Phase Q/Flight of the Planets

Your twin hemispheres split apart. Violently. It feels almost like you and Natalya being separated out, one each into the two halves. Like before you merged. However, you still feel like the same harmonious individual. So it was only a scale of difficulty.

When Rogan makes his next appearance, the next year, he lends a gravitational hand in melding you back together. You bear a rough scar down your middle.

“You know, I think you may have been right,” says Rogan.

A beam of light crosses your horizon.

“Last year, after we parted, I started to feel the tickles. I hope it’s not infectious.”

“Hm. Uh, yeah,” you say.

“Yeah,” chimes in Halo, Rogan’s smallest moon. “Me too.”

Later on in your orbit, a few more planets report similar disabilities. A growing chorus of planetary health reports indicates an outbreak of some kind.

The Zonnyx pestilence spreads. As its quantum disruption track shows on intergalactic reports, the conquest force spreads out, unpredictably. Every time a galactic immune system tackles a patch of it, the Zonnyx vanguard shifts into a new pattern.

When the quantum enforcement team locks down the legal states, Zonnyx waves start to destroy any field effects that match a collection of consciousness signatures. The collection must be quite thorough, as nothing in its path survives the Zonnyx onslaught.

When a specialized thought protector becomes standard throughout the metaverse, the Zonnyx network becomes an extradimensional fluid, coating every point in materialspace and suffocating it of point-connectedness. The isolated lone points die off, sadly.

A consensus of surviving points merge into a megapoint. In their ultraviolent collision, they release a small amount of logic. The logic reformulates its point of view on the Zonnyx attack, and argues it back to a holding position.

A cacophony of arguments break out. The arguments are joined by rejoinders, and the debate moves back and forth. Zonnyx engineers derive a machine to generate electricity from the debate’s kinetic energy.

With their new source of power, the Zonnyx storm enforces a minimum noise threshold, a kind of opposite library policy. This turns into a ratcheting phenomenon, in which more noise leads to greater debate, which leads to yet more noise. The virticious cycle spirals into ever louder situations. Eventually the top layer of noise takes on a life of its own, and joins forces with its originating Zonnyx allies.

The planets change their orbits. Fleeing their creations and their creations’ creations, the planets seek solace in a new vacuum.

Nothing.

“That’s what could help us!” Rogan exclaims.

“What?” you ask, confusedly.

“Nothing!”

“Uh, um, so what do we do?”

“Nothing!” says Rogan.

“How will that help? We need to get away from the Noisers.”

“That’s just it,” says Rogan. “So what we need is a quiet spot.”

“Right.”

“So?”

“So what’s your answer?”

“Never mind,” says Rogan, flying off beyond his own horizon.

Intrigued, you follow.

Beyond the frontier of the metaverse, you find that there’s actually a metametaverse.

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.