries; machines experience millennia in second. The two concepts are in opposition, yet Cole is willing to bet that in the balance, the Nornir will be more patient than he is.
They can take his guns, but they can't take his knowledge. Without Candor and Connection, Cole must rely instead on Deception and Rejection.
He takes in a deep, deep breath. He hates doing this, though he doesn't like to use the word hate because of its negative connotations and its role as a barrier to further communication.
His fingers shudder as he curls them. He relaxes them, letting them go limp for just a second — but he has no other choice.
Slowly, slowly, his fingers close. Then his thumb goes over them. His eyes water from shame.
Now he wields his bare fists — Deception, his left. Rejection, his right.
He hates it — but Thereven the diplomat must cease. Thereven the warrior must awaken to fight the GOC.
Cole shades his eyes and resists the urge to scratch his ears to pull out his earplugs.
In the distance, he can see Dolores King Memorial Belltower. If he were to approach, he knows he would hear a gaudy bodily of one of the movements of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
The containment ritualists besides him are fretting, eyeing him askance.
"Frankly, kid," says one of them, a stern woman named Rossellini, "You sure you don't want me to call Regional Command? See if we can get you reassigned? You see a bit out of place here."
Cole shakes his head. "I asked for this, and I'm going to see it through. My momma didn't raise a quitter."
"But—why?"
He's not sure he can answer her. He's listened to the the redacted versions of 6447's music, had some contacts of his run them through signal processing and cryptography, thought about it for quite some time — and he's convinced that 6447 is saying something more than it seems.
"Mister Thereven," Rossellini started.
"Doctor."
"Doctor—wow, really? Doctor? So young?" Rossellini says. "Doctor Thereven. I've been working with 6447 for quite some time, and it's an incredibly delicate system in contrabalance. The weather is tied to the music. We've lost hundreds to it over the years, and once you're part of it, you cannot die. It won't let you."
"Hey now," Cole says. "You're not that much older than I am!"
The truth was, Cole wants to be here because everything else that could be called a god was under strict lockdown. The Foundation keeps strict tabs on any deitic beings in custody, precisely because if they were to run amuck, it could have devastating effects on reality. 6447 is barely said to be in custody, however. It's hardly under control. But it fits his criteria. It's an Emergent Eschatological Entity. And if he can figure out what makes it tick, he can solve a problem. Help the world. Make his parents proud of him.
He can tell Rosellini isn't going to be of much help.
When night falls, he sneaks out of the Foundation camp and approaches the Dolores King Memorial Belltower on foot. He brings his trusty speak and spell with him, so he can take extensive notes.
The music vibrates through his bones even though his earplugs are in. No normal human beings should be able to make such loud noises with their own bodies. It would scare him. But he needs to know.
He sees them. They don't stop him from walking among them. They don't notice him at all. They simply keep playing the music.
Their throats are bare. It makes no sense that they can sing at all. And they exude the substance, R-447. He's careful not to touch it, but he knows it's only poisonous if ingested, and even then it can be eaten in safe doses if diluted far enough. But a part of him feels like a voyeur, among all of these people focusing on their art, yet unable to engage.
He knows he won't get anything from them if he just tries to talk.
So instead he starts to clap. There's a place in the song for a percussion line. Not quite traditional for Vivaldi — he can't make a cymbal sound with his bare hands — but it'll have to do. And anyways body percussion and voice was never meant for Vivaldi in the first place.
He gives himself to the music.
His hands are drumsticks. His thighs marimbas. His voice both trumpet and violin.
He doesn't know how long he's there.
One eternity blurs into another.
The music gives way to darkness. A sense of falling, and then cold.
The fire ticks down.
When he awakens, he's been recovered by a Foundation team and is in Site-12, convalescing.
They don't know how he survived any of it. He's just glad he did.
He's upset to learn they've taken him off of the 6447 project, though.
Cole unclenches his fists.
He won't get anywhere by punching with them. It was mostly symbolic to clench them anyways, to represent him embracing Deception and Rejection.
"I am now about to speak a lethal cognitohazard, that I personally have been immunized against," he says, enunciating loudly and clearly. "I do not expect this to be of any harm to the Nornir. However, the mechanism of action for this cognitohazard is to cause overheating via neural agitation. I don't know the first thing about how computer brains work, but I bet they don't like being hot any more than meat brains do."
There's no response. The lights of the computer banks hum as usual. If he's been heard, he's not being listened to, which is always hurtful for communication. Cole would go so far as to say that it sucks.
He walks over to the door and pushes on it. It's locked, as expected, but the locking mechanism is electronic. He suspects it's like a distant limb or a skin tag to the Nornir, in that if he had a way to break through it normally they would usually not take notice, but since he's drawn their attention, he can pull a con.
They searched him, yes, but they can't take away all of his knowledge and his magic.
"Sussamogus Vent," he stage whispers at the lock. It's a nonsense word, a homage to his beloved daughter Lisa's favorite video game. It's an added bonus that the GOC's thaumatologists and linguists will waste upwards of 20 hours trying to figure out the nature of the "spell" he used.
Simultaneously, he performs a very complicated set of hand twitches that took him a very long time to learn, which superheat the locks of the door, melting them. He does it again to the other side. When he sees red-hot liquid metal dripping out the side, he gives it one great kick.
The door falls flat outside with a great clang.
"There's more where that came from," he says.
And now, to escape from Eurtec.
Cole Thereven will return in: