Tibor stared at the readout, as if unaugmented eyes could discern something his blessed cogitation array could not. The last canticles of stability whispered through his noospheric link, leaving only silence in their wake. He waited, steel-filtrated breath grating within the engine of his chest cavity. The subharmonics were well within tolerance, and yet…
He had heard something.
‘Impossible,’ he whispered.
Machine spirits do not vocalise. Especially those of long-dead engines of war.
He shifted, casting his gaze into the cavernous vault, where wrist-thick cabling, like vines in a steel-wrapped jungle, swirled around the gargantuan, hab-block-sized head of the titan Evigilans Mors.
‘Initiating diagnostic hymnal,’ he muttered, vocalising a process undertaken in nanoseconds. ‘Activating subsystem sweeps.’
Adrenal inhibitors auto-flooded his body, counteracting the hammering of his heart within iron-banded ribs.
Y O U R S O N G I S N E W
Tibor recoiled, chair clattering to the floor. Ejection idents flared, protesting his breach of protocol.
Titans did not speak.
He paused at the threshold of Magos Telok’s temporary chambers within the vault complex. Vapour, hissing from incense ducts, shrouded the hunched figure of the master at work. Telok knew he had arrived, but did not look up. He rarely did.
‘You have a deviation to report?’ Telok said, banks of auspex arrays above his bowed head, scrolling with innumerable reams of data.
‘Subharmonic resonance,’ Tibor replied. ‘Within the titan cortex. A vocalised string.’ If his throat were biological, it would have been dry. ‘Magos… It knew I was there. The titan spoke to me.’
A mechadendrite tendril snaked from beneath Telok’s crimson coverall. Tibor shuddered as a needle slipped into the interface port of his mnemonic stacks. The dataflow from his cortex bloomed on Telok’s personal console screen.
‘Did you respond?’
The question was irregular – outside expected ritual.
‘No, Magos. I came directly to you.’
The personal screen dimmed. The mechadendrite in Tibor’s skull scraped free with a hiss as the transfer concluded. Telok rose then, two-score steel legs clacking upwards to propel him to head height. He turned, copper-core facial plate in half-shadow beneath his cowl.
‘Your function is optimal. Deviance is not yet error.’
The vault recognised them both. Two-metre thick serrated gate-teeth withdrew with grinding reverence, releasing a wheeze of pressure and stale incense. Tibor stepped through first. The Evigilans Mors loomed ahead, a sentinel in the gloom, head turned slightly, as if listening to their arrival.
Tibor took his place and watched as the scrolling display reported no new interactions.
Telok looked on, communing with the local noospheric network as easily as a human might breathe.
‘Stillness does not imply absence,’ he intoned.
‘You can confirm no new emissions?’ asked Tibor.
‘None.’ The Magos’ mechadendrites flexed in the dim light, adjusting a portable auspex display slung across his back. ‘You believe it will speak again?’
The skin of Tibor’s forehead scrunched against his implants. ‘I… I believe it is aware, Magos.’
Telok tilted his head. His eye-lenses flashed once, then settled. ‘Belief is outside your remit, Adept.’
Tibor stiffened and murmured a quiet scrap of the Litanies of Alignment. ‘Forgive my extrapolation, Magos. Yet if this were truly an emergent…’ he hesitated to even vocalise the term, ‘machine soul… should we not elevate the anomaly to the Synod?’
Telok did not answer at once. His gaze lingered on the titan’s helm. Data scrolled unseen across the glowing pane of his array.
‘In time,’ he said at last. ‘Protocol demands verification. You are the chosen conduit.’
Tibor hesitated.
‘Interface, Adept.’
The command held no malice, but also zero warmth. It was void of tone, measured to the electron. Tibor sat, hesitating only a second before locking a spinal plug into place. The localised data stream shimmered behind his eyes, thought-signal fogging his mind like steam upon glass.
‘Evigilans Mors,’ he breathed. ‘I return.’
Something stirred, like a shadow below the ocean’s surface.
‘Extending manifold relay,’ Telok said quietly.
Without warning, data surged into Tibor’s interface. Dozens of logic-paths ignited, cascading through his mnemonic stack like wildfire. Pain bloomed across the scaffold of his mind. He cried out as thoughts that were not his thundered across the link.
‘Magos!’
The scream died in his throat, his jaw locking. Failsafes snapped, and Tibor’s limbs twitched as his internal subroutines failed to regulate input.
‘Unexpected symphonic intrusion,’ muttered Telok from beyond a shimmering ring of ritual glyphs. He did not move to assist. Instead, he turned in place. ‘Fascinating.’
Beyond the flood of binharic data pinning him in place, Tibor heard the vault’s doors activate.
‘Observe. Record. Analyse.’ Telok’s voice crackled from beyond a bio-locked wall of steel, accompanied by hydraulic pistons sighing at the completion of their sacred task. ‘You will do fine work, Adept.’
Tibor wept, or the remains of his eyes tried to weep. One by one, the hovering glo-lumens in the chamber sputtered and died, until only the dim light of his databanks remained. He slumped forward, his disconnected body suddenly heavy. He tried to speak, to breathe, to do anything. Nothing, only a tidal surge of data, drowning all that he was, all that he would ever be. In the silence, the titan finally spoke.
Y O U A R E N O T T H E F I R S T.
Y O U W I L L N O T B E T H E L A S T.
T H I S S O N G I S O U R S N O W.
