Nihilnauts

Prologue:

“It's the same fucking thing every time. I can’t—" Her voice was drowned out by the buzzing crack of her directed high voltage discharger as it unleashed a bolt of lightning arcing to an advancing creature, caramelizing the fizzling flesh of its chest.

"We've been to how many dimensions?" She asked. Her companion turned his head, the neck pistons hissing as they actuated his face.

“Around five hundred." He answered in mechanically warm voice.

“Right," she continued, turning to face the slushing blob of flesh creeping towards them, "we've been to hundreds of dimensions and they're all basically the same. We drop in, obliterate some low-level goons, maybe there is some civilization we interact with. We're either gods or a nuisance to them and we run a few errands for random people. Gal'k'kazu might fall through a portal and we fight him or maybe an impending apocalypse is approaching and we have to stop it or slide into another dimension as it gets obliterated."

Pulling the trigger, she squinted as the blue energy pulsed from the capacitive plate at the end of her weapon and grounded in the melted body of the creature. Reviling from the damage, the creature fell backwards and jiggled as it tumbled into a small sandy pit, puffing up lilac colored dust. The robot took a step towards it and, positioning his thumper cannon at the base of its neck, pounded the tungsten rod into the melty flesh, shattering the internal skeleton. The creature fell limp and out of its body fell several small items.

She took a step towards it, crouching down on one knee. Reaching up to her visor, she rolled through a dial on the right part of her helmet, flipping through different light spectra as she inspected the three things nestled in the sand next to the dead body. 'A bottle of phase plasma?" She asked as she reached down, brushing chunky red goo off of a silver-plated vial of purple substance.

“I have a drum of that stuff in my pocket-dimension. Remember there was that one world where the boundary was a plasma ocean. So we pumped a couple megaliters into the city and then swam through picking up loot?"

"Oh right. So, I guess not." It dropped quietly out of her hand and shot halfway under the sand.

"What about that?" The robot exclaimed as he pointed to a shiny golden object nestled beneath a fleshy hatch on the dead creature. Slowly removing the mucous dripping object, she turned it over and brought it to her face. She stared at it for a moment before stating, "it’s a data log. I bet it's one of those stupid procedural poems some dumb village wrote. He'll probably give us half a dryna for it."

"Where's the village here anyway?”

“See that mountain?" She pointed to a craggy spire reaching into the sky, puncturing the swirling blanket

of purple clouds sweeping across the upper atmosphere. Several titanic obelisks hovered unmoving around the mountain. Continuing, "Its at the base. Near a crashed obelisk."

“We should head there." The robot asserted.

“don’t know. Why?"

"Why we should head there?"

“Yeah. Like what purpose? We do a barter. Get a couple random fetch quests and then what? We catalyze another phase crystal and jump dimensions again. And what there? The same fucking thing. Except it has blue sand. Or there’s giant stone tentacles coming from the ground.”

“That's one way to look at it, I suppose." The robot looked up at the mountain and took a few steps forwards, the light sand pluming off of his boots.

“El, you seem different lately" he began after a moment.

“Maybe. I'm just not sure what the point is anymore.”

“Nothing has changed.”

“But maybe there wasn't a point before, procy. We were just so pumped on dopamine from smearing infinite hordes that we never thought about it. I was always chasing a new colorful gun or trying to get bigger armor or scared out of my mind trying to get a portal open before the sky lit on fire."

“That’s valid." Procyon said as he turned to look her, “but like what else is there? Isn't it good enough?"

“l don't know. Let's just go to the village. We should bring the data log back." She said as she stood up,

sliding the data log into a pouch on her belt.

Procyon threw tiny color bombs along the side of the road, showering the gravel path with solid color particles.

“Gotta clear out my inventory." He said after shooting a glance to Eltanin, "l always collect the fun consumables, but like I never use them so I figured why not now."

Eltanin stared back at the gravel path directly in front of her. She trudged on in silence, the only sound the crunching rocks under her boots mixing with the faint rhythmic hiss of her air scrubber.

An idle creature meandered around a field on the right, using two long spirals on its head to filter feed from the organic dust flowing across the field from nearby vents. As the two got closer, the animal shot its head up, coiling in the spirals, and tilted its solid black eye towards them. It stayed still for a moment before bouncing off of its hind legs and bounding off away from the road, puffing dust up behind it. Procyon raised his arm, finger clenched around a green color bomb. His eyes tracked the beast as it bounced away. He lowered his hand and continued marching along the road, tossing the grenade softy in front of himself so he walked through an emerald haze, coating his shin plates and boots with a patchy layer of green.

The village sat at the base of the craggy volcanic mountain at the center of the island, composed of several homogenous light-blue concrete structures huddled along the two cryogenic lava rivers flowing out of the mountain. Embossed yellow tracks traces out simple maze-like patterns on the walls of the buildings. Many structures had a beacon emanating a thin purple haze directly up into the thick cloud cover a mile above the village.

Procyon and Eltanin walked quietly across the flat concrete walkway over one of the river towards the central strip of pink land. Procyon turned his head to look into the oozing stream of gray methane flowing turbulently under the bridge.

“l think I've gotten used to everything being different," procyon said solemnly as he stared down at the warped reflection of the village in the dynamic surface of the river. "On earth, everything was blue or green. Water wasn't rock and animals walked on 4 legs and ate with mouths.”

“Everything made sense because the world was tiny" Eltanin added.

“We haven't been back on earth in a long time.”

“No. But earth was just one these, right?" She said gesturing around at the dusty pink island beneath a shroud.

She continued with a subdued energy, "Earth, our earth, was just a universe. There wasn't anything special about it. Even in that universe, earth was a tiny dot floating around a dim little spec in a spiral cloud around a black hole which was suspended in an intricate mesh of other unreachable, isolated swirls set into an infinite, empty vastness."

The air hung around them. Only the deep faint rumble of the river was audible through their helmets. 'And every universe we visit," she said, "is the same way. An infinite expanse we see an infinitesimal fraction of. What else lies beyond those clouds? An empty void of unimaginable magnitude populated by a few sparse rocks?”

“Maybe," procyon said softly after a brief pause, "but

I'm focusing on getting that villager his data log." “Yeah. I guess we should focus on something tiny and insignificant. Something comprehensible."

They stepped off of the bridge onto the packed dirt road specked with reflective shards. Procyon turned to look at a small figure walking briskly down one of the roads. He was a stout bipedal creature wearing a white and gold robe covering his body except for his bald oblate blue head, with tiny ears poking up at its apex. The figure was facing away from them so Procyon couldn't make out his face.

“The market would be a good place to start." Eltanin remarked, "l guess I didn't figure how we'd find him.” “l agree. We could just talk to everyone there until someone says, 'l was jogging in the field to the north near the tetracrystal shard and dropped my memoir.'" Procyon said, raising the pitch of his voice and rocking his head to imitate a villager.

Eltanin exhaled sharply through her nose, the sudden sound, garbled by the facemask's plating and reverberated through the air hose, was heard by Procyon as more of a crackle than a laugh. A small green tint reflected off of his silver face plating from the mood indicator as it changed from low saturation blue to medium green.

The central market, designed much like every other market across dimensions, was a round plaza set in the center of the village. A central beacon, set up on a geometrically patterned block of stone, pulsed out a deep purple beam into the sky. Along the border, several stands clustered, a symbol of what they sold hanging above each. Procyon scanned the many shops, his eyes passing over a canister, a blaster, a med kit, a hover bike, and finally coming to rest on a datalog. "There," he pointed, "the archivist would be a good first look." He started off quickly to the small tan and blue stand set off alone on the other side of the market.

The archivist was a short plump figure. He looked up at Procyon through vertical-oriented red eyes.

Procyon interacted with the shopkeeper.

"What do you want?" The shop keeper sputtered in his native language, the message translated and echoed in procyon's ear piece.

“Do you have a quest for me?" He asked back. "One quest. Difficulty level 230. Go to spacedock on the eastern shore of the island and retrieve a nanoreconfiguration device from the gang of electric goblins." The archivist propositioned in a high-pitched slapping squeal through the beak hidden behind the moist dripping tentacles flapping about as he spoke.

"What's the reward?"

“You get to keep the nano-reconfiguration device. But the electric goblins intend to attack the shore town in three hours. If you don’t get the nano-reconfiguration device back, they will kill all the villagers.”

“Sure. I'll do it."

The archivist hopped and twirled his mouth tentacles after Procyon accepted. A ping rang out from the pager on procyon’s belt, indicating he got another quest open.

“Is it his datalog?" Eltanin's voice crackled through the facemask's audio patch.

“No," Procyon answered, "l just took a fight/fetch to get a nano-reconfiguration gun thing. It should be fun. Finally use all that phase-plasma for something useful."

"Oh." Eltanin said as she looked over her shoulder at the rest of the market. She turned abruptly and marched into the center of the market. The beacon rested on a hexagonal prism of a dark, ancient stone, common across dimensions. The etched details of the faces were semi-concentric right-angled rings tessellating a maze set into the cold faces. Along the bottom was a small ledge running along the base. She sat down, hunched forwards to accommodate the life-support unit on her back. Lifting her legs, she slid one boot under her, while the other rested on a small rock. She looked up, the neck rubber between her jumpsuit and helmet popped as it's accordion style folds opened in the front and closed in the back. The chin piece of her helmet protruded slightly to accommodate the breathing mask and audio equipment. The left and right flank of the chin was a black mesh covering speakers, surrounding the white middle plate. Above the chinplate, was a 200-degree field of view blue-tinted pearlescent visor. Her face was mostly obscured by the glare and silvered glass. The rest of her helmet clamped tightly to her head. The stark geometric plating softened at the joints by a blue-painted bevel. She adjusted the hoses coming from her chinplate, pushing them to the left slightly so the coiled air hoses bunched tighter coming from the metal flow regulation unit on her left shoulder. A thicker insulated tube ran from the regulation unit to the fabric covered life support unit back pack latched onto her suit. A chest harness clung to her white with blue-detailed fighter pilot-like jumpsuit, sporting an assortment of quick use items. Three medkits dangled from the right hip, a 40000 high-volt grenade latched onto the chest, a quick-deploy Faraday shield hung besides, a red plated ballistic sidearm rested under her left arm, and a spare tungsten-shot canister was secured underneath on the left abdomen. The baggy legs of the jumpsuit sported numerous velcro pockets filled with an assortment of items, visible only as irregular protrusions through the plasticky reflective fabric.

She looked down at the packed dirt, defocusing her eyes so that her vision blurred into a lavender haze. A clicking sound pattered around her helmet as the life-support cycled. Reaching for the dial, Eltanin brought her gloved hand up to her visor, gripping the grooved black plastic surface of the knob with the tactile pads on her gloves. Cycling through preset spectra, she watched as the lavender dirt changed from true color, to a blueish-green infrared, a light pink ultraviolet. A desaturated orange filled her view as she swung down into the millimeter and then radio waves, before it gave way to the chaos of the ambient radio signals. She lifted her head, staring at the red glow of the radio spectrum. Turning to the sky, she could see faint dots of intense red from intergalactic sources spewing radio blasts out into the dark abyss. A faint buzzing red bobbed into her view. It was a static line of radio activity. As she twisted the dial back to truecolor, she saw the form of Procyon slowly acquiesce out of the background radiation into the robot she knew well. The red line transitioned to a grey metallic antenna on the left side of his head.

“You good?" Procyon asked, his mood bar changing from dull cyan to a light purple.

Eltanin looked up at him, her eyes obscured by the visor.

“I'm fine. Just sitting down." She replied as she shifted her posture and slid her leg out from under her. "I'm just trying to find who has this datalog and you took another quest, so I don’t know"

"Well, we're gonna be here a while and I want a reconfiguration gun. We can still look for the guy and his data log.”

“l guess." Eltanin sighed as she stood up. She brushed some dust off of her suit that had piled up in a crease in the fabric. "Who do we try now? I'm not gonna interact with every single villager." She continued looking up at Procyon.

“Did you read it?" Procyon asked.

She looked off to the right. "l guess not." She said after a pause.

Reaching into her pocket, she dragged out the datalog. Its brown and yellow exterior was specked with tiny pink particulates. The glass disk was visible through two tiny holes on the front. She crouched down, dropping the datalog onto the stone ledge.

“Cyon, you got your datadrive?" She asked, looking over her shoulder at the tall robot.

“No. But," he began as he grabbed a void-shard container hanging onto his vest by a carabiner, "I'll get it."

He depressed a button the front part of the container, and flicking his thumb to the right, activated the shard. He tossed it into the dust a meter away and after a fizzling crack of purple light, a spherical void grew out of the container. The market warped and lensed around the boundary of the portal, Procyon's pocket dimension visible in the interior. He stepped through into the warehouse like void. He took a few steps down the first aisle, reading the signs he hung around the store house.

A villager walked up to the portal puzzled. He reached out and stuck his hand through, before tugging it back as he saw his fingers distort and bend as they passed through the curved spacetime. He promptly turned around and walked briskly out of the market. Eltanin looked back at the void-hole, Procyon meandered deeper 10 meters or so into the ware house. His hand glided past the numerous items stacked somewhat organized on the shelves. Gigantic weaponry crammed onto the shelf, fitting together like a puzzle of wanton destruction. Touching the metal flank of a temporal scatter blaster, he looked up at the datadrive resting on top of an entity cannon. Dust fell off of the black plastic case of the device as he grabbed it and started walking out of the pocket-dimension. Stepping through the bubble, his figure warped and distorted, stretching to infinity across the spherical surface of the portal before his foot poked out of the slowly vibrating sphere followed by his head and body. He turned around in the pale dust before closing the portal. A flash of blackness escaped from the void as it collapsed back into the container. A metallic ring reverberated through the market as the shaking container sunk into the sand.

“Here it is." Procyon said, subtle green emanating from a small panel to the side of his head, as he handed the old datadrive to Eltanin.

She took it and immediately placed it down on the stone ledge next to the datalog.