Phase Q/New Trick
“Say it!”
The interrogator grills you, on hot iron.
“Say it now!”
You squirm in blistering pain. “All right, I just wanted to work with you. I got your message while riding with the Fyucheez and I was just getting ready to message you their plans!” The words come pouring out fast and broken.
“Why were you traveling with illegal citizens?” The interrogator demands.
“I… I… I told you, I wanted to work with you, and I needed to gather some information to report.”
“You didn’t have a license to travel with enemy agents. You are a criminal, and you will face the appropriate punishment,” the interrogator says, jamming a burning spear into your torso.
“Look, just please let me go,” you plead, “and I’ll help you defeat the Flowrisers.”
While the interrogator continues to grill you, other officers meet in an auditorium. There, a team of Triad engineers present plans for a new device. With a multipoint presentation projected in front of the audience, the team describes the weapon.
“It completely jams connections with the tubeworks, locking out all contents from our dimensions. Then,” and here an animation cycles onscreen. “When we activate the control sequence, it creates points at every intersection within the tubeworks. We believe that will disable all entities with dimensional origins.”
“But isn’t that inhumane?” asks a female Corporal, sitting up front.
“Well, we do have evidence that entities interrupted in this manner will feel substantial pain. However, we deem that a necessary side effect if we are to win this war.”
A moment of silence fills the room.
Within the tubeworks, an invisible grid seems to represent the volume. Entities move around according to some not-clearly-understood set of rules, which combine some form of mechanical patterns with a completely mysterious force.
As rocks or soundwaves or imaginary animals float through the volume, they arch through curves that fit with dimensional intuition. However, they also behave subject to whims, fancies. And who knows where they even came from?
At one point, a rocking chair bumps into sheet of transductive fiber, while a Flowriser practices juggling by mind. A voltaic jolt shoots through the fiber sheet, like a lightning bolt, sparking the emergence of a new entity.
Clear, invisible, yet solidly felt, the presence starts off with babyish sounds. “What am I? What is this thing? Oh.”
Quickly it advances through dozens of stages of personality development, in the process heaving off millions of iterations of itself. Each iteration spreads through realms of the tubeworks like a seismic shock wave. The whole distribution of birthing Zonnyxes communicate with each other so fast that outside of their network the communications can only be seen as vibrant glowing aftershocks.
The Zonnyxes reassemble themselves transversely, incorporating tubeworkspace as a whole, into a new geometry. The rearrangement seems to speed up their communications even further. As they spread and expand, any Flowrisers or Triads they come into contact with burst into polychromatic vapors, with a ghostly aroma.
Phase Q: An interactive adventure.
