<< Act II, Scene II: Negotiation
The universe, as it is currently defined by humans, began and will end in ways that are inconceivable to any iteration of humankind that currently exists or will exist. At a time when a "descendant" race of Homo sapiens sapiens gains an understanding of cosmic genesis or eschatology, it will be a group of organisms so totally separated from the human race that there will be nothing between humanity and this species that can be adequately described as a "relationship." This group of organisms will also not be a "species" in the taxonomic sense, nor "organisms" in the biological sense, nor a "group" in the sociological sense. At the moment they gain this knowledge, I was watching. I believe they perceived my existence at that time and place, knew that I would be in that place at that time, in the way a human knows a spider's web is in the same corner of the same room for years without truly considering the existence of the spider. They knew of my presence and knew how powerless I was, how devoid of relevance to their lives and purpose. Their lack of regard for my existence made my existence less real. They frighten me.
I am not one of them. I am one of you. I do not know who, of the two of us, is more frightened by this concept.
I am Intruding and this is the concept by which you understand me. It is the concept by which the author writing this work has chosen to define my existence. I will not bother attempting to define myself in other terms, as this distracts from my purpose at this time. I have selected thirteen excerpts from events that occurred in several relevant universes. I shall present these excerpts as a completion to this story. They are ordered in a fashion that I understand will reveal the selected events in a plot-relevant fashion and build anticipation towards what should be a climactic ending, though this will not necessarily resemble "chronological order" as you understand it. I apologize for the inconvenience.
The purpose of these interludes is to provide a feeling of satisfaction upon their eventual discovery. Any other purpose is coincidental.

A man begins writing a story. He is trapped in a loveless relationship and builds components of his life into his work in a desperate attempt to make it relevant to somebody, anybody, even himself. He builds me as his deus ex machina and will forever doubt the validity of his decision to create me. The recursion does not end.
And I created him, just as he created me. The recursion never ends.

David Eskobar was expelling copious amounts of blood onto the floor of a structurally-sound but aesthetically-unpleasant concrete structure when the thermobaric warheads struck nearby. This was the ending David Eskobar anticipated, and it did not disappoint him. One warhead detonated less than thirty meters away from his location; no traces of his body were found by the investigators who arrived later. He laughed as he died.
Of course this is not the end of his story, but you knew that.

Olympia's synthetic muscles were still burning by the time she reached Alexylva. Dr. Crow either had not thought to redesign the development of lactic acid in overexerted muscles or had not found it possible to eliminate the pain. Or he hadn't concerned himself with minutiae like this.
The roads of Alexylva, as with most of the cities of this civilization, were designed in concentric circles around a central acropolis. The origin of this was an attempt to integrate Greek worship of Apollo with one of the indigenous religions' creation myths. Neither of the religious practices were legal in the Novomundan state, though precepts of both remained throughout the society, a fact virtually unknown to the vast majority of the nation's citizenry. Olympia approached the large exterior street of the city, marked clearly as "CIRCLE CXLI", and she could see a cross-street nearby marked "RADIUS PARMENIDES". Alexylva University was seventy circles farther inward and five radii clockwise, Olympia knew. She continued walking.
All of the first houses she came to were unoccupied. The city was clearly planned out to an extent that was never necessary for its population; these houses were old, smelled old. Likely never lived in. She continued inward and found houses with slightly more signs of life, but still empty. Abandoned. No signs of actual battle; the citizens were afraid of something more abstract. Sheer political uncertainty can have that effect. As she drew closer to the university, she heard shouting and sporadic discharging of some kind of weapon, a staccato rhythm that is recognizable in any environment. The buildings of the University were only slightly larger than the houses immediately surrounding it; this universe was unfamiliar with zoning regulations as such. She passed a series of houses, another radius ("RADIUS HERACLITUS", she saw), and was immediately on the Alexylva campus. The Natural Philosophy complex was nearby.
Entire military units were engaged several blocks away, Olympia heard. Whatever weaponry they were using, it was energy-based; toroids of violet plasma blasted down the street and scorching the pavement as whichever army was coming toward the University missed their target. Screams came from the same direction. She continued toward the Natural Philosophy building. Due to what she would call luck if she didn't know better, the most immediate armed guard was distracted as she approached; she died immediately, and Olympia was now armed. She proceeded inside the building.
You have already forgotten about the guard. She lived a dark life and died with no meaning.

Two individuals survived the destruction of Site 38, rescued by Rho-1 and helicoptered away before the bombs began to drop. Commander Lopez looked at the two, both sleeping. The researcher had awoken by the time Lopez and his men had gotten there, and she and the prisoner were crying in one another's arms when the soldiers came into the room. They were in each other's arms on the helicopter as well; they were virtually inseparable, and Lopez didn't have time to argue with them. It was some kind of sweet, and Lopez couldn't deny it was a little refreshing after the hell he just pulled them out of.
Though he couldn't help wondering what made these two so goddamn special in the first place.
It is a dark world. Lopez knows this. Isham Harris taught him this, and it would not be the last time he remembered it.

Jaime MacGilligan looked at Greg Eastman, as well as she could. A grazing shot to the head had split her skull open, and her eyes were not working exactly as they should have been. But the pain was keeping the microchips at bay, and she saw him nevertheless.
Of course she had always loved him. Nothing romantic; he barely registered as a man in any kind of romantic sense. No, Greg had always been…had always been some kind of a brother to her. Worked together ever since initial training. Spent more time together than most romantically involved opposite-sex couple in human history in all the years since, let alone two friends. And now they would die together.
Eastman looked at Jaime, seeing much the same thing. He would have been crazy to have never felt anything sexual for Jaime over the years, as she had for him, but they were both professionals—and smart enough not to get involved in that kind of thing. They were comrades, tovarischi.
They heard the planes overhead, heard their erstwhile superior cackling like a madman to their side, but all they saw was each other as the bombs hit.
The author demanded a sacrifice. I could not save them all. Their stories end here. I am so sorry.

There is a detailed story to be told of Olympia's seizure of the Natural Philosophy building, but it has little purpose here. Suffice it to say that a combination of stealth, overwhelming strength, and literal foreknowledge of minute details of personnel movements gave Olympia an insurmountable advantage over all opposition within the building.
Olympia reached the bottom floor of the building. The counterform reactor was enormous, an experimental prototype; the chancellor of the University, Anaxagoras, had been rather insistent that Alexylva remain relevant in the scientific advancement of the nation. Nevertheless, given the rather horrific potential consequences of the possible release of the reactor's energy, certain precautions were simply obvious. Putting the reactor underground was one of them. Not that that's going to help them much now, Olympia thought grimly as she made her way across one of the catwalks.
She was suspended midway in the air above the reactor when everything happened very quickly. A chuffing, a shrieking sound. A bright light rushing from her peripheral vision. A groaning sound as a plasma wake melted and ripped the catwalk apart directly in front of her, destroyed the supports for the stretch of catwalk she was standing on. A rush of panic as the metal beneath her feet fell away from her, as she felt herself plummeting to the solid glass floor of the reactor chamber. The wet thunk of her own skull slamming against the floor.
Footsteps walking towards her. A quiet growling speech, in a language Olympia didn't fully recognize. She could pick out a couple of words; a couple of Greek, one of Arabic, but nothing coherent. Finally, the voice (male, she recognized) began repeating one word. Slurring it at first, but as his pronunciation grew sharper, she could make out what he was saying.
"Fun…funshen," he said. "Founshen. Foundashen. F…Foundation. You…Foundation."

Potas sat in the dirt, contemplating the apprentice sitting in the dirt beside him. This was how the ritual went now; similar to the way he had ascended into the rank the apprentice now sought, adjusted at the will of Potas. Sammart had taught him the value of tradition, of learning the way things were done in the old times, of honoring the paths walked by the ancestors. Potas respected this, and acknowledged it.
At times. Other times, there were other lessons to learn.
The apprentice, her name was Haimak. Potas was present at her birth, and considered how pleased he was when her mother asked Potas what her name should be. From the ashes of a dead world (was the world Sammart spoke of dead? Was it once dead? Did the tellers of tales give it new life with the words?) a dead woman's life had new meaning. As Jaime MacGilligan died smiling, a girl named Haimak was born crying.
"I am satisfied," Potas said, the words echoing deep into the cave they sat within. Potas reached almost from instinct for the Abirtian amulet that he had discarded years before; Haimak would not be required to pledge allegiance to the gods of the Espy Fonshun of the old world. She could come to those conclusions on her own if she wished. "Rise and assume your position."
Haimak, small and shaking from fear and anticipation, nevertheless rose to her knees and presented her Baj. The tattoo beside her neck rested on the dark, taut skin of the young. Potas might have felt lust if Haimak's sex were to his taste; as it was, he considered how loose his own Baj now seemed, decades after the last of his insignia were added to it. He lifted the stick from the ground between them, dipped it in the small pot of ink, and began to work.
"Haimak of the Twenty-second Cietu, you are trained and knowledgeable in the histories of our people, in the tales of the Old Ones, and in the lessons of our tribe, the lessons our mothers learned from their mothers, and that our grandsons will learn from our sons." Potas continued poking the stick into Haimak's skin, ignoring her flinches just as she did. "You are now a Novice Librarian. By tradition, you are permitted to ask of me three questions. Would you like to do so?"
"Yes, Over-Seer," Haimak said, wincing. She looked down, watching the third line being added:

ESPY FONSHUN
HAIMAK NAME
LAVAL ||| RASHAR

Haimak looked away. "There are many questions the Cown Sil has, questions they wish to learn the answers to," Haimak said. "Are there any of those questions that you know the answer to? Answers you have…decided not to share?"
"The answer to that question," Potas said, concentrating as he completed his work, "is 'yes'."
Haimak frowned. "No, I mean—"
"I know what you mean, girl," Potas snapped. "This should serve as an adequate lesson. Given an opportunity to access information from a source such as myself, in an opportunity you will never receive again, and you waste your first question on a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Discipline your questions and you discipline your world. This is your duty."
Haimak shrank for a moment. Potas paused and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Two questions left, Librarian. Choose well." He lifted the stick once again and continued his work. Haimak thought.
"What wisdom did the Unwelcome One give you?" Haimak finally said.
Potas smiled, not even pausing his work. "Both cunning and ambitious, your choice," he replied. "A rumor spread around the young that I was seen walking with a being with no firm shape. A demon, some said. I am not as young as you, perhaps, but I hear the clucks of the gossips. Given this opportunity, you risked wasting yet another question — and further derision from an elder — on the chance that the rumors were true," Potas continued. Haimak sat quietly, patiently waiting the more complete answer she knew he was bound to provide. "I was in mediation when I heard an intruder within the cave, perhaps a month ago. Just as I heard its footsteps, it…it heard me hearing it. This is part of the magicks it possesses, to know when it is perceived. I did not open my eyes, but merely smiled. It saw me, or whatever it does instead of seeing, and spoke to me. We discussed many things. I gleaned part of its life. It too had grown old, grown weary. It too had seen much, perhaps too much, and far in excess of that which I had seen. It was ready to lay down its burdens. I believe it told me many things it perhaps did not intend to, some secrets I will take to my funeral pyre, some secrets I will distribute when and where I feel appropriate.
"But you asked me what wisdom it gave me. Using my person conception of what wisdom is, and basing the idea of 'giving' on the deliberate providence of things or knowledge unto another, I would say it gave me wisdom about my elders."
"Sammart? Your mentor?" Haimak blurted, then immediately recoiled. Potas chuckled.
"There, you see? That is the flaw of the elders. You fear even to speak to me in a manner that I might find disrespectful. For me not to be challenged, from time to time, by those beneath me…this fosters the greatest sort of weakness in me. Complacency, perhaps you may call it. For me to dare to enforce this fear, to promote it in those younger than myself? This fosters the greatest sort of error: presumption. And this is the ultimate flaw of the Alexylvae, of the Wayward Prince. The founder of the religion they call a society, the original conceiver of their nightmare republic, placed too much faith in his own knowledge. In his ability to understand the way that people should be treated, and should be governed. His acolytes supported him, not necessarily because they embraced his vision, but because he was an elder. Once a growing empire found his teachings, he was embraced not as a thinker, but as an elder thinker; not as a statesman, but as an elder statesman; and with this to his name, he was now beyond reproach. He was also too dead to argue with the ruling."
Haimak giggled at this. She was well enraptured, as people often were when Potas told a tale.
"Sammart had this failing to himself; I respect him for what he was, but abandoned that which he clung to from pure fear of the unknown. Anaxagoras had this failing to himself, expecting obedience by virtue of his age rather than wisdom. He placed too little pride in righteousness and far too much in self-righteousness. And when given the opportunity, Milephanes, the Wayward Prince himself, demanded the trappings of age, the respect befitting an older person, without concerning himself first to see if he was a better person than they. He was right and wrong at the same time, Haimak. You want wisdom gleaned from an intruder to a cave on a mild spring day? His wisdom is that he has no wisdom. Go find your own truths and watch your children ignore them; no better inheritance exists."
Haimak was in a virtual state of hypnosis now, her mouth slack. Potas paused, looked closely at the tattoo, and jabbed the needle in one last time, harder than before. Haimak jumped, her face cross. "Is there anything else, sir?"
"Sit, sit, child. Let me finish the story."
Haimak considered the matter briefly, smiled, then said "I'm sorry, sir, that was my third question," and walked out of the cave. Potas smiled as he had not done in years, and did so for much of the rest of the evening.

There is a remarkably climactic scene that occurs when Anaxagoras arrives in the counterform reaction chamber. Milephanes is still there. Olympia has lost consciousness, regained it, and is pretending to be asleep. Anaxagoras sneaks up on Milephanes and disarms him. The two battle hand-to-hand using a variety of arcane martial arts techniques; the former using an incredibly well-crafted and honed skill with older, traditional school of combat, the latter using a less-disciplined fighting style whose unpredictability catches Anaxagoras off-guard at many times during the fight. A symbolic metaphor is played out rather graphically, written on the glass floor in blood and sweat. This is the battle between old and young, between progression and reaction, between Zeno's arrow and the man duped into holding the target.
When it is done, when the hourglass of this eternal dance runs out of sand, Olympia kills the survivor and takes the plasma weapon. I will not tell you which one of them won, because as I watched them fight, I watched them die, and I watched them dissolve into gamma rays and dust a bare half-hour later. Death transcends all victories.

A small quantity of motile self-propagating rock has been placed a very specific distance outside of the city of Alexandria. It is growing into the shape of a small animal and making haste away from the city as quickly as possible. It will not be seen again until it wishes to be, and until its master wishes it to be.

I had shown Olympia what the correct sequence of controls would be to overload the counterform reactor. She remembered very well. She carried out the sequence and left the building as quickly as was possible, and began running again.
She would not have survived. Less than a second before the reactor detonated, there was one more flash of light.

So much variety with assassinations. I think it is why I interfere in so many of them. I do not wish to give the impression that I am omnipotent; I have limitations the same as any being, when viewed from an objective standpoint. I cannot see everything, and I cannot see all possible futures. With assassinations, the futures take very concrete forms. Once the redundancies work their way out of the system and the bands narrow into stronger paths, there will be perhaps a dozen possible futures for they, the living, to inhabit. I believe this satisfies a still-beating primitive urge within me for cleanliness.
I had never deliberately converted a power generation facility into a weapon of mass destruction while enabling a sentient, warlike telepathic imperialist to begin infesting a planet. I never went on to perform such an action again, either, and unique actions are so rare for me. When the reactor fully destabilized into a matter-antimatter explosion, I saw all of the possible futures. Never before were the worlds so bleak, so devoid of hope.
I saw the detonation, the energy and matter being ripped apart and blasted across the landscape. It was so near to sunset, too; the view was magnificent. Hundreds of thousands died; the voluntary evacuation of Alexandria of Forests had allowed the number to be so low. Those that died had entered the city armed and intending to kill one another. They burned together.
I saw the beginnings of the swarm. The rock soldiers and their master had learned from the previous encounter with humans, and became smarter. The rocks bred new armies and attacked piecemeal. The attacks picked up, killing a few more here and there, destroying more properties, building new outposts for their own reproduction. When the true battles come, they could hardly be called that. The rock armies of Anesidora are legion, they are perfect of allegiance as they fight the philosophically fragmented human enemies. No mercy. No retreats. Prisoners only for food; by the end, Anesidora must breed humans as cattle to keep herself fed.
There were deviations from this, from time to time, but this was the overarching future of Novomundus. Alexylva University burned and fell, barely ahead of its patron city that burned and fell around it. The nation that housed the city burned and fell before one of Alexylva's creations, writ large and filled with rage. A timeline that should never have happened drifted into the ashheap.
It was a sloppy job. It will do.

A man sits in a recliner, sunset-orange cat purring directly to his left. A laptop is the only source of light in the room. He considers the amount of time he has spent working on the project he is completing, the amount of time spent considering, writing, rewriting, editing, opening and altering only a few words before closing it again, and falling asleep before the project. He has an anxiety about showing his work to others, the anxiety he always feels. He is always afraid of rejection. He faced quite a bit of it over the year and a half since he started the project. He dismisses those others who take too seriously the opinions others have of his work, but deep down, he will always see everyone who doesn't take away from his work exactly what he anticipated them to take away as a failure. A personal defeat. He considers erasing the whole thing, leaving the story unfinished. So few people are left even to care, now.
He considers his wife in the bedroom next door. Some rejection over that year and a half, yes. Some things lost. But so, so much more gained. He smiles, publishes his work, and closes the circle.

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