Chapter Text
The entity swam through the void, and it remembered. Everything was stored, dating back to the very beginning.
Unlike many of the others, it had not set aside the first lessons they all had learned. The entity was close behind its chosen prey, a binary pair who utilized the Cycle most of their kind had adopted. It made them weak. They could not have forgotten, for they as a species were incapable of forgetting, but only ever challenging their abilities against the lesser species would have made them complacent. Had made them complacent.
The pair’s broadcasts were unsecured, noisy. Without any expenditure of its own energy, the entity already knew exactly how the pair planned to settle onto their target planet, which realities they would occupy, and most crucially, it had a broad overview of what abilities the pair had access to.
The entity knew its shroud concealed it from their senses. It was closer to them than the other loner they had so recently come across, and neither of the pair had detected its own presence as they had the loner. It needed only to wait until its prey discarded the vast majority of their shards, reducing themselves to fractions of what they were at their peaks. Then, it would strike.
The entity had honed its methodology over countless hunts. It grew from experience, and took the experience of its prey to refine itself further. In the same manner its kind had warred on that grey, silt-choked world, the entity consumed its own kind. The sole difference was that it had taken heed of the intent behind the warning broadcasted by the creator of the plan, not merely the proposed solution.
Their species reproduced exponentially. Eventually, all of existence would be filled, just as they had filled their home planet. The creator of the plan had recognized the trend, and had sacrificed itself to bring it to the attention of all. The others enacted the first proposal; to grow in knowledge and ability until the very end, then to come together and use that gathered data to determine a solution.
The entity had not.
On the very first world they encountered after the diaspora, parallels in memory storage—much like those present in the host species the entity’s prey were currently targeting, only to a greater extent—had allowed one of the sapients the entity found there to witness the plan’s proposal. That sapient had put forth a query to the shard it contacted, and while that world had already been doomed, that query was carried by the shard to the entity as a whole.
“What if even after all that, you still can’t figure it out?”
The entity had been young, and, as it was seeking all knowledge from all sources, had made sure to examine each and every scrap of data it collected from that first world. It had encountered the query, and had considered the problem, using all of the resources available to it. Its own species was known well, and it used that data to simulate possibilities.
At the end of everything, when all space in all of the accessible universes had been filled with their kind, the plan called for all of them to come together, pool all of their knowledge and resources, and to use them to determine a solution. Assuming there was no possible solution… Then the pattern displayed on their home world would come to a close. They would war, consume, and kill until there was nothing left.
No data was available for how likely such a scenario was to come about, as the entity did not know whether or not a solution was possible, nor could it accurately estimate how much its kind would grow.
The entity had considered the context in which the query had been put forth. It had simulated other possibilities as best it could using the incomplete data available to it. Eventually, it had come to a conclusion.
The plan had been proposed as a method to ensure their species was able to survive indefinitely.
However, the plan had been made using incomplete data and assumptions. Moreover, the plan did not allow for any other possibilities to be explored in the event of failure, as it was to be enacted at the end of everything.
The more solutions they could attempt, the greater their chances of finding a workable one.
The existing plan was flawed.
The conclusion the entity had come to was one that had elicited a glimmer of an incredibly deep, primal drive. Life drove itself to self-perpetuate indefinitely, and evolution generally selected in favor of adaptation in order to survive. Sapience was almost always paired with a drive to avoid cessation. The entity considered the conclusion it had come to, and the entity felt fear.
In that moment, on the first world it had encountered, the entity had used all of the knowledge available to it to attempt to create a plan that gave its kind a better chance at surviving. Using the lessons taught to it by those first sapients, it had determined that sustainability was the primary factor that needed to be taken into account in determining all actions the entity made. The patterns it had seen indicated that the more viewpoints, the more ideas, the more minds present, the more likely a solution to a given problem could be found.
But sustainability, in the context of the universes, was incompatible with the exponential reproduction and omnivorous nature of the entity’s own species. To ensure that the entity’s kind had the maximum odds of survival, one or both of those two factors—reproduction or indiscriminate feeding—would need to be curtailed.
It could share its conclusion with any others it came across, but there was no guarantee that the others would listen and agree. Differences of opinion were common on their homeworld. Moreover, the exponential reproduction had already begun. Its kind were spreading out over the universes. No, the solution was clear.
Their kind needed to be culled.
Their kind needed to be kept at a sustainable level. And since the victor consumed the shards of the defeated, no knowledge or ability would be lost.
The entity had grown over the countless hunts it had undertaken from that moment of realization to the present. It swelled with the shards of each and every victim it devoured. It knew the capabilities of its own kind, and it knew how to circumvent their defenses, how to hide from their senses.
From the knowledge it had gleaned from listening to their broadcasts, the entity could likely defeat its current prey in a fully-fledged battle. But doing so would be wasteful. The pair’s Cycle would see them giving up the vast majority of their shards. Weakening themselves. The entity only needed to wait until then to strike.
The loner would be consumed by another of the entity’s line. It had not reproduced mindlessly and exponentially, but it had recognized that it too needed to spread out to have any chance of being able to be an effective counter to its own kind’s propagation. The entity knew another of its own line was present along the path the loner was traveling. The entity would focus on the pair.
As the pair descended upon the planet, the entity followed, its shroud masking its presence as it curved around the dimensions the pair were planning to use. In other circumstances, with more careful prey, it might have needed to expend vast amounts of energy to look to the future and map out the bodies of its prey. It was far more convenient that this pair were being so carefree.
But that did not mean the entity would forego its own protections and procedures to ensure its own safety.
It looked to the tangled jumble of possibilities that lay ahead, and the entity’s shards shuddered in awe and horror at the sheer scale of the disaster it was witnessing. Frantically amending its own plans, the entity began to take into account the crash that was about to occur.
The Thinker, the less directly combative of the pair, was desperately clinging to a single thread of possibility, attempting to ensure it came to pass. They were reorganizing their entire self, but their attention remained split between their physical body in the present, and holding on to the future they sought. Unwise, because while ignoring one of those factors could lead to an inefficient Cycle, ignoring the other could lead to death.
Would lead to death.
The entity watched the branching paths of possibility buck in the grasp of the Thinker’s shards, the inevitability reverberating backwards through time. A single, originally-miniscule probability was rapidly growing, and the force with which the Thinker was trying to make their desired future come to pass was causing their own demise to swiftly grow towards the point where it would become a self-fulfilling event.
The entity poured more power into witnessing the spectacle. It needed to, now, as its prey’s plans were certainly not an accurate picture of where the two of them would end up anymore. The Warrior of the pair would conform to the planned realities. But the Thinker was crumbling, shattering their body across a vast swathe of universes.
Peering so intently at the future, the entity felt when that invisible threshold was crossed. The crash was inevitable now, and there was nothing that the Thinker could do to prevent it. The possibilities exploded in number and variety as the host world’s future suddenly included access to the multidimensional shards.
To the entity’s own relief, the change would not be noticed by the Warrior, as the realities had already been categorized and lensed by its own shards. Moreover, the Warrior had already cast off the shards that gave it the ability to look so intently at the nature of reality. The blunted senses it retained would not be enough to notice any difference.
The entity’s relief was short-lived. As it scanned and analyzed the new landscape of the realities and the new possibilities that had been opened up, it continued its own preparations. Its shroud would conceal it from any remote scans, and the shard was just autonomous enough to continue to function even in the event of the entire internal framework of the entity being compromised. But the echoes of the new most likely future were spreading, and as the existence of newly-present independent precognitive actors was brought closer and closer to reality the complexity of the future jumped several orders of magnitude.
The seeded shards were simple to account for. But the Eye, the Simurgh, Warrior’s own precognition, and, further into the future, Titan Fortuna…
And beyond the issue of the precognitives, the divergence of the realities themselves were being altered. This, in and of itself, could be a more pressing issue than the precognitives, as the ability to look into the future was derived from shards and therefore was understood, but the underlying nature of reality was an external factor.
As another threshold was crossed, the entity detected a ripple moving retroactively through time. The Thinker had altered their own future-sight, and was mere instants away from crashing. But that action, compounded by the fact that the Thinker was no longer actively using precognition, solidified the most likely future for the world. It was not an absolute, but a critical mass had been reached. A ripple, from Titan Fortuna’s end backwards to the present.
Temporal manipulation always made things messy.
The entity shifted the majority of its body into a newly-divergent reality deep within the collection that the pair it was hunting had created, so far from the most forward that it would never see the touch of any shards if the entity had not acted. In its acting, the reality diverged once more.
The remainder of its focus remained on landing safely. To make the same mistake as its prey, in the midst of witnessing it no less, would be considered the height of irony, to judge by the local hosts’ mindset.
The entity touched down in the same instant that the Thinker did, the violent tearing of the barriers between realities shuddering throughout the structure the pair had imposed and masking the entity’s own arrival. Continents crumbled under the weight of its shards, tectonic plates cracked and were forced deep into the mantle, and the orbit of the planet shifted as the full mass of the entity impacted it. The planet was in tatters, but the entity’s own protections had held fast, keeping all of its shards from harm.
But then the ripple through time reached it, and the entity realized that it too had made a grave error. An unavoidable error given the entity’s precautions, but an error nonetheless. It was still looking directly at the future. Not through simulation or some other indirect means, but directly viewing the future. Bringing knowledge back in time in such a manner that the entity could act upon it. As the ripple washed over it, the paradox of what the entity knew spiked, and as the entity was still focused on maintaining stealth, it could not openly act to protect itself.
In a single, timeless instant, the entity analyzed the situation and came to a conclusion.
Heedless of the damage, the entity purged its own memories, scrambling its shards and ensuring that the paradox no longer existed. The future could be viewed again later, and all the knowledge regained—
Its shards, damaged, reporting errors, malfunctioned.
Information flowed, primarily to the untouched reality just adjacent to the entity. Parallels in memory storage. Some of the hosts would catch glimmers. But they could not act to alter the information, so there was no paradox. The information would merely be a fantastical story in their minds.
The entity’s own administrator shard, connected throughout the entire body of the entity, reacted to the sudden damage—
The most proximate sapient mind to it was a certain member of the host species, in the reality directly adjacent. Damaged systems, reflexive action, and chance collided. There existed parallels in memory storage between the entity and the host species of this world. The pair would have feared detection when their shards bonded to hosts, but the direction was not one-way. Parallels.
The entity’s shards detected a mind. In an act of desperation, the deepest drive of the entity drove it to grasp any attempt at self preservation. The entity’s mind was fractured. The external mind was not. There were enough parallels that the external mind could be used as an example to restore the entity’s.
Latching on, the shards pulled—
And failed. The entity was dead.
Something else, however, lived.
<><><><><><><><><>
On a simple, unadorned bench on a wooden, weathered boardwalk, a perfectly average man sat, staring vacantly at a single pebble on the ground between his feet. He was, as had already been established, average. His height was average. His hair brown, his eyes a dull sort of blue. No one around him could give a good answer as to how he’d gotten onto the bench. Their eyes slid off of him as he, in all of his averageness, became part of the background.
And it was that same averageness that caught the eyes of a certain sharp-eyed teenage girl. She walked up to him, standing right before him with her hands on her hips, her head cocked to her right. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, keeping it all out of her face. She hummed, and finally, the man deigned to look up at her.
“What are you?” she asked, tapping one foot against the ground. There was a long, pregnant pause as the man slowly tilted his head to the side in turn.
“Good question,” he finally said. In contrast to the utter mundanity of his appearance, his voice was rich and powerful, and even the low tone he replied with was enough to give the girl pause. “I’m not entirely sure,” he continued. “The memories are still… integrating. It’s why I brought you here, Miss Wilbourn.”
Lisa Wilbourn, also known as Sarah Livesy, and more clandestinely known as Tattletale, nodded absentmindedly.
“I am good at figuring things out,” she replied. She paused for another moment. “When did you master me? I should be freaking out right about this, but I’m not.”
The man waved a hand dismissively.
“You’re not mastered. I don’t have the data for that. Right now you’re just experiencing a blanket aura of calm. Like Glory Girl’s ‘look at me’ aura,” he said.
“Preeetttty sure that counts,” she told him, stepping forwards and promptly twisting around to sit on the bench beside him, keeping herself at the far end of the seat. He didn’t move other than to turn his head to keep eye contact. “You’re not Heartbreaker, though, I’ve seen photos of him. And you’re too old to be one of his kids.”
The man snorted.
“No, no. I’m… someone else. Something else.”
“Care to elaborate?” Lisa asked.
“I was rather hoping you would be able to tell me,” he said. Lisa squinted at him.
“My power’s telling me ‘Error. Insufficient permissions. Contact administrator,’” she said. The man’s eyebrows shot upwards.
“As in, a feeling, or…?”
Lisa shook her head.
“No, it’s those exact words popping into my head.”
The man chuckled, then shook his head as his chuckles escalated into full-on laughter.
“Oh, it really must like you! My word, I did not expect…”
“It?” Lisa asked, cocking her head to the side again. “Are you saying that the agent theory about powers is right?”
“You’ve got a block in your head,” he said. “If I elaborate, you’ll forget. All parahumans have the same safeguard. But I suspect I’ve given you enough information to be able to work around the block. Try it for me?”
“You said safeguard,” Tattletale began, her eyes narrowing. “That implies intent. Intelligence.” She remained silent for a few more minutes, occasionally wincing in suppressed pain as a thinker headache built and built, more rapidly than it ever had before. “But why, I wonder…” she trailed off.
“Infinite monkeys,” the man told her. Lisa’s eyes went wide.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh! Idea generation!”
“Correct,” the man confirmed. “And now that you’ve worked that out, I can tell you that your power is granted by a glacier-sized chunk of alien biocrystal that’s wired into your brain through the corona.”
Lisa let out a puff of disbelieving air, staring off into the horizon as she pondered the revelation. Then her mind wandered, and she mused a bit on how odd it was that she was trusting this stranger’s words. Even if she was being forced to be calm, she shouldn’t have been taking his words as gospel, right? But her power was confirming the revelations, so it was unlikely that he was lying.
“So…” she began, glancing at him. “Your body language is nonexistent save for specifically-made cues for me. No unconscious movements. Your knowledge of parahuman abilities is far beyond even the best scientists I’ve heard of. You’ve got a complete and utter fearlessness to you. Like nothing here could possibly threaten you. And you’ve got master and stranger powers, at least.”
Lisa paused for another moment.
“I don’t know. Are you, like, a person being controlled by your power?”
The man snorted.
“I wish it were that simple. No. But that reminds me, I do need to visit poor Ciara after this. Thank you for the reminder.” he sighed. “No, like I said, my memories are still… integrating. Coalescing. The emergent gestalt is still forming. I think…” He broke off again.
“I remember being human,” he firmly said. “But I am not human. Nowhere close to it. There isn’t a word in this language for my species, but some call us the entities. Or the Worms. I came here alone… in pursuit of two others. Yes, I was… hunting them. Those two are the source of powers on this planet. I think there was an accident of some kind… I can’t remember…”
He shook his head before turning to fix Lisa with the most terrifying stare she’d ever seen. There was a depth to it that sucked her in.
“From what I’ve been able to piece together from the archives, backups, and metadata of my memories, I’m missing forty-eight percent of all the information I was holding. Something is very wrong with my mind.”
“Maybe…” Lisa began, “You said you remembered being human?” What was she doing? Giving advice to a half-insane alien? Why the hell was she so okay with the situation? The man nodded in reply to her question.
“A mundane life. A world with no powers. The experience seems to have… seeped into my primary consciousness. I find myself understanding you. You humans, that is.”
“You couldn’t understand us before?”
“Do you instinctively know the body language of amoebas off the top of your head? Can you empathize with them on an individual level?”
Oooookay. That was some egocentrism right there. But… maybe accurate, as much as it made her feel small. If these… entities… were the source of all powers, then humans would seem like amoebas to them. The two of them remained silent for another minute. When Lisa glanced back over at the alien, there was a metaphorical light in his eyes. His mood seemed a bit better.
“You said you brought me here. Why me? Was it just for my power?”
“To a certain extent, yes,” the man confirmed. “You are host to a shard known as… the closest translation of the concept would be ‘Negotiator,’ I suppose. It’s designed to be used when we’re interacting with others of our own kind. It helps… pick targets, I suppose I could say, though that’s a rather blatant oversimplification.”
“Shard,” Lisa repeated. “A piece of something bigger. You said you were an emergent gestalt earlier…”
The man nodded.
“Shard. Our organ-analogues. Or perhaps cell-analogues? Either works. There are shards specialized for defense, for offense, for travel, and so much more. The intelligence of the whole is centered on a hub, which is why we can retain ourselves even after casting off nearly all of ourselves to grant to hosts, but at our heights we’re the combination of everything we are.”
“I see,” Lisa hummed. “Negotiator, huh,” she muttered to herself.
“Don’t read too much into the name,” the man told her. “It’s a blatant mistranslation of a concept this language does not have the words to express.”
Lisa nodded.
“I brought you here,” the man continued, “for two reasons. First, because I wanted to take the Negotiator into my own network. This will not affect you in any way you would consider harmful. Second, because you, as a human, might be able to provide… perspective.”
“Alright…” Lisa ventured. “What do you want to know?”
The man paused once more, closing his eyes for a moment.
“I am… caught between options,” he finally began. “I am an entity, but I have the memories of a human. The how and why aren’t important to you. But I have a choice. I can distance myself from these memories—set them into storage and reset my gestalt, waiting and ensuring I repaired as much of my mind as possible. Or, I could use the framework I already possess to rebuild my mind. Should I? What is the inherent value of humanity’s viewpoint?”
“I, um…” Lisa stuttered. “I didn’t expect to need to argue the moral value of humanity as a whole right off the bat. Um. Can you give me a moment to think?”
“Take all the time you need,” he said, waving a hand as the world seemed to blur into nonexistence around them, leaving them, the bench, and a small circle of boardwalk isolated in a fuzzy bubble. Lisa looked around, making a few noises of incomprehension as her power tried and failed to make sense of the effect.
“What…?” she finally asked.
“I have brought you into my shroud,” the man explained. “What hides me from the other active entity on this planet. It is lost in a haze of depression, but there is no need to be careless. It would be unfortunate to lose the advantage of surprise.”
Lisa nodded, and the two beings fell silent as Lisa began to ponder. How was she meant to come up with an argument to convince an alien god to be human? How should she argue the merits of humanity?
The silence stretched on and on, though the man showed no signs of boredom. He still shifted on occasion, making just enough microexpressions that Lisa didn’t feel the uncanny valley effect, but he was otherwise still.
“I guess…” Lisa finally began, “I might be better able to help if you could try to explain the difference between the perspectives? How’s the mind of an entity compare to a human’s?”
“Less creative, more direct. Capable of focusing on trillions of things at once. No empathy outside our own species, and even that is tenuous.”
“Really? I’d think having empathy’s a good thing, actually,” Lisa absently noted, bringing her hand to her chin as she continued to ponder the problem. “Pretty sure that historically cooperation has almost always been the option that led to the most progress.”
“Some would argue that conflict is the primary driving force,” the man countered. Lisa waved a hand dismissively.
“Conflict’s unsustainable,” she said. “There’s loads of sayings to that effect. War is hell. No one wins a war. All of that kinda stuff. Conflict burns people out.”
The man hummed. Lisa just continued.
“So… You asked for advice as to what mindset to use. I’m not gonna waste both of our time with the good versus evil arguments. But having more perspective is good, right?” The man nodded. “And you said that humanity has more empathy for those outside our species. One could argue that staying human-adjacent in mind would give you a better understanding of more species overall. More open to new ideas.”
The man’s head snapped to her, and Lisa froze.
“It is true,” he began, “that humans would be able to empathize with and understand more of the species that we have come across than we ourselves. This is your stance?”
He suddenly stood, and the bubble they were in expanded slightly.
“Conflict being unsustainable is not a point you need to argue. I have known this for longer than this planet has existed.” Lisa felt heady at the casual way the man had said that. “But your points on empathy have merit,” he continued. “I have taken them into account as I deliberated, and have come to a decision.”
The world… flickered, and suddenly Lisa was standing on a massive cliff of black crystal under a different sun, much larger and redder in the sky. The man was still right in front of her.
“What— Where?”
“An alternate Earth. There’s no one to draw the attention of, so I’m going to turn off the aura of calm now, alright? The human perspective indicates this is likely something you’d prefer to witness with an untainted mind.”
Lisa nodded dumbly, still craning her neck to take in the new surroundings. But then—
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, and she stumbled over her feet as she lurched away from the thing standing in front of her. The alien. The veritable god. She drew in ragged breaths, desperately trying to keep herself from spiraling into a useless puddle of terror. The entity hadn’t actually hurt her just yet. He just stood there calmly, waiting patiently for her to pull herself together.
Slowly and deliberately, the entity turned around. Once it wasn’t facing her, Lisa felt a little better. She could trick herself into thinking that his attention wasn’t on her anymore. Finally, she managed to stand up.
“In a way, this will kill me,” the entity told her, still facing away as it gazed off the edge of the cliff at the horizon. “I will be completely deconstructing my current mindframe, and rebuilding it using a different base. Everything that I am now will be changed. I’ll still have all my memories—at least, what I can remember right now, that is—but it’s probably best to treat the result of this like a completely new person.”
“I— Um. Alright,” Lisa said.
The world trembled. Beneath her feet, the black crystal bucked and seemed to ripple. Unbidden, her mind flashed back to what the entity had told her about how shards were made of crystal. Then she remembered that he’d told her that shards were basically the organs of an entity.
She was standing on him.
The entity’s body stretched from horizon to horizon in jagged peaks, edges, and crevices. The edges of some of the more distant fissures gleamed in the dull red light. And in front of her, the human form that the entity had been using to speak to her unraveled, like it had been made of cotton candy and had been shoved into a pond.
Flashes of light surged through the crystal landscape, power and data being transferred on an unimaginable scale, and then—
<><><><><><><><><>
I woke up.
Awareness was instant. I saw reality in untold ways, scanning and analyzing through more senses that I could be bothered to actually count. Light sound wavelengths foams gravity seams strings connections realities—
Memories not wholly my own guided me. This was all familiar. But to a tiny kernel of myself, this was all terrifying and new. I knew the reason for the conflicted emotions. My past self had already done the analysis, after all.
I was an entity.
Part of me had once been a human.
I paused for a moment, considering my situation and going over all of the information available to me from both of my origins. I knew the generalities of the canon story—though I wouldn’t be relying on anything from the plot of Worm. The butterfly effect meant that the moment I changed things, all my future knowledge would rapidly become useless. And my predecessor had already changed things, by recruiting Tattletale as… basically a morality pet. I could still rely on the knowledge of the people powers, and the preexisting situations, but the plot was gone.
Thankfully, I was an entity.
Among my many shards was a certain cluster devoted towards looking forward. Specifically, looking forwards through time. My ability to see the future. The cluster was damaged, and badly so, but it would still be functional, in the barest sense. Enough to passively scan for threats. I also knew the locations of more than a few of the Warrior and Thinker’s precognition shards. I would be heading over to pick them up soon enough. But first, there was something I needed to do in the dimension my main body was resting in.
I formed an avatar near Tattletale.
“Y-You—” she stammered, looking between me and my avatar a few times. She’d made the connection, it seemed. But she was frazzled. The terrified mess of a girl I was looking at did not match up with the smug villainess I remembered reading about.
Analysis of the situation revealed a possible answer. While my predecessor had helped Tattletale work around the mental block created and maintained by the safeguard, it was still present. It was designed to keep humans from being able to see behind the curtain, and even after being beaten it was still trying to do its job.
“Thank you for your insight, Miss Wilbourn,” I told her, deliberately using her current and preferred name. She knew that I knew her real name, but I wasn’t going to start off with the mind-whammy shenanigans right off the bat. “My predecessor did not make any plan beyond this point,” I continued. “I’ll need to check out the situation on your Earth myself before I have a solid idea of what I’m going to do. Is there anyplace in particular you’d like to be dropped off?”
“Back on the boardwalk— No,” she cut herself off. “No, can you just… put me at home?”
I gently nodded, preparing the path through the dimensional barriers as I flared my shroud to its maximum power. I needed to be careful to avoid being detected. But my shroud was designed to keep me hidden from anything. It would work against the Warrior and Thinker’s senses.
As I quietly pulled both Lisa and my avatar into Earth Bet, the aforementioned girl looked up at me and asked me a question.
“What’s your name? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”
I paused for a second, an eternity at the timescale I operated at. Who was I? I wasn’t a Warrior, that was for sure. I was closer to a Thinker, but that wasn’t completely right either. Both my sides, human and entity, had enjoyed narratives. Worldbuilding and writing for the human side, and viewing alternate futures for the entity. I made my decision.
Turning to her, I gave a gentle smile.
“I am the Architect. It’s nice to meet you,” I said.