Number Six
A little of Shady’s bravado leaked out around the edges at Six’s dire revelation.
“Three will wipe my entire family then,” she stated, struggling not to freak out. All of the Scrutimancy skills pouring through her told her that the Number was being honest.
“Three will wipe out all Omnids,” the dead god stated far too calmly.
“Huh?” She blinked. “All of us?”
“Every kind. Every line. Every Wendigo, every Skinwalker, every Mothman, every Taniwha, every Kelpie, every Mbielu, every Krampus, every…” Six’s words gradually accelerated to the point where Shady could barely keep up. He somehow listed all of the possible omnitypes in a single sentence. “Every Omnid in every dimension, in every Astral pocket, in every time bubble and every Citadel court. Three will not distinguish between the binders and their cousins. An illegally-produced species that produces this many conceptual thieves will be judged as one. Three will erase the Omnids from being. The word Omnid would no longer have referent. The concept of you, in every form you take, would be removed from the catalog of things that ever were.”
The silence that followed had a particular horrid flavor to it. The kind of silence that sat in a room after someone described a nuclear-plant meltdown that had not yet started but was very much going to.
“A tad… overkill, no?” Shady let out.
“Three does not weigh by sin. Three weights by category. A category accrues weight. A category that violates the laws is deleted.”
“And you, what, agreed to this? Sicced him on us?! Sat there in your patchwork chair and signed off on our future genocide?”
“I did not agree. I do not disagree. We are functions. Three is Erasure. Three’s permission to act is not granted by me. The numeric threshold is a threshold. I do not own it.”
“But you… don’t want it to happen?” Shady’s borrowed Scrutimancy made a guess.
“No.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why not? You literally called us roaches five minutes ago.”
“Roaches are interesting.”
“How are we interesting?”
Six’s thousand times a thousand pupils within pupils all swiveled at once to look at her. The effect was nauseating, like being watched by a swarm of bees that had each independently learned to focus.
“I have catalogued the lost edges of many sapients created by System Wizards. Most kinds shed things. They forget their own songs. Forget their dead. Forget the names of small clever animals they once cared about. Those forgettings fall to me. I keep them. Each kind contributes a particular flavor of forgetting to my collection, and each flavor is unique.”
He tilted his head. The motion was slightly off, as if his neck had been borrowed from a slightly larger person.
“The Omnids while being incredibly illegal shed the most unique and interesting forgettings of any kind I have catalogued.”
“You’re a fan.”
“I am a curator. The distinction is technical. Functionally, I do not wish your kind erased. Erasure does not produce forgettings. Erasure produces silence. Silence does not fall to me. Silence does not fall anywhere. Silence is what Three leaves in his wake.”
Shady’s stomach gave another twist. “So you, what. Want to keep us around so you can keep collecting our dropped socks or something?”
“In effect. Yes.”
She rubbed her face with one clawed hand.
“Okay. Fine. You specifically, prefer us alive and shedding. Three would erase us. The threshold is approaching. So what… do you want?”
“You must slow the illegal accrual.”
“Me?! How?!”
“Begin the unbinding process. The weight of bound concepts is a sum. The sum may rise. The sum may fall. When concepts are free from conceptual binding, the sum decreases. The threshold recedes. Three’s permission to erase you, currently approaching, retreats. The Omnids continue. The forgettings continue to clip into my domain. I am pleased.”
“And you want me to be the unbinder?”
“Yes.”
“Why me? There are highborns with way more crap bound to them than I have. Empress Aconia…”
“Aconia will not come here to find me nor is she willing to unbind her possessions. Her other children will not unbind their hoards. I have seen seven hundred and forty three million potential branches in which the top binding Omnids encounter my offer. In every branch save one, the offer is refused. The refusing branches all end the same way. Three. Silence. Nothing new left for me to catalogue from your kind.”
“And the one that doesn’t end that way?”
“You.”
She looked at him.
“Just… me, hum?”
“You. The girl with a hole in her chest.”
Shady’s dark claws pressed against her chest without wanting to do so. “You do realise that I’m just one Princess, right? Even if I unbind everything I own for some idiotic reason, the ownership is still there… by all of the other Frontenachii highborns. The kobolds and hoards are collectively owned by my entire family, by our Omnicorp! The threshold won’t move at all if I give everything up!”
Shady’s heart ached, she definitely didn’t want to give up the fantastic power of a million kobolds flowing through her Fractal Engine heart.
“You are the first stone. The avalanche begins with one,” Six stated with a degree of inescapable certainty. “Once you remember, you will not be able to bear keeping any of it. Once you have unbound yourself, you will not be able to bear watching your kin keep what they have bound. You will become a force. A subtractor. You will spend a long time at this work. The avalanche is slow. I prefer slow. Slow produces more curious forgettings.”
“You’re recruiting me to… dismantle my own empire?” Shady deduced.
“Yes.”
“Because I’m the only Frontenachii who’ll actually do it once she remembers the thing she’s forgotten?”
“Also yes.”
“That’s a real long con, hobo-god.” Shady produced a crooked-edged, wry smile.
“I collect forgotten time, so I have all the time to wait.”
“And what’s in it for you, specifically?” She asked, seeking greater explanation.
“More forgettings. The unbinding of bound concepts produces particularly rare forgettings. The moment a vault forgets it owned a thing. The moment a hoard forgets it was hoarded. These flavors do not occur naturally. They are produced only when a concept binder frees a concept. I have very few of such. I would like more.”
“You’re a creep.”
“Yes.”
“Seriously though, how do you expect me to pull this off? My hoards aren’t even fully mine! They’re cross-bound to my mother, my great-grandmother, aunts and many cousins. I can’t just walk in and say ‘hey, we gotta unbind all our magic shit, ‘cus the Backroom hobo asked nicely.’”
“No. You cannot.”
“So your offer is garbage!”
“My offer is a snack.” Six reached into the patchwork of his suit. His arm went in past the elbow, then past the shoulder, then his entire torso seemed to lean into the suit as if it were a closet. He rummaged for several long seconds. Shady watched, ears flat, deeply unsettled by the Number’s revelation.
Six withdrew a cardboard box.
The box was the size of a small breakfast cereal box, the kind kept on kitchen counters. The cardboard was faded yellow, almost the same shade as the Backroom walls. Across the front, in cheerful red letters arranged to look like a child had written them, the box read:
BRAIN SPIDERS™ PART OF A FORGETFUL BREAKFAST!
The mascot on the front of the box was a black cartoon spider with a creepy-looking, faded smile. Tiny yellow snowflakes drifted around the spider in a happy little flurry.
Shady stared at it.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“No.”
The pixelated snowflakes on the box drifted down, falling slowly inside the cardboard, settling at the bottom of the printed image and then restarting from the top. The cartoon spider stared back at her with exactly six eyes.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Brain Spiders. A specific breakfast cereal manufactured by a specific recipe. Six ingredients. Each ingredient is a forgetting from my collection.” Six set the box on the carpet between them. The cardboard made no sound when it touched the floor. “Combined, they form a living network that, when consumed, takes up temporary residence in a single eater’s soul.”
“Take up residence and do what?”
“They eat the threads of binding. Slowly. Methodically. In agreement with the consumer. They are very polite about it.” Six’s rotting-jaw mismatched smile surfaced again. “They nom the cords of ownership. The hooks of obligation. The leashes of family signature. The rune-knots that say ‘this is mine’. Every cord, every hook, every leash, the spiders chew through them all as long as you desire them to.”
Shady’s mouth went dry.
“That would unbind me from… everything.”
“Yes.”
“My hoards. My kobolds. My family signature on the vault contracts?”
“Yes.”
“Even the Wormwood Star shards burned to make me?”
“No. The shards themselves are spent, converted to create your soul. Their burning cannot be undone. The conceptual residue, however, the binding of your soul to the Frontenachii Prime line as a constructed asset, the rune-knot that says you are theirs, that residue is a thread. The spiders can eat such threads, making you untraceable.”
“Hrm.” Shady clicked. “That’s a freaking soul-grade weapon cereal.”
“Yes.”
“And you keep it in a box with a dumb cartoon mascot.”
“Where else would I keep it?”
She stared at the box. The snowflakes drifted.
“The threshold approaches,” Six rambled, “Three accrues permission. I prefer my little roaches alive. The cereal slows the accrual. You are the only branch in which the cereal is eaten.”
“You’re using me.”
“Yes.”
“To save my own kind, ironically.”
“Yes.”
“By dismantling my own family.”
“Your family as a start, then all of the others.”
“And you’re not even pretending to feel bad about any of it.”
“No.”
She let out a sharp laugh. The sound bounced off the cream-colored walls and came back wrong, slightly delayed, higher and also lower in pitch.
She eyed the box. “And the price of the cereal?”
“The cereal is free. The cereal’s effect is the price. When the spiders finish their work, you will be unbound. Your old hoards will no longer recognize you. Your kobolds will no longer feel your leash. Your name on the vault contracts will no longer be a name. All those forgotten bindings will end in my collection. The cereal does the giving. You only have to eat it for breakfast once. Every single spider-flake.”
“And this whole ‘I’ll show you what you lost’ business. The hand-shake thing. Where does that fit?”
“The cereal is a tool. A tool requires a wielder. A wielder requires reason. You presently have no reason because you have forgotten it. To eat the cereal, you must first wish to eat it. To truly wish to eat it, you must remember what was taken from you.”
“And the remembering is what you offer.”
“Yes.”
“And once I remember, in your view, I’ll absolutely want to eat your stupid-ass forgetting cereal.”
“Yes.”
“Bold guess.”
“Not a guess. Six hundred thousand and forty three branches. In every branch where you remember, you eat the Brain Spiders. Eventually. Some take longer. The pattern is consistent.”
“Pattern, huh.”
“Yes. I collect futures that do not happen.”
Shady narrowed her eyes. “You said the avalanche is slow. So eating the cereal is just the first step. After that I’m what, an unbinder for hire? Wandering the Omniverse, gnawing on my cousins’ vault contracts?”
“The branches diverge after the eating. The methods are many. The trajectory is one. Subtraction of accumulated power. Conceptual unbinding.”
“In any of those branches. Did I eat the cereal and then come back and beat the shit out of you?”
Six’s ghastly smile spread slowly across his face, teeth made from patchwork of random decaying nonsense, yellow and gross.
“Yes. You will likely return here as four states with a tree in tow.”
“Cool.” Shady shook her head, then pulled out Lazarus bracelets from her pockets. “These…”
“Are incredibly illegal save-points your kind stole from Eureka and bound to yourselves,” Six said. “Part of the problem. These hold seven females of your kind who have forgotten themselves.”
“If I take them to the incarnator…”
“They will grow fresh bodies, but will not remember themselves, will be blank, empty of purpose until they learn such.”
“If you want me to take your stupid cereal or to shake your hand, help them first,” she demanded.
Six looked at the bracelets. Looked at her. The thousand pupils inside his gray-white eyes drifted in different directions, each pair tracking a different bracelet.
“Help is a verb of intention,” he said. “I do not intend.”
“Bullshit. You intended to recruit me for your ‘Subtraction’ Quest. You intended to slow Three. You’re sitting there in your sad little smelly armchair full of intentions, hobo-god.”
“I am neither a hobo nor a god, I am a probability function expressed as a person. The expression resembles intention.” Six folded his patchwork hands. “I am not an agent of Goodwill, Princess Aquillianne. Goodwill is sentiment. I am a Syntropic Agent of the Good Directorate.”
“The what now?” Shady asked.
“A waveform function cast by the infinite Fractal Engines of Eureka across its boundary. I function according to a calculus you would find tedious. Calculus does not feel pity. The calculus weighs all as objects as numbers in a system.”
“So you won’t help them.”
“I cannot help them in the shape you are asking. I can perform an action consistent with the law.”
“Which is?”
Six reached out. His fingers slid into the bracelets the way a draft slides under a door. His patchwork fingers melted into the Lazarus bracelets and the metal began to bubble. Then they unfurled. Black, metallic centipedes scuttled in seven directions at once, vanishing into various cracks in the cream-colored walls.
Shady stared at the empty carpet. “What? Where did they run off to? What have you done?”
“The Lazarus bracelets are copied shards of a Number, illegally bound into a centipede-hexagon-bracelet shape by your kind. I’ve simply unbound them. The seven Omnid girls they held will awaken on Arxtruria when they are summoned by the local players. They will also remember everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
Shady’s eye twitched. Six was starting to get on her nerves with all of the repeating agreement statements that sounded exactly the same.
“They will reincarnate as themselves, with the full weight of what they forgot. Including the manner of their unmaking. An Corpse Seeker scouting for reincarnated Omnids will find each of them in due time.”
A small, vicious smile curled the corner of Shady’s mouth.
“Including remembering the idiot Skinwalker who killed them.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Do you see… Vincent’s future too?”
“When he returns to Skyfall, he will be arrested by Justice Nova for crimes against your kind.”
Shady relaxed. She sniffed the future, as hard as all of the Frontenachii Scruts allowed her. There was a lot of pain in it for her, but also a lot of revelations and good times.
“I’m ready. Make me remember what was taken from me, Six.” The Omnid girl reached out and accepted the Number’s dirty fingers and they shook hands.
Inside Shady’s skull, a door opened that had been welded shut for twelve years.
A seven-year old human boy with too-serious eyebrows reading aloud from a book about a redhead girl in striped stockings. A blanket fort lit by Christmas lights. A cardboard sword pressed into his small hands and her declaring him a knight of an order she just invented. A fae ring they found and reinforced. A stolen boat with a sail full of golden light. A name carved into a prow. The taste of tea-pine resin on her tongue. Her own voice, much younger, saying the word “always” with a confidence she had not felt in any waking hour since.His name. His face. The warmth of his hand in hers.The shape of him filling the gnawing emptiness in her chest.
Shady made the sound a person makes when they put weight on a leg they did not know was broken in a thousand places.
Her silver eyes filled with tears.
Ash. Ashcroft Clifford. Ashykins. Her best friend. The boy whose face Vincent stole from her subconsciousness, wore for years while they’ve dated.
Shady let out a loud wail, clawing at her face as she broke.
She remembered EVERYTHING. Too much of everything. Every lost moment, every death in Neverland, every joke, every game of checkers, three summers, seven years of pirate adventures that culminated in a Frontenachii Primaborn Princess begging a human boy for a kiss.
His loss hurt, hurt more like any death she’s experienced across a thousands doomed and corpse worlds.
When she finally wiped her tears, the armchair stood empty. The amber lamp had returned to fluorescent buzz. The cream wallpaper was yellow again.
The boat was back inside her mind. Small and white and sailing across Neverland. Ash’s smile was stuck in her heart, filling it with inescapable weight and fear… rising, clawing panic that it’s been twelve years… that he might not wait for her, find another girl to date…
TWELVE FUCKING years that she’s been filled with inexplicable ire for everything and everyone without even knowing why!
A small cereal box sat beside the chair. Shady grabbed it and stuffed it angrily into her robe’s pocket.
She stood. Wiped her wet eyes again with the back of her wrist.
Started walking.
More questionable, wriggly, long, black things tried to get in her way. She pulverized them and ate them barely thinking, moving on autopilot, pulling on the power of Frontenachii Knights.
The endless yellow halls didn’t want her to find her way back to Skyfall gate, rearranging themselves when she wasn’t looking. She didn’t give a shit. She pulled on a million kobold Scrutimancers and sniffed the best path forward, punched and kicked through solid walls.
Thanks to her bloodline, she found the hexagrammic extra-stable perimeter line within about thirty minutes of walking and wall-demolishing. Greyfield was there, taking attendance. His blood-red eyes flicked to her as she stepped towards the group.
“Miss Frontenachii. Where’s your delving partner?” The Instructor asked.
“Vincent ran off to do a dumbass ritual of some kind and… fell down an infinite hole,” Shady answered gruffly.
Greyfield’s tinted glasses caught reflections of the repeating halogen lights. He made a considering hum in the back of his throat.
“How… unfortunate. I shall file the appropriate paperwork and send a Seeker to retrieve his bracelet. You smell like you’ve broken my rules and gone outside the perimeter. Did you go outside of the marked zone and…”
“Yes.” Shady said.
“Minus one hundred points from Aquillianne Frontenachii,” Dr. Greyfield said.
“Like I give a fuck,” Shady ground out, struggling to hold her tears in.
Dr. Greyfield’s red eyes stared at her from under dark glasses. She stared back, then examined him with the combined power of all of her Scrut kobolds. The answer became obvious after a moment. The Instructor… was a human.
A pure… human. There was nothing Omnid at all about him. Nothing magical either. His Omnidness was just an illusion, a projection slathered atop him with wriggly, ridiculously powerful holofractal waves. He was smiling serenely instead of frowning, his eyes blue-green under the round, clear glasses flickering with lines of text.What the fuck?!A million Scrutimancer threads made a million guesses of the most probable explanation for this.Greyfield planned this. He set her up. He probably wanted her to talk to a Number, told her exactly what not to do, knowing that she would do the opposite out of spite for his rules.
Shady blinked.
“Miss Frontenachii,” Dr. Greyfield began, speaking with a fake, old man, 1950s Omnithornian voice layered atop of his real, far younger, smug self. His dark coat was fake too, hiding a white and black track suit underneath. The only thing that didn’t change was the Stabalist pin on his lapel.
“Go fuck yourself, you lying bastard,” Shady flipped the human off and marched back into the gate into Skyfall.
The fake teacher wasn’t her problem.
All of her thoughts now existing only for one person, one mission, one half-baked plan… to find her way back to Zexxia, to use the invented Mothman to get back… back home to her Ash.