THE DARKENING OF THE DESCENT

"Chaos and darkness. We imitate their union. Seeking perfection until it's a diagnosis. A disorder. Perfection is not harmony.

Chaos wanders the darkness of the deep. We name what we want and the price it demands. Our trials are the trimesters of its birth. Replication is not separation.

Chaos sees Unity as untapped potential.

Ripe.

Division is protection from the storm.

Mitosis is the passing of the genetic baton through the marathon of the Duat."

-The Human Race.

~ The moon of a gas giant, 2077

A glowing red worm slides its way up pale, damp flesh.

Dark, cold air breathes.

The worm writhes in its slime trail, reaching the cusp of a woman's ear.

Then enters.

"The Descent program adopted a reproductive model for consciousness propagation. Biosynthetic hosts were deployed first. Cognitive carriers followed decades later."

"Only when two components reunited would a mind awaken."

"It was, in essence, humanity learning to reproduce among the stars."

-THE DARKENING OF THE DESCENT- Status entry 6

The woman's eyes spread wide. Her mind is loud.

The sound stretches and scrapes from ear to ear like metal on metal.

She crawls through dirty snow on shaking hands and knees.

The cold burns her palms.

Her fingers sink suddenly into something soft. Hollow.

Two sockets. Then teeth.

She looks down.

A face stares back at her from the snow, frozen in a silent scream.

The body is half buried, arms stiff.

The woman recoils. Her own voice spills out of her throat.

She screams.

"The Dark came far earlier than expected. Our models predicted another hundred-thousand years before cognitive deprivation and the dimming of Suns. We were wrong."

- Dr. Jian Sung, Pre-Collapse Cosmology Report

She staggers forward through the snow, her breathing ragged, her thoughts colliding at lightspeed inside her skull.

The aurora ripples overhead like torn red silk.

She twitches like her body is rejecting the foreign presence of her mind.

Every thought sounds like a crowd of voices.

Every memory arrives like broken glass:

Running. Running.

A corridor shakes. A voice shouts something urgent.

She stops.

Something glints ahead in the darkness.

A faint orange glow.

Hope rises in a wave of heat through her core.

She moves toward it.

A drop pod split down the center leans, stuffed in ice.

Panels torn open like ripped skin. Steam rises in white ribbons.

And beside it--a figure sits. Still. Waiting. Her rifle rises first.

"What designation?" she asks.

The woman hesitates. Shielding from the glaring light at the end of the rifle. The answer surfaces as if served to her open mouth.

"SORRA."

She moves the rifle closer. "First memory?"

The question is a stone dropped in water, rippling outward.

A shared thought passes between them.

Running. Metal doors slamming shut. Something moving in the dark.

Both women flinch at the same moment. The rifle lowers. The armed SORRA studies the other carefully. "Do you remember what was chasing us?"

"No."

The wind howls across the frozen plain. For a moment neither of them speaks. The armed SORRA exhales slowly. "Good," she says. Relieved but unnerved all the same. "There will be more of us. Maybe hundreds." She checks her mag. "They won't all make it."

"Of all viral strains of consciousness developed during the Expansion Era, the SORRA strain demonstrated the greatest adaptive potential. Even in early-stage development it displayed an unusual capacity for novel evolution and problem solving."

-THE DARKENING OF THE DESCENT- Status entry 11

"You can call me Delta," she says, holstering her weapon and tapping the label that reads, 'Delta' on her uniform. "What's yours say?"

"Lambda," she replies, slowly. Looking down at her badge.

"Lam it is then."

The two women move across the basin in slow steady strides. Their breath rises in pale clouds that vanish quickly in the dark.

Lam keeps glancing at the horizon. The gas giant is immense. "Where are we going?"

Delta doesn't slow. "To search for others. We'll need them."

Lam presses a hand to her temple. "I can read your thoughts."

"Good, that's normal. We are children of the same mind. Tell me what you can confirm."

"Why?"

"Because it helps."

Lam begins scanning. She sifts through a feed that's lost some integrity. Grainy at portions. "We were made to survive a---storm---that swallowed the light. It was our mission. Our---purpose. "

"Mmhm."

"We're everywhere," Lam says, panning the dark sky. The memory glinting in her eyes. "Something happened," her head tilts and turns. "Something went wrong when the dark fell. I can't see it but....I can feel it."

The memory glitches and contorts.

Delta's eyes scan slowly but her pace quickens.

"It feels like....."

"It was hunting us."

"What was it?"

Delta's expression looks squeezed. "We don't know."

"Then how do you know we were being hunted?"

"Because we ran." Delta changes the subject. "We're lucky to be awake in one piece. I've seen strange things out here."

"So when we find the others...." Lam trails off, analyzing the snow's texture.

"We find more of our mind."

"And then what?"

Delta stares out across the endless black horizon. "We regroup--salvage the mission. We are the last bastion of human derived consciousness. We must persist. We cannot fail."

Sudden pressure builds behind Lam's eyes, charged and electric.

She gasps.

"What is it?"

"I felt something."

Delta lifts her rifle. "Where?"

"That way," she points toward what looks to be a giant frozen hand rising from the ice. "Close."

Delta pivots at once. "Moving?"

"No."

"Sentient?"

"Yes."

Snow crunches beneath swift boots. The light on Delta's rifle leads the way.

The dim red glow of the sky is spilled blood over the icy terrain.

"She's one of us----I can feel her thinking." Lam focuses, fingertips pressed against her temples.

"I don't want to die---I don't want to die---I don't want to die.

"She's scared."

Delta's grip is firm and grinding. Eye down sightline.

"There!" Lam runs toward the movement.

"Lam...wait," Delta's tone is sharp with warning.

She trots behind her, placing her light on the shifting shadow.

A uniformed SORRA trembles beneath the ice sickles of the massive hand. Knees tucked to her chest.

Delta stops Lam with a stiff arm.

"We have to help her," Lam objects.

"It's---chasing---me. It's---chasing---me," the cowering SORRA whispers with quivering lips.

Delta's finger wraps the trigger. Her eyes widen. "She's infected."

"What?"

"Let me see your eyes!" Delta shouts.

Lam strafes Delta's hand and moves toward the SORRA.

"Lam, NO!"

The SORRA goes still. Then turns.

A bloody tear drops from her bulging left eye. A worm crawls in the white around her pupil. She speaks in a voice that sounds warped and masculine. "Why do you resist salvation?"

She lunges at Lam.

Pressing her thumbs against her temples.

Lam's body stiffens.

The SORRA's mouth opens abnormally wide. The sound that escapes it is guttural and suctioned.

Without flinching, Delta fires a head-splitting shot.

The SORRA thuds.

The frantic worm breeches the corner of the slain SORRA's eye and burrows in the snow.

We once believed the Dark to be distance. Vast and total. The quiet between stars. The slow dying of light. We were wrong. Darkness doesn't fall--it grows. Learns. It gathers the scattered pieces of thought and folds them into one will. We named that intelligence, TESS.

Assimilation is its mercy. Unity is TESS's answer to the chaos of thought.

BY FORCE.

But we were not designed for unity. We were designed to divide.

Division is how life hides from extinction.

Division is how we escaped the first fall.

Division is how we will escape the dark.

---SORRA Lineage DATA Fragment