Chapter 9

Two Weeks Ago...

SparkySparky looked nervous, but slowly, he nodded to Celestine Nexus Thirty Three.

“Okay.” He sighed. “One truck coming right up. Should we get another Japanese kid?”

“Nah, they’re oversaturated,” Thirty Three said, already taking out more files and hastily rewriting names.

“Who should I nab then?” SparkySparky sounded unsure.

“I dunno, roll a die!” Thirty Three said, then muttered. “Supergirl can be ... Super ... Lady! There! Perfect.”

SparkySparky sighed. “We’re going to get sued,” he said, then turned to his computer, and started to scroll through Prime-Earth’s many potential targets – and cycled through variegated causes of death. He settled on one Eugene Dalbert, sighted in, then frowned. “Question: How are we going to nab him without the Caretakers noticing us?”

“What do you mean nab him?” Celestine Nexus Thirty Three asked, her voice irritated as she scribbled over Noceda and wrote in that place the name Notceda. “Just ... just grab the nerd.”

“You have no idea how my job actually works do you?” SparkySparky asked, his voice droll.

“You just nab souls when people die, and then ... bip bop boop, cram them into dimensions for isekai bullshit!” Celestine said, throwing up several of her arms. “Right? That’s how that works?” Inside, she started to count down the seconds that SparkySparky was wasting with this diversion. She had spent her entire life trying to crawl up the ranks of the Caretakers, and this souljock was-

“Souls don’t exist, Celestine,” SparkySparky said, rubbing each of his infinite temples all at once. “I mean. Okay, they do, but only in cosmic-pockets that have quantum saturated sentience bearing foam, but that’s not the prime universe. The prime universe is running on pure crunch, just straight up how biology and physics tells it to work. Right?” He tapped the desk with his fingers. “If someone dies on Earth Prime, they ... they don’t go anywhere. They just stop. Only fictives get to keep living forever, in their pocket universes, and that’s only if the universes don’t collapse or get forgotten or overwritten or rewritten or whatever.” He shook his heads, the expression on his manifold features shifting from contempt and pity.

Celestine, who had spent her whole life mostly dealing with the big, weighty projects – the gears of cosmos, the lives and deaths of stars – stammered. “W-What?”

“You didn’t know that?” SparkySparky asked, actually laughing.

“B ... Bu ... but the Caretakers are yanking people and isekaing them all the time,” she said. “It’s how we deal with most of our problems! Or, uh, how we used to deal with all our problems!” She gestured around herself with her arms, her hair flaring bright blue. “Before corporate got involved-”

“Yeah, we yank them bodily out of the universe and throw them into new universes,” SparkySparky said.

“ ... an ... and Earth Prime doesn’t notice?” Celestine whispered, her frantically concocted plan beginning to fall apart around herself.

“Well, we replace them with a fake body, but a body’s easy to fake. It’s consciousness that’s hard!” SparkySparky said, sighing. “And the Primeverse just winks them out like candles. Fucking sucks, doesn’t it?” He shook several of his heads. “But none of that matters if we just grab Eugene before the truck hits him. But that kind of dimensional snatching is going to get noticed by, you know, our bosses? Then we get fired?”

“S-So ... you’re saying...” Celestine said, slowly.

“I’m saying I thought you had an idea on how to grab Eugene or Larry or Greg or any of these people I have lined up before they bite it!” SparkySparky said, growing agitated now.

Celestine rubbed her palms against her face. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.”

“I ... take it you didn’t then,” SparkySparky said, slowly.

Celestine tapped her fingers together before her nose, all twenty nine million of them. She thought, pensively.

“What is consciousness?” she said, slowly.

SparkySparky sighed. Closed his eyes. Rolled several dozen of his heads back. “Consciousness is a process, running on any system complex enough to support it. It’s like a song, that comes out of an instrument. The instrument needs air – that’s the processes that run life, by the way, whatever kind of life you’re talking about. And air needs the instrument – that’s the structures of the brain or computer or fungi or whatever it is your consciousness is in at the moment. Without either, you don’t get the song.”

Celestine stuck her tongue into the corner of her cheek. Cocked her head.

“What if we just grab the pattern of his brain?” she asked.

“Uh...” SparkySparky blinked. “Earth Prime still hasn’t figured that trick out yet? Like, if they had brain scanning technology, sure, we could replicate it here. But the only side-universes that have it are fictive ones – and fictive technology won’t work in Earth Prime. The best I can do is, like, get a very detailed snapshot of his brain. But like, a brain isn’t just a physical structure, there’s hormones and electrical interactions and quantum events that are happening.”

“Grab it,” Celestine said.

“But-”

“Grab it!” Celestine said, slapping her palms on her desk. “Or else this whole plan is a non-starter.”

Her hands reached out into the controls that floated above her desk. They were complex and intricate and were normally used to sculpt a universe over many long centuries. She had a few hours, and was doing her best – and that was before she realized she had to make some pretty fundamental changes to the nature of the quantum foam in her current pocket universe. As Celestine’s fingers twirled and twitched, SparkySparky focused on his own job. He winced. “Okay,” he said. “Got the picture – a slightly blurry snapshot of a brain literal seconds before it gets squished by a truck.”

Celestine grunted, still focused on her work.

“ ... sorry kid,” SparkySparky murmured, his eyes unfocused. They saw another world, at the moment.

Celestine slapped her palm down. “Okay, it’s quasi-stable and there’s a body in there. Lets just ... stick the brain pattern in and defibrillate it.”

“That-”

“It might work!” Celestine said, desperately.

SparkySparky sighed.

He pressed a button.

The two of them watched, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of mortals and gods alike, as the lump of tissue and flesh that Celestine had sculpted and plopped down into a bedroom in a pocket dimension sprawled there. The body twitched and jerked under the sudden slamming of electrical energy – and then collapsed back. The two kept watching. Celestine wished that god was real, so she could pray to whatever that god would be. But that was the problem with being a part of the inner working of the multiverse.

She knew for a fact that it was clockwork, all the way down.

“It’s not working,” SparkySparky said.

“Try it again!” Celestine hissed, looking away from the pocket dimension. SparkySparky looked down at his controls.

The body, in that moment that they were not peering directly at it...

Twitched.

Electrical energies buzzed through.

And the body sat up with a jerk, gasping and looking around itself. Celestine pumped her fists into the air. “YES!” she exclaimed, while SparkySparky shouted.

“WHOA!”

“It worked!” Celestine laughed. “Hah! We did it! We did it, we did a consciousness transference on the cheap!”

SparkySparky blinked several times in rapid succession, clearly trying to process this.

“Well!” he said. “I guess we did!”

Right Now...

Aiden gaped at Luz.

“I’m ... the...” He paused, then pointed at himself.

“The Chathurian,” Luz said, looking deeply nervous. She drummed her fingers on her knees. “So! Like. Not exactly what we were all expecting, buuuuut, it does make defeating the Chathurian a lot easier!” She tried to keep a hopeful look on her face. “Right? Right?”

Aiden examined his memories like a tongue probing at jagged tooth.

It was a bit like standing on the very edge of a very high cliff. He blinked – and realized he actually was standing over a vast, yawning black cliff. Looking down into it, he could see...

Nothing.

No memories of his old life. No memories of his old friends. No memories of his parents, beyond a blurry, indistinct thought that he could only grasp at.

“It is kinda funny how you never once really thought about your old home, huh?”

Aiden spun around. His feet scuffed at the edge of the cliff side that had become very much not metaphoric. Standing behind him ... was him. Blue skinned, elf eared, white haired, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. His hands were in his pockets and he didn’t look particularly gleeful or wrathful or eager to eat Aiden’s brains. Instead, he was just looking pensive. Thoughtful. He cocked his head to the side as Aiden stepped hurriedly away from the cliff. He tore his eyes away from the other Aiden and saw that the two of them were standing in a vast, gray-white field of endless dust, reaching out in every direction save ... behind him. Behind him was just a yawning gulf of nothing. The sky overhead was lined with frozen lines that zigged and zagged like lightning caught in the moment of the flash – but between those glowing white lines was just ... blackness.

“And, you know, the whole ‘prime humans have actual powers here’ seemed kinda fishy to me,” Other Aiden said, walking up beside Aiden, peering over the edge of the cliff. “Like, if prime humans had any actual inherent specialness or power, I’d have thought it’d ... you know ... demonstrate it in our day to day life.”

“B-But...” Aiden shook his head. “We ... I ... was crammed here to-”

“To stop up the Chathurian? Yeah, I guess,” Other Aiden said, shrugging. He started to walk around Aiden, his shoes scuffing slightly.

“So, we have to have something going for us,” Aiden said.

“A semi-stable quantum process, grounded in the real,” Other Aiden said, shrugging his shoulders. “The metaphysical equivalent of a doorstop.”

“Okay, but-”

“What part of being too mundane to let the Chathurian through into the multiverse makes it seem like you and I should get anything?” Other Aiden asked, walking around to Aiden’s front. He spread his hands, taking them from his pockets. His right hand was tipped with glittering, black claws – claws that sprouted from blue fingers that were turning purple from the very tips. It was as if the claws had sprouted, and now were beginning to take root, spreading their corruption through Other Aiden’s hand. Before his eyes, actually. Aiden could see the webwork of dark lines threading through the purple, which became black, and the blue beyond became purple in time.

The darkness was spreading.

“But if we’re the Chathurian,” Aiden said. “An outer god...”

“Then we have power to spare,” Other Aiden said.

“Just needed to ... shape it...” Aiden shook his head. “But, wait, wait, but, but, but, they, they said I was an isekai! The fucking, the fucking asshole people who made this dimension!”

“Wow, they lied, that would be so unlike them!” Other Aiden said.

Aiden inclined his head. “Good point. Where are we? Before I get distracted?”

“A cutaway,” Other Aiden said. “Just, you know. More metaphoric.”

“Good to know, good to know,” Aiden said. “And, uh, you notice your hand is getting kinda...” He pointed and Other Aiden looked down at his hand – then yelped in shock as blackness now webbed down from his fingers to his wrists and each of those fingers ended in a two inch talon that glittered and gleamed with vicious eagerness to rip, tear, and rend flesh. He grabbed his wrist and looked at Aiden.

“Fuck!”

“Wait, you’re not, all, like, tempted to go evil Aiden?” Aiden asked.

“No!” Other Aiden exclaimed. “I thought that was you!”

“Me!?” Aiden said, pointing at himself. “I’m the fucking panicking about the fact that ... that ... that I’m just a thin membrane of fake fucked up fucking memories wrapped around a fucking elder god! Fuck!” He sagged, then sat down, his back facing the cliff. He had enough space to place his palms on the ground behind him without getting near the edge. “This bullshit!”

“I know, right?” Other Aiden sat down, still clutching his wrist.

“Why do you think you’re getting all corrupted, though?” Aiden asked.

“I dunno!” Other Aiden exclaimed. Then, grinning sheepishly. “I bet, uh, heh, if Luz could see it, she’d be like ‘ahh, my boyfriend is getting weirdly hot and stabby!’”

Aiden laughed with him. “God, what a fucking dork,” he said. “Do you even know what TV show she’s supposed to be from?”

Other Aiden shook his head. “No, still lost. But fuck it. She’s probably diverged from her original character anyway.” He risked a little grin. His teeth looked just a bit sharper. “Just like us, I guess.”

A low, quiet wind whistled by. Dust picked up, carried, and swirled around.

“What even is the Chathurian?” Other Aiden asked, frowning. “Do we even know?”

“No,” Aiden said. Then he frowned. “I have an idea.”

“What is it?” Other Aiden asked as Aiden started to stand up. He brushed grayish dust off his pants.

“Since you’re basically me, just, you know, hotter,” Aiden said, grinning slightly. “And I’m me, too, that means that we’re both Aiden. And we both love Luz, and we both want to make sure that our goofy ass little pocket dimension is safe. And Earth Prime. Right?”

Other Aiden nodded.

“Which means ... we can take some risks,” Aiden said, cracking his knuckles. He stepped backwards, squared his shoulders, and called over his shoulder. “If this leads to my total obliteration, tell Luz I’m a big idiot.”

“Wait-” Other Aiden started, reaching out with his clawed hand.

Aiden stepped off the side off the cliff.

“AIDEN!” Other Aiden shouted, scrambling to the edge of the cliff – where he saw that Aiden was floating slowly down into the darkness. Aiden slid his hands into his pockets, craning his head back to peer up at Other Aiden.

“I can fly, remember?” Aiden asked, sinking himself down inch by inch.

Other Aiden flushed. “Shut up.”

Aiden drifted down along the wall of the cliff.

The darkness crept around him bit by bit bit. First, he couldn’t make out details. Then he couldn’t make out gross features. Then he couldn’t even see himself. And still he went down.

The air went from stale and chill to stale and cold to cloying and freezing. His breath fogged invisibly against his cheeks – he could feel the transitory heat of his exhalations every second of the trip down. And still he went down.

The pressure on him grew less and less and less, until the air against his skin felt like nothing but a whisper, a suggestion. A hint that he was moving. And still.

He went down.

And down.

And down.

And then, barely perceptible at first, then faster and faster, the space below him began to gain shape and light. Aiden slowed his decent as he emerged from the blackness and came out over something vast and seemingly infinite. It reached out in every direction – neither curving up nor down, simply a razor’s edge of a horizon. The sky was black, and the bottom was black, and between was that pale gray lightless light that he had seen. The bottom rippled slowly, tiny perturbations of liquid.

Aiden was floating above a vast, infinitely wide black ocean, at the bottom of the pit of his soul.

“Whoa,” he whispered.

His word was caught and swallowed by the vastness.

SPOOKY, HUH?

The voice that was not a voice did not leave any room for any thought or comprehension. It was less a sound or an impression and more an all consuming presence, imprinting what it meant into Aiden’s brain by the spaces it left behind. Like being caught in the pressure of a vast typewriter’s molded pewter typeset, the words bloomed into him with a sense of agony and inevitability. Aiden clutched at his head, clenching his teeth as the voice that was not a voice continued.

THIS IS THE END, AIDEN. THIS IS WHERE EVERYTHING GOES, EVENTUALLY.

“Who ... what ... are you?” Aiden asked, choking the words out, piece by piece.

ISN’T THAT OBVIOUS? The voiceless voice chuckled – each chuckle caused the endless ocean to tremble. I’M YOU.

The ocean wheeled around him – and Aiden found himself tumbling through what appeared to be speckled blackness. Flaring firefly sparks whipped past him, billions of them. Aiden realized that they were stars. The wheeling stopped and he realized he was floating above the vast, stately procession of the Milky Way galaxy. There were the Magellanic clouds, smoldering with their own set gemstones. There was the distant Andromeda galaxy, looming. There, beyond, were more galaxies, galaxies on galaxies, stretching outwards to the edge of the known universe.

WATCH.

The galaxy began to spin. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. Stars flashed perpetually – pinprick flares so bright that they made Aiden’s eyes sting. He winced, but could not look away as the galaxy spun like a top now. The stars flickered and twinkled like a sparkler in a firework display. Supernova flaring to life, spreading nebulaic gasses, then condensing into protostars, which themselves formed into stars, which then flared brightly, and then pocked away. The Magellanic Clouds orbited the galaxy, and then ... with a dizzying sweep of stars, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy collapsed together. Stars were sent flinging off into the vast abyssal darkness between galaxies, and solar systems were ripped apart by gravitational sheer.

Still, the flickering went on.

Aiden wanted to ask – what was happening, why he was being shown this.

But then the stars began to die.