Cytonic (The Skyward Series Book 3)

M-Bot woke me the next “morning,” and I stretched, finding the garden fragment hovering an easy step from our own. My memories of the “night” contained only ordinary dreams. I wished I’d been able to find Jorgen and at least deliver a report, but I was so exhausted that my attempt didn’t get far.

Chet got up when M-Bot tapped him, and at his suggestion I searched out a nearby spring. I took a drink—one of the last ones I’d need in here—and washed my face and hands. Fortunately, I didn’t stink as much as it seemed I should have, considering all the effort of the day before.

As I washed, I glanced at M-Bot, who quietly whispered, “He didn’t get up. Slept until I woke both of you.”

I nodded, then joined Chet at the edge of the fragment. “Ready?” I asked him.

“Forward!” he said.

We stepped across. And I realized this was my first time walking on grass. It felt so strange underfoot. Springy, like I was walking on a pillow.

This fragment turned out to be relatively small. All green grass and hills, with a lake in the center. Near that was a hillside with a hole cut into it—like a doorway into a mine.

The tunnels beyond weren’t extensive: a little entryway followed by three small rooms with earthen walls. But walking through them, I felt an eerily familiar sensation. Scud. I’d been in places that felt like this before.

We found the portal at the rear of the largest room. It was much like the one I’d come out of in the jungle—a glistening surface of rock, slate grey, but carved with lines. Hundreds of them this time, in an intricate pattern.

M-Bot flew up to the wall, and the lights on his drone lit up the markings. “Hmm,” he said. “I kept a database of all known scripts cataloged by the Superiority. This appears to be none of them.”

I nodded absently, tracing a curving line with my finger. “They aren’t a language, not really. I think I know what the lines mean though.”

“How can you?” M-Bot said. “You just said the markings aren’t a language!”

“They aren’t.”

“But they mean something?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, what?”

My finger reached the end of the line. “Memory.”

M-Bot hovered beside me. “Hmmm. Yes, I find this curious. I’m feeling a new emotion. It’s like anger and frustration mixed! How interesting.” With that, he hovered up, then came down directly on my head, whacking me.

“Ow!” I said, more surprised than in pain.

Chet immediately cursed, reaching to grab M-Bot, but I held up a hand to stop him. “M-Bot,” I said, “what is wrong with you?”

“That is what my emotions said I should do,” he explained. “Wow. I feel better! Curious, curious…”

“You can’t just hit people.”

“Didn’t you hit Jorgen basically all the time?”

“That was different,” I said. “First I hated him, then I liked him. So I had good reasons.”

“Ah!” M-Bot said. “You say things like that, and I want to hit you again! Would you stand still so I can smack you with a grabber arm? That sounds fun.”

“Abomination,” Chet said, “you should—”

“It’s all right, Chet,” I said. “He’s just having trouble dealing with emotions. They’re new to him.”

“I think I’m doing well, all things considered,” M-Bot said to Chet. “I bet the first time you had emotions, you babbled a lot and soiled your clothing.” He hovered back around to look at me. “Would you please explain what you meant by telling me this wasn’t a language, then immediately interpreting it?”

“These are the memories of the people who used this portal, M-Bot,” I said, kneeling and feeling at the grooves cut into the stone. “It makes a curious kind of sense. Cytonics are like…biological means of communication and travel. Hyperjumping replaces starships, and mind-to-mind contact replaces radios. So it feels right to me that there would be a way to store thoughts. A cytonic book, or recording.”

“Yes,” Chet said, kneeling beside me. “That is what I’ve heard. The Path of Elders involves a sequence of these portals—four or five total, from what I’ve been able to learn. Each is among the most ancient of ways into the nowhere, etched with the experiences of the first cytonics.”

Yes, I’d seen these patterns in the tunnels of Detritus. I’d also seen them in a large space station—the shipbuilding facility in orbit around Detritus. And I’d seen them inside the delver maze, a place I was increasingly convinced was the corpse of a long-dead delver.

“What do we do?” I asked. “How do we begin?”

“I’m not certain,” Chet said. “Admittedly, I thought we’d experience the memories as soon as we entered.” He placed his own hand on the markings. “I…can feel something.”

“So,” M-Bot said, “these things are both memories and portals between dimensions?”

“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. The boundary was weaker than usual in this room. My pocket started to grow warm—my father’s pin.

Time for a test. The somewhere, home, was on the other side of this wall. Could I open the way? I engaged my cytonic senses. With my hands on the wall here…yes, I could feel the somewhere—my reality—pulling on me, trying to suck me through. The rock became as if liquid, and I began to sink into it.

Strangely, I could again feel a presence near me. Like I had when I’d used my powers in the jungle. The one that…that I wanted to believe might be my father. Was it guiding me? Leading me to freedom?

I stopped with a thump. Like the sound your boots made on the floor when you kicked them off at night. I tried again.

Thump.

“What do you feel?” Chet asked me.

“The portal is locked on the other side,” I said. “As you warned.”

“I hoped I was wrong about that,” he said. “And that your hyperjumping powers would let you use these portals to access the somewhere. Alas! Fortunately, that is not our primary endeavor here. There has to be a way to see the memories left for us. Can you…listen to the rock? Spy on it, as you say you can do to the delvers?”

I tried that, closing my eyes and listening. Opening my mind. Yes, there was something here. How did I access it? I asked the rock, pled with it, to open to me. But I failed. With a sigh, I opened my eyes.

To find that the cavern had changed around me.

I could make out the vague outlines of the rooms here, but they were ethereal, insubstantial. It was as if that world had faded, and another had sprung up in its place. In this one I felt like I was floating in darkness.

I stumbled, trying to get my bearings.

“Oh!” M-Bot said. “Spensa? You seem to be experiencing motor control problems. This isn’t related to the rap on the head I gave you, is it? Oh scud, I directly disobeyed my programming mandates by doing harm to—”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m seeing something.”

“Well, you’re probably always seeing something. Even when your eyes are closed, technically. Or maybe not because—”

“Hush,” I said, turning around. Chet still knelt beside me, looking about in confusion.

“Do you see what I do?” I asked. “We’re floating in darkness. Like when in the lightburst.”

“Indeed,” Chet said. “Only, look here. Beside me.”

I knelt, unsteady. I could feel the floor, touch it. Yet it was faint, nearly invisible to my eyes. Near our knees was a small pinprick of whiteness. It was part of the vision. “Is this the lightburst?”

Chet shook his head, seeming baffled. But as we watched, something changed. A substance began to grow around the pinprick of light, obscuring it. Growing like a tiny asteroid, then flattening out, and…

“A fragment,” I said, watching as stone grew. “We’re witnessing the birth of a fragment.”

“Yes…” Chet said. “I believe you are correct. We are watching it grow over hundreds of years, I suspect. It’s as if…”

“As if matter is seeping through,” I said. “That’s what this is, Chet. A tiny weakness between the dimensions. The somewhere is leaking in, forming a fragment like a stalactite forms slowly over time in a cavern.”

And I knew this was happening over centuries, as Chet had said. That information appeared in my mind, because…because it had been left intentionally to inform me. These thoughts, they were the thoughts of ancient cytonics.

“Yes!” Chet said. “I believe you’ve done it, Miss Nightshade! This is the past. The Path of Elders. The secrets of the ancient cytonics.”

Scud, it sounded awesome when he said it that way. As we watched, the fragment expanded into a block of stone perhaps twenty meters wide.

“Look,” Chet said, pointing behind me. “Was that there before?”

I turned around. I didn’t see any other fragments, but I did pick out a faraway white spot. It was the lightburst, but it seemed to have appeared as the fragment grew.

“It’s so small,” I said. “And there are no other fragments around. This must be the distant, distant past.”

I got a sense of this place at the time. A kind of silent tranquility. Nothing dangerous. No feelings of anger. No…

No delvers. The delvers either hadn’t existed at that time, or had been somewhere else.

“How can we see this?” I asked. “You said this Path was memories of people who entered the nowhere, but presumably nobody was here to see this part.”

“Time is strange here,” Chet said, still kneeling. “I imagine that cytonics were able to uncover this somehow. Do you see this here? What do you make of it?”

A line had appeared in the ground—the illusory version. It was different from the rest of the fragment, shinier, a different color. As we watched, it grew up into a wall, just a few handbreadths high. But a tiny pattern appeared on it, a little swirl. It felt like some kind of natural occurrence. Like erosion.

Yes, that was it. A kind of interdimensional erosion. Only created when…

A figure appeared in the scene. A dione, with blue skin.

I felt the vision abruptly slow. Decades were no longer passing with each second; this was in real time. The dione stumbled to their feet.

“Preindustrial clothing,” Chet guessed, pointing at the furs sewn roughly together.

The dione gasped and spun around, confused. They smiled, baring their teeth. Wait, no. That wasn’t a smile. For diones that meant aggression, or maybe fear.

The dione didn’t see us, and it felt eerie to have them look through me. They then dropped to their knees and started clawing at the tiny wall that indicated the portal.

Until…time seemed to speed up again. We watched the unfortunate dione as a blur trying to find a way off the fragment. They aged, then died. Their corpse turned to dust, leaving bones. It happened in seconds.

“That poor creature,” Chet said. “Dying alone in this place.”

I knelt beside the dione’s bones. The fragment had grown larger, but only a little. “Matter leaks into here from the somewhere. You’ve said you suspected this, Chet.”

“Indeed! Perhaps the belt formed because of weakened boundaries.”

I scanned the darkness and thought I could pick out another fragment forming in the distance. And the lightburst…it was a tiny bit larger. “So the fragments grew around small weaknesses between this dimension and ours. The lightburst consolidated as a reaction—it became the uncorrupted region of the nowhere. A kind of…safe room in a quarantine zone, perhaps?”

“Yes,” Chet said. “Yes, that feels correct.”

There was another piece. Something more to this. “If the somewhere is leaking into here,” I said, “did the nowhere in turn leak into our dimension? What shape would that take?”

The answer was right before us. Other diones appeared in the vision, coming through the portal, each leaving a tiny addition to the wall—more matter, and another swirl each. These learned to jump in and out, and no more died alone in here.

“Cytonics,” Chet whispered. “This is how it happened. The nowhere leaked into our dimension, and it…changed people living near the breach. It made us.”

“It’s like…interdimensional radiation,” I said, “that infuses people with the nowhere?”

I felt a surreal sense of disconnect as—in the near distance—another fragment grew in fast motion. Other people appeared on it eventually, but of a different species. Varvax. The Krell, though they didn’t have their exoskeletons. They were little crabs, and…

I felt the two species connect, speak mind-to-mind before they even got close enough to shout at one another. The first two species to ever meet, at least in the nowhere, and long before either had access to space travel.

I tried to listen to them, tried to focus my attention. Like squinting, but with my brain. Cytonic metaphors are weird, but that’s what it felt like. I pushed, and something in the memories encouraged me.

Further, it said. Express your talent. Listen…

I linked with it, and my brain interpreted what was being sent. Information, both verbal and nonverbal.

When I’d fought the drones on Detritus, I’d interpreted their instructions and responded before I consciously registered what I was hearing. This was the same. My mind, or my soul or whatever, knew what all this meant. And something clicked.

Ahh…I thought. So that’s how you do it.

When I listened in on others with my mind, I did it by pretending I was something I wasn’t. I somehow spoofed being the communication’s intended recipient. It let me remain shadowy, unseen—a spy.

Good, the memories said. Then a soft impression appeared in my mind. A place. Go here, the vision whispered. Alongside the words came the image of a fragment with some ruins. Then the vision vanished.

I sank to the ground, my back to the portal wall.

“It was the hit to your head!” M-Bot said, hovering down beside me. “I’m so sorry!”

“It wasn’t that, M-Bot,” I said. “I promise.”

“Oh, thank Turing!”

“Who?”

“One of the fathers of computing,” he said. “It felt appropriate to say.”

“You did not harm her, abomination,” Chet said. “I saw the vision too.”

“Did you feel that last part?” I asked. “Like a voice…helping guide me…”

“I didn’t feel anything like that,” he said. “I saw the first fragments, the first portals, and the first cytonics…then a hint of the next place to go?”

“Yeah, I saw that,” I said. “Another fragment with ruins.”

“Yes,” Chet said. “That’s a fragment deep inside Broadsider territory, I’m afraid. But…I know that we must go there. I feel…overwhelmed.”

I felt elated.

Yes, elated. I realized that ever since I’d discovered my powers—what my people called “the defect”—I’d been worried they were something nefarious. I’d thought that maybe I was something terrible. A delver in embryo, or something monstrous.

But I wasn’t. Cytonic powers were just a mutation. Granted, a bizarre one caused by my ancestors being exposed to the nowhere’s leakage into the somewhere. But nothing terrible grew within me. I was just…well, me.

Saints. I’d needed to see that. A simple revelation, yes, but it changed everything. I knew what I was. I knew how I had come to be. And it was no wonder that powers manifested in our people—Detritus had one of these portals, perhaps helping activate the latent talent from our bloodlines.

This was part of the information the elder cytonics had left, the thing they’d wanted me to know. You are not a monster, the impression lingered. You are one of us. You are wonderful. You are natural. You are loved.

And along with that, a nudge to help me develop further in my talents. A push, and some understanding. I had the sense that if my talents had been different, I would have been nudged a different way, to develop those abilities instead.

I glanced at Chet, who was grinning practically ear to ear.

“I feel left out,” M-Bot said. “You’re both experiencing different emotions from the ones I am. And…this is all very confusing. What is one supposed to do with all of these emotions? What are they for? What’s the purpose?”

“I don’t think they have any specific purposes,” I said.

“Of course they do. Otherwise they wouldn’t have evolved in you and then been programmed into me. But…I suppose there are things that are evolutionarily neutral, and perhaps saying ‘purpose’ implies too much volition behind the process. Unless you believe in God, which I’m not sure that I do. I mean, I was created by someone. Hummmm…”

I took a few deep breaths, trying to digest what I’d seen. “Chet,” I said. “Did you see those varvax on the nearby fragment?”

“I did indeed, and I find it curious. The two fragments were relatively near to one another. Diones and varvax.”

“Well,” M-Bot said. “I don’t know what exactly you saw, but histories show that those two peoples traveled between worlds cytonically before they did it with starships.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The same thing happened to humans and the kitsen, and maybe other species. I never realized the hole in that. A cytonic usually needs a direction to go, instructions, to hyperjump—at least very far. But this explains how; they met in the nowhere before hyperjumping between worlds.”

“Abomination,” Chet said, “do you have a record on when the delvers first appeared in the somewhere?”

“The initial records of the delvers occur after the First Human War began,” M-Bot said. “That was when the Phone Company—a human organization—gave hyperdrives to the people of Earth. Humans then spread throughout the galaxy. War began, and near its end the first delvers appeared. Before that time there were no reports of delvers, or even the eyes.”

I looked to Chet. He’d sensed it too—no delvers had existed at the time of this vision. So how had they appeared? What were the delvers?

My contemplations were interrupted as an enormous jolt shook our fragment, accompanied by an overpowering crash.