The Cydia arc is pretty much over! A nice local climax marks the end of their adventures in Cydia. Lots and lots of stuff happening in this writing – like I said, this is going to extend out for six more days through December 6th while I write the War arc, which is the ending of the novel. Will Talos make it? Will Cydia make it? What will happen to Earth? How the hell is Jason going to close up the gaping plotholes? Why are there so many typos? All will be explained over the next six days in… NANOWRIMO OVERTIME!

Word Count: 100,268

And this was what Graham was now in the midst of. With the affirmation of The Collective, and after a lengthy argument amongst itself, The Collective had approved research once again on Country 200, knowing that it was abandoned and that there nobody left to harm should something once again go wrong. There were several operations going on at once in City Square, but only two were prominent: The shipping of goods from Cydia to Talos in an effort to keep the waning planet alive and stable, and to further its resources, and another project which Graham could not make any sense of. There were no memories of this project, simply the widespread notion that it existed – as though someone else other than the greater Equation has successfully kept a secret from The Collective.

That meant whoever had imprisoned Graham, Ames and Variable into the network had left and never returned. He was not working for The Collective. And then, Graham saw the inside of City Square – he saw it demolished, and he saw it slowly repaired. Yet one object remained unrepaired for quite some time, or if not fixed, then fundamentally changed: The portal from Cydia to Talos inside of the building. The human transport portal was broken, and deflected to Migard. The much larger goods transport portal was still intact, but Graham did not know where that was located on Talos.

Graham was supposed to have ended up in Country 200’s City Square from the beginning.

Before Graham had time to search for more memories, he felt a strong pull. No longer could he sense the presence of Variable or Ames – all were gone, and now he feared he was next. Was he leaving? Was he being deleted?

Fear overcame him, and this fear was immediately washed away by more pleasant memories from the collective consciousness at the core of Cydia.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

When he awoke, he felt perfectly fine. He felt around, using his limbs – ah, to have limbs at last! – making sure that his body was intact in its entirety. All at once he heaved a large breath, all the breath in lungs escaped him, and he slumped against the side of the container to take a rest.

The container?

He opened his eyes, grateful to see, but ungrateful for his predicament – where was he? He extended his arm out, but it was blocked by unbreakable glass. He looked through the glass and realized that he was inside of a container; just like those containers he had seen earlier carrying supplies to be shipped to Talos. Next to him, Ames’s unconscious body was also placed in a container. The containers stood upright, connected to some sort of terminal, while a man unlike the one who had shot Graham worked the controls. Graham instantly began banging on the glass, yelling for the man to set him free, but to no avail. The man could not hear him; apparently the glass was not only bulletproof, but also soundproof.

“Let me out, asshole! “ His pleas continued to be ignored as he banged harder and harder on the glass. He looked at his body; the clothes were different, more modern. Up until this time he’d been wearing the clothes knights from the Black District had given him to replace the puffy clothes he’d received from Vanessa at the beginning of his melancholy adventure. Now his clothes had been changed yet again, to reflect a more modern style, akin to what he used to wear on Earth. These clothes looked nothing like Cydian clothes; whoever had changed his attire was familiar with the current trends on Earth. Or familiar with Graham’s trends.

The latter frightened him significantly.

Across the room Graham could see hundreds of containers stacked horizontally one by one atop each other; empty bodies filled each of them, just waiting for a new consciousness to overtake them. But that couldn’t be the case; they were in old, decrepit containers – these clearly had no intention of ever being opened. That meant they had either been opened recently, or had never been opened. All of a sudden, Graham had a hunch as to what that missing second major project going on in City Square could be.

He banged on the glass even harder, very afraid of what might happen to him next. He checked his body; the back of his neck felt cooler than the rest. And then he found a flap.

His hands shaking rapidly, he lifted it up and felt ports for cables, and gasped for breath in disarray.

He felt the rest of his head; its interior felt cool and metallic. Taconic Slate. He was in a fetch – a fetch tailored to be an artificial copy of his old body. Was this how long he had been in the collective? No – it felt like only a few hours had passed yet someone had found the time to make an exact copy of his body in fetch form. It felt exactly like his real body. One moment he marveled at the technology able to so accurately mimic the true human form, and the next he was frightened out of his wits by the prospect of losing his original body. He knew it was around somewhere. He only had to find it, and place his mind back inside.

He was blind with rage now, pounding on the glass and hardly feeling the brunt of the blows. It didn’t take much longer for the glass to finally shatter. He escaped the capsule and looked around; he saw Ames’s body – what he assumed was also a fetch, those monsters! – and saw the man working at the controls, clearly loading up Ames’s consciousness into her new fetch.

He approached the man, and politely punched him square in the face as hard as his new body would allow. The man yelped and fell over, but no blood came out – a fetch contained no blood, and it was doubtful that the man felt any pain at all. But the man whom Graham had just knocked over was not just any man. This man looked exactly like Adam Curie, Graham’s only true friend from Earth. How many months had gone by since he’d last seen Curie’s face? Startled, he took several steps back. He even almost apologized before he realized the impossibility of it all – it couldn’t be Curie. Curie was gone. Curie was on Earth, someplace far away from Graham.

No, it wasn’t Curie. It was someone else. Graham tried to convince himself otherwise, but as Curie’s fetch counterpart stood up, his mannerisms and even his voice all indicated that it was the same man Graham knew on Earth. Graham simply refused to accept it without proof.

The two men exchanged long looks, looks that only long lost brothers would exchange on their first meeting in fifty years.

“You’re not Adam Curie, are you?” Graham asked, finally.

“James…”

“That’s impossible! You’re not him! You can’t be him!” He ran up and prepared to punch the fetch Curie once more, but the man stopped him with a single hand, held him still, and placed two fingers to his forehead. Graham felt a strong electric shock, and new memories flowed into his mind.

He saw Adam Curie move away from his house on Earth. But his family did not go somewhere else on Earth. Fooling Graham entirely, Curie and his “family” returned to Cydia, where he returned to his place in the greater Equation, giving reports about Earth and it’s status since the inception of the Talos project; there was no further information about Talos. The memories continued, and Graham saw Curie step into a container next to a very familiar fetch, and step out as the man Graham knew now as Variable.

Curie released his fingers from Graham’s forehead, and sighed heavily.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I betrayed you for so many years.”

“That’s why you wanted the corpus lock? You wanted to make a portal?”

“To Talos, not to Cydia. I had already implanted memories in your sleep that would give you the design schema for the corpus lock. All I had to do was wait for you to build it – but I was called back early and another fetch had to take my place. He took the broken pieces of the corpus lock and finished the job for you, and even installed it into the shed, but it seems you got to it before he did. When I saw you arrive in Migard, I was more than surprised. I knew I had to help you return to Earth, but you seemed to have other things on your mind.”

Curie sighed once again, and Graham asked one more question. “So, you’re Adam Curie, you’re Variable, you so many people. Who were you originally?”

“Who I was is not important. I was a hard-working Cydian, like everyone else they shoved into The Collective when the planet collapsed. I lost my home, my wife, and my body, and those wretched people within The Collective tried to assimilate my mind. The Leaf is a despicable symbol.”

“Did you do this to me?”

“No, I didn’t. There are hundreds of scientists roaming around this place; it’s not safe, but we won’t be leaving without a fight. I was able to use this, my last fetch, for it seems someone is using my black fetch, when I was killed and sent back to The Collective. I managed to suppress the sharing of my memories just long enough to escape and put myself safely back into this body.”

“Then… Ames…”

“I’m trying to wake her up. I’ve pulled her consciousness out of The Collective, but it’s not responding to the fetch. It might take a short while longer, but I don’t know how much time we have. I’ve already killed one worker.” Curie pointed over to the edge of the room at a destroyed fetch, its vital organs spilled out over the ground. “He’s not dead, per se. But his mind is securely back inside The Collective until he can procure another fetch.”

“And my old body?”

“I think it’s in those sealed chambers on the other side of the room. I still don’t quite know what’s going on here, but I do know quite well how to move people in and out of fetches; that’s common knowledge. After I get Ames into her fetch, I won’t be much use to you anymore.”

“Don’t say that, Adam. We’ve been friends for too long to not be of use to one another. Knowing that it was you, that it was someone I could trust, helping me navigate this strange world, only makes me more confident that we can work together with Ames to save Talos.”

The light elevator on the far side of the room began to glow intensely, and three men stepped out all at once bearing arms. They were chattering amongst themselves; Graham’s new body could hear far better than his old organic body; the whispers of the men across the room were magnified a thousand fold, and at once Graham knew that these men had come to destroy the trio and send them back to The Collective for using the scientists’ property.

“Adam Curie, cease using that fetch loader at once, or we will shoot you,” the group said all at once. “You are interfering with Experiment 29b, and could cause out data to become corrupted.”

“Keep going,” said Graham. Graham rushed over to the dead scientists and picked up a small pistol the man had been carrying, then quickly fired at the three men, missing every shot. Luckily, the pistol seemed to grab ammo out of nowhere – another Cydian miracle, no doubt. “Make sure you get Ames into that fetch! I’ll deal with these idiots. You said killing them only sends them back to The Collective, right?”
“Yeah,” said Curie.

“Then I won’t hold back.”

Graham rushed right at them, getting as close as possible to the men before shooting one of them square in the forehead, causing the fetch to topple over dead. The two remaining men continued to shout their cease and desist message before realizing that they were talking to the wrong person – that their true threat came from the man with the gun.

“James Graham. You’re the one of those from Talos! This can’t stand; we’ll have to do away with you quickly. Nobody from Talos but the six founders is allowed to visit Cydia; those were their words when the Talos project began. Not that it matters to you. I won’t let you ruin my work and the work of hundreds of other people,” said one of the remaining scientists.

“Nor will I,” said the other scientist.

But Graham had all the intent of ruining their despicable work of feeding new technology to Talos. He knew more than anyone else with the exception of Ames that it was fueling a global genocide that had to be stopped before the entire planet was wiped off the face of the universe. And his gut told him that Cydia knew all about it within the confines of The Collective – that Talos’s destruction had been carefully calculated alongside President Ford and the other world leaders of Talos. Cydia and Talos were in intricate collaboration – at least, that’s what Graham thought.

He quickly back stepped towards Curie while ensuring that none of the bullets would pierce Curie or Ames through the glass, then shot a barrage of bullets straight at the two remaining scientists, who were using far more powerful guns against him. How they missed most of their shots was beyond Graham; it must have been a miracle that his shots hit directly – or it could have been the sheer power of his fetch, whose arms did not even move backward in recoil, but remained firm in the position Graham’s mind told them to be.

Graham realized that he had more control over his fetch than he had ever had over his organic body. Although he was still upset that he’d been put into this artificial monstrosity, he was beginning to feel the benefits of living this way.

After the two men were dead, the room became calm and quiet. Ames was finally coming to consciousness; Graham wasn’t sure how he was going to explain the situation to Ames, a woman from a land where even a microwave oven was inconceivable. But somehow she would come to cope with her new body.

In the silence, before Ames awakened, Graham began to wonder what had become of Maiya. He asked Curie.

“I don’t know, to be honest. I focused on reviving you and Jessica as soon as I was into this fetch. But I have a feeling Maiya is somewhere inside this building, in one of the containers. If they had one of her fetches, perhaps they have more – including the one she was using at the time of her capture; and yes, it’s clear to me now that these people captured her, but for what purpose I don’t know.”

“Could she be inside The Collective? While I was there, I could feel your presence, and the presence of Ames. Yours slipped away first, I assume into your fetch, and Ames soon after. Couldn’t you sense Maiya’s mind inside The Collective if she was there?”

“I couldn’t feel anything; I got out as fast as possible. Either way, I doubt that her mind is inside The Collective. What would that accomplish?”

“It’s just a theory,” said Graham.

“Got her!” Curie shouted in triumph. Ames’s fetch began to stir – she was awakening. He eyelids shuffled, and opened slowly – her entire body awakened gracefully; Curie opened the container via the control panel and let her body work its way out of the chamber on its own. Without conscious interference her legs swiftly stepped out of the container, and she stood unaware of her surroundings while her fetch booted up for its first and only time.

“Where am I?” she said.

Graham immediately ran up to her and held her tight in his arms. “I’m so glad you’re alright,” he said.

“What the hell happened? Everything’s so fuzzy,” she said, not sure whether or not to return Graham’s embrace or shove him away and beg for her memory back. Graham eventually let go, and broke the news to her. “You’re joking. You must be joking. Who is this man? Whoever you are, tell me he’s joking!”

“I’m Variable, Jessica. This is a different fetch – the maniacs in here destroyed my other one. But it’s no lie; you are indeed in a fetch. I fashioned it myself, using skills that Maiya taught me. I think they turned out quite well, not a kink or bug to be seen. Maiya always was the best tailor I ever knew.”

Ames felt her face. “Where are my glasses?” she asked, not feeling them on her face. “Variable, give them back.”

“It’s Adam Curie now, not Variable. Don’t even bother trying to call me that, or you’ll give the greater Equation away to the scientists in this building, who are undoubtedly working for The Collective. You no longer need your glasses; as I said earlier, the functionality of the glasses is built in to the fetch. All you need to do is stop panicking. Everything will be fine, as long as nobody else shows up for the time being.”

Graham, however, had moved over to the large half-cylinder structures at the other end of the room. They were gigantic structures sealed tight and made entirely out of black metal – Taconic Slate, he was sure of it, but where this material came from he did not know as his new memories told him that Cydia was running rather low on this ore. He looked for any switch that could open the thick metal chamber; it would be impossible to break through it with the pistol, or any sort of blunt object if one were available. The metal was tough enough to withstand all of the gunfire, so Graham assumed whatever was inside these two structures was incredibly important.

Eventually, he found a switch floating in the air, hidden on the side of one the structures. With his fetch, he tapped the glass surface. He couldn’t feel it, but his fetch prevented his finger from moving through the glass, as though it were a real object. He lamented that he was now constrained by these virtual objects, but glad that he could not literally feel them the way that Curie could.

He still wondered about that. What made Curie susceptible to pain from the virtual world? But there were more important tasks at hand. Though they had found the source of the shipments to Talos, they had yet to stop them – and weren’t even sure who to meet to discuss a cease of shipments. Though Graham had a feeling that the person necessary to talk to would end up coming to them instead of the other way around. Unfortunately, he was right.

He heard the sliding doors of each of the two half-cylindrical chambers open, and they completed their task with a loud thud. Walking to the open side of the chambers, Graham saw what was within and screamed. Inside he saw two bodies floating in a thick yellow liquid resembling formaldehyde. Both bodies looked ripped apart, and were missing many vital organs necessary to sustain life. The dilapidated bodies belonged to people very familiar to Graham. One of them was Ames’s body. The other was his.

He buckled over and cried, looking at his body. It became clear to him that there was no hope of returning to such a dilapidated and dismantled figure. Pipes and wires were hooked up all over the bodies, in particular the brain. His body was far more torn up than Ames’s, but both were beyond dead. It looked like the work of a madman, a serial killer who kept the gutted bodies of his victims in enormous formaldehyde jars. It was their work – the work of those damn researchers that had shot him and everyone else down. But for what purpose did they destroy Graham and Ames’s bodies?

At his scream, Curie and Ames came running, afraid that more gun-bearing researchers had made their way to that floor. What they saw, however, frightened them far more than any gun-touting scientist could have. Now it was Ames who huddled against Graham for comfort, for the sight of her own body so dismantled drove her near insanity; to save herself, she cried on his shoulder, screamed into the cloth of his shirt, and turned away. Not once did she ever look back at the bodies.

Curie walked over to the side of the container and found the switch, then shut both half-cylindrical chambers so that none of them would have to look at the bodies anymore. “Sadly,” he said, “this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this. Although it’s disgusting, I know, it is the necessary process to connect a physical body to the network. Once the body has been properly connected, the consciousness can flow freely outside of the body. Unfortunately, bodies are no longer usable once connected to the network, for reasons I suppose look obvious. Somebody did this to you on purpose. I have a feeling we’re about to find out why.”

“What makes you say that?” said Ames through her tears.

“Look at the elevator.”

Their heads careened toward the light elevator – the scientists that had originally put them out of commission was walking towards them with no signs of slowing. “I’ve got a gun!” shouted Graham, lifting Ames’s head off of his shoulder and drawing his pistol.

“As do I,” said the scientist. “I’m afraid neither of these tools will do us very good. I’ve accomplished what I needed to with you two, though I see your persistent friend has put you both into fetches. Rest assured, you will not stay in them for long.”

“Are you the head of the Talos shipment operation?” Graham asked.

“Not at all! There is no head; The Collective runs that. Which I intend to make you a part of, just like everyone else. You don’t want to go back to real life, I’m sure. It’s dreary it’s depressing. I’m only here temporarily myself, doing research for the collective. We all are. Someone as impressive as you, James Graham, should want to join our initiative.”

“I don’t like to associate with men who feed guns to genocidal maniacs.”

“Genocidal maniacs? Is that what’s become of that dreadful planet? Serves the founders right for taking up the initiative to build their own world. It almost never works out properly. It hardly worked out for Cydia, though I do say we’ve got something close to perfection. Nevertheless, I can’t stick around and chat. You’ll all pay for using my equipment. These operations are top secret – for now anyway.”

“The Talos operations are top secret? Impossible, I learned all about it while in The Collective,” said Graham.

“Why do you keep bringing up Talos? That’s not even my department. I’m talking about you mucking up The Collective’s objectives by using that machine to restore yourselves into fetches. I can’t allow you to get away with that. Talos isn’t the only planet in existence that requires stability, you know. We have to keep order in Cydia – and when someone needs to be put back into the network, we put them back. When you use that machine to remove yourself from The Collective, you make a statement that we cannot afford to have propagate throughout the minds of our people.”

“Too late. I’m sure by now even more people are removing themselves. Scary, ain’t it?” Graham said, intentionally taunting the man with falsehoods. “I’ll bet I could stop it, if you’d stop the shipments to Talos.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t so easily sway the whims of The Collective; the more powerful minds will always override your pathetic consciousness. The silly illusion that your thoughts might have had any effect at all on The Collective is ridiculous!”

“Then why are you talking to me about it?”

“Touché, my friend,” the scientist said. But before he could continue, Graham grasped his pistol and fires several shots directly at the man, knocking him back.

“Go back to your pit in hell,” he said. “You deserve that for what you did to me and Ames!” But the man was not dead. In fact, he was the furthest thing from it – and he stood up, laughing at Graham’s futility.

“Don’t think I’ll go down as easily as the morons who chased you here before. I demolished you once already, all three of you, and I’ll do it again. I know all about you two, James Graham and Jessica Ames – you’re from Talos. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but if you’re going to be in Cydia, you will damn well assimilate! As for Mr. Curie, I suppose he thinks his precious Equation is going to get off scot-free.”

“What are you doing to them?”

“Oh, The Collective has known about the Equation for a while now. We’re taking measures to resolve the situation; this is one of those measures. Soon everyone will be back inside The Collective where they belong, including these pesky Talosians – ah!” Several more rounds blew the scientist back. He stood up, laughing again.

“Why won’t you die?”

“My fetch is reinforced. The patients I force into the network are often hostile; you won’t find a gun available that can pierce my body. Now, onto business; I believe all of you are due to be put back into The Collective. If you don’t go quietly, I’ll just use force like last time.”

Curie stepped up. “What did you do to Maiya?”

“Maiya? I’m not sure who you’re talking about.” The man raised his gun. “I’m sure you’ll be joining her shortly, though.”

“Bastard!” Curie shouted, and ran at the man. In a fit of blind rage, Curie grabbed a hold of the man’s gun and turned it around, then grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it to a most uncomfortable position, nearly ripping it off. The scientist cried out in pain.

“You think sending me back will mean anything? You forget where you are, Mr. Curie. If I leave this room, ten more will arrive to take my place. There are a million of me, a million just like me, eager as I am to force you back into the network!”

“No; there must be a reason behind it. Never has Cydia forced its residents into the network. Only one time, in fact, that I can remember – the day the network was created. You brought us in out of fear. People like you told us we would die if we didn’t, and we believed you! We trusted you, and you were right. But you’re not right now – the planet is already dead, and we’ve gone down with it. If you want to live life without a mind of your own, so be it! But now that the planet is stable, we don’t need to live inside that data center. We can be free-spirited humans once again. So tell me,” Curie said, moving the gun closer to the scientist’s head, “why you and all those other researchers are playing police force.”

The man remained silent.

Curie laughed. “You don’t want to return, I can see it all over your face. If I pull this trigger, all of the secret information you’ve kept from The Collective for all these years will be exposed. You’re just like me,” he said, and let them man fall to the floor. The scientist, now weaponless, clutched his arms and stood.

“At the request of the world leader in Talos, we’ve increased the shipments of technology. However, its almost harvesting time, and it looks like the pompous morons running the planet want to destroy it and rebuild it. I’m sure Mr. Graham or Ms. Ames has told you this story. We’re well informed about it.”

“Impossible, there was no information about it inside of The Collective,” Graham interjected. “But if you know, then why don’t you stop the shipments? We’re here to preserve Talos – we need to reason with The Collective and cease shipments to Talos in order to save it. If we cut the world leaders off from the technology, they won’t be able to build any more machines, or kill any more innocent people.”

“Like Mr. Curie said, I’m not in The Collective right now. I haven’t been into The Collective in thousands of years. Of course, ‘thousands’ is still only a temporary predicament to me – one day, when all of this is through, I shall return to The Collective. But nevertheless, it is impossible to stop the shipments. Even if I could – even if The Collective could – we have an agreement with the Talos governments and cannot go back on our word. In addition, even if the shipments are successfully halted, Talos still possesses enough resources and knowledge to jettison their world into our dimension.”

“Your dimension?”

“Why, yes. Where do you think they want to go? They want to destroy their world and rebuild it, just as their founders did several hundred years ago. But The Collective has bigger plans for Talos. You see, we’re running low on fuel, and Cydia’s data centers are not sustainable for much longer. If they destroy their world, all that wonderful fuel will go to waste! And I can’t let that happen – all of Cydia can’t let that happen. So we’ve been secretly putting everyone back into the network to prepare for this grand refueling. Cydia will consume Talos, as it had planned from the very beginning. We cannot allow them to consume themselves and steal the energy that is rightfully ours.”

Graham slumped down. “It’s destroyed either way. Jess…”

But Ames wouldn’t stand for it. “I won’t let you do that to Talos! It’s my home – even if it’s unstable, we’ll fix it by stopping the flow of technology. We’ll overthrow the current genocidal governments with global coups, and rectify the situation, and return Talos to the paradise it used to be. You don’t need to consume Talos – not now, not ever. You hear me? Why would you do such a thing?”

The scientist’s laugh progressed into a high-pitched cackle. “Do not ask us why we are what we are, but ask us how, no? As we speak, Cydian forces are crossing the dimensional barriers to begin the refueling. And if Talos tries to fight back, we’ll just have to show them the full might of Cydia, until there’s nothing left of us!”

When the scientist’s eyes were opened to their full extent, and his pupils retracted to their smallest radius, Curie took the liberty of shooting the man and sending him back to The Collective once and for all. “I can’t believe I can compare myself to this man,” he said softly. I am ashamed of everything I’ve done, and it’s time to make up for it.