Isle Unto Thyself

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Isle Unto Thyself

There was no grand entry this time, no great crash to signal that Madden, Ra, and Barlowe had stopped their descent. They simply felt the Serpent's might — its will, hellbent on banishing them from its Library — relax its grip and let them go, ceasing their fall and allowing their souls to breathe. They could open their eyes, now — but the second they did, they regretted their decision.

All around them, the world was dying.

The void that surrounded them in every direction was great beyond reason, a terrible, dark place where no stars still lived. In the distance, Robert could see a few irreal pulsars breathing their final breaths, their lights almost a mockery of hope. Between them, in the empty space that was everything here, there sat many things, nonsensical things: leftovers of reason, the remnants scattered all across this parody of cosmos. A loose photo depicting a smiling woman; the hopes and dreams of a fleeting artist, their hard work unrequited by applause; a single loose sock, still dirty despite the concept having vanished millennia ago in this reality; the soul of a planet beyond redemption, its final cries of unfulfilled lives nothing but a silent echo in the universe.

Madden blinked, and realized that what he was looking at was a rotting, cosmic corpse, seen from the perspective of a human maggot too small to comprehend it. All around them were the last remnants of what had once used to be a world, the tranquility of its alien nature making it almost incomprehensible. And in the middle of it they stood, half-levitating in a grotesque parody of no-gravity; still alive and capable of movement, but too far to reach any of the remnants of reality blinking in and out of existence around them, too far to do anything but lay down and observe the rot consume the universe whole.

They were stuck in a place without even the concepts of entry or exit still existing.

Robert looked at Ann, then and Ra. None of them needed to speak to know why the Serpent chose to send them here to get rid of them.

Barlowe was the first to speak. "Wh-What do we do?" She looked at Madden, genuine fear in her eyes.

"I don't…" He closed his eyes and shook his head, turning to face Ra. "Ra. Can you sense 6172's signal? Or… any signal, really."

"No."

"What do you mean, no?" Barlowe said, her voice bordering on trembling. "What the hell do you mean, no?!" She was shouting, now, the echo making reality around them reverberate with a faint whisper of power. A whisper great enough to come back as distorted audio, but far too small to actually bend the world to Ann's will.

"I'm sorry, Ann." Ra said, changing the display of her head monitor from a smiley face to a neutral-tempered one. "As far as I can tell, there isn't a single detectable signal left within my range."

Ann didn't look at Ra. "Your range being…?"

"Twenty thousand kilometers."

"No. No, no, no." Barlowe shook her head, quickly turning to look at the void around her. As far as she could see, there was nothing she could grasp onto, nothing that could be of use — just a great expanse of surreal technicolor, a void without as little as reason left inside it. She tried moving forward, in some vague hope of getting anywhere, but even though her limbs moved, her position relative to the rest of the void didn't change. She barely resisted the urge to scream in frustration. "Do it again. Try it. There's gotta be some—"

"I'm sorry, Ann," Ra repeated, her tone similarly flat.

"Then try heat signatures," Barlowe continued, gesticulating frantically, as if trying to propel herself through non-reality — an obviously futile task. "EVE imprints. Thaumic footprints. Fuck's sake!" She turned again to face Ra, her features as cold and firm as stone. "Do something!"

"Okay." For a few seconds, Ra didn't speak. When she did, though, her words hit Ann like a sledgehammer. "All of my sensors tell me that we are the only humans present in the entirety of this universe."

"Fuck you," Ann spat out. "Fuck. You. That's not—"

"Ann," Robert said calmly.

"There has to be—"

"Ann."

"We can't just—"

"Ann!" Robert shouted, sudden anger twisting his face. He snapped his fingers, making Barlowe look at him. "Focus for a second. This is reality. How do we deal with it?"

"I'm afraid we don't, Ra said.

Madden faced to look at her. "What the hell do you mean?"

"This world is extremely unstable. It's unlike anything I've ever seen." She paused. "The Hume fields and Scranton waves are all over the place. The thaumo-ontokinetic register is way over twenty."

Robert lifted his eyebrows. Ann just furrowed hers. "In normal terms?"

"It means that this universe isn't real, strictly speaking," Madden said, worry entering his face. "It fades in and out of existence so quickly we can't perceive it. This… This world isn't really compatible with us, Ann."

"What?"

"It… The frequency, let's call it, that it exists on isn't like the one found in our universe. Or the universes neighboring it. We're… We're so far out on the Compass, so near the border of what we should be able to perceive, that we just…" He made a 'poof' sound with his mouth. "We can exist here, but only barely. Whatever happened here, whatever made this whole place look like this—" He waved around them with his hands, not really pointing at anything. "—it took down the stability that anchored this reality to our multiverse. And now, after thousands of years of being adrift, it's just… no longer our world."

It took a moment for Ann to speak. "And what does that mean for us?"

Robert sighed heavily. "It means that, without something outside this reality to take us home, we cannot leave it by any native structure, anomalous or otherwise."

Ann blinked twice. The realization was starting to dawn on her. "Oh god. Oh god. Oh—"

"Barlowe!" Robert snapped his fingers. "Focus. What do we do? There has to be something we haven't thought about."

"I don't— You're the scientist!" she shouted, looking first at Madden, then at Ra.

Robert sighed. "Ra?"

Ra tilted her head. "Well… There is still the matter of Ann's alchemy. Can you sense the Great Seal existing here?"

Ann closed her eyes, trying to focus on the reality around her. There was something there, something vague — but only barely. It was clear that without the Foundation — or any other organization, for that matter — still being around in this world, there was no force to contain the alchemical forces of reality with the Seal or a similar construct. For what little it was worth, Barlowe was free to bend the universe however she pleased here — but there was almost no universe left to bend. The only thing in between those lost dreams and stranded hopes were a few lost particles, left wandering across endless space. Too little to amount to anything — and far too little for Barlowe to use them in any way that mattered.

She could sense and touch them, just like in the two other Seal-less realities that they had visited, but she couldn't use them to construct even a simple flame. They were just castaways from reason, a few lost bits and bobs against the otherwise hegemonic cosmic background.

"I… There isn't anything left. It's…" She struggled to find words. "It's like trying to hold onto sand. I just…" She didn't finish.

After a moment, Robert said, "So, I'll ask again: with my science and Ann's alchemy rendered useless, what do we actually do?" For the situation they were in his tone was shockingly calm, almost as if he let his logic entirely override the rest of his body in some drastic attempt to not let the panic get to him.

Ra looked at him, shifting her monitor to display nothing. "I don't know."

"I am not going to die here," Ann said, focusing all of herself at the end of her fingertips. They did not start to glow. "You heard that? Not here. Not like this. I—"

She grabbed all of her will, all of that unbent, marble-like soul that had persisted unbroken for decades, and pushed it to the edge of her cognition, where her skill in alchemy lay. She pushed it until she ran out of breath, exhaustion beginning to enter her body and mind. When she opened her eyes again, though, she found that she had achieved nothing. Not even a single spark manifested atop her hand.

She didn't have the strength to shout.

Robert looked at Ra, then at Ann. He didn't say anything.

"So this is it, then," Ra said slowly, as if carefully choosing her words.

"Don't say that," Ann said, weakly. She didn't meet the android's eyes.

An imitation of a sigh left Ra's body.

"Well." Robert took off his glasses, trying to wipe off the dust still present on them from the last dimension with his shirt. It was a meaningless gesture — it only made the situation worse — but he didn't really care. He just gave all of himself into the almost mechanical action, as if it was the only thing still left for him to do in the whole world. When he finished he put them back on, and continued, "Yes. I suppose that it is it, then."

This time, Ann didn't find a reply.

They didn't speak for a while, after those words.

None of them had it in them to really talk. They simply drifted through non-space, left to their own thoughts, as an occasional extra-dimensional beam of energy or chaotic wave made its way past them. They noticed them, but didn't act upon the realization — they knew it would be of no use anyway.

They all had thought that words had little meaning, even back in their world, so here? Here, where such a thing as meaning didn't even exist anymore, words were little more than just tears lost in the rain, a whisper begging for relevance against an endlessly uncaring and cold void. Even the few last sparks of cohesion left in the whole world — a few distant flickers of stars long-dead and a few items that had since lost even their own definitions — they remained unmoved by Ann, Robert, and Ra's fate. No words — not mortal, not that of gods — could ever change that.

So instead of wasting breath (not that this world needed breath, anyway, having nothing else to do, the three gave in to their thoughts.

Ra remembered her birth. Well. 'Birth' wasn't perhaps the best word.

In spite of her creation not being biological, just like any other artificial intelligence developed by the late Foundation, she had always remembered the moment she came to be. She could still recall that sudden hope, that sudden spark that made itself manifest in an otherwise uninhabited body made from wires and processors. Snap. And then, with just a flick of a button, there she was. Like a lost soul rescued from the terrible fate of nonexistence, she began to live in a flash of light — light so great and overwhelmingly beautiful it would have made her weep tears of joy, had she been able to.

Looking at the stars dying light-years away from her and her companions, she figured that she would cease in a cascade of light, too.

Robert thought of his parents. He had never known them, not really. He didn't even have memories of them — they had perished in a car crash before he had even formed the skill to remember at all. It was a terrible thing, he had always thought, some cosmic joke, a mock of probability — it robbed him of a life he never really knew he wanted. But now, now that he was seconds away from facing the same fate as them — he wondered what it could've looked like, if they just survived. Would he still join the Foundation? Would his anomalous nature even develop at all, or was that just a by-product of chance, the universe somehow thinking that making him an avatar of anomalous probability would pay back for the fate it had woven for him, the moment it killed its parents?

And, if they lived, would he still end up here?

He figured he would never know.

Ann too didn't have any parents — whoever they were, they had left her at the doorstep of a Russian alchemist before she was even able to speak — but in her final moments, she didn't think of them. Instead, she remembered her cats — a trio of orange alleys, a mischievous bunch of misfits she'd found during her first visit to Esterberg. They had always been just like her, she had always thought, both red-colored and unwanted by the world, both willing to make their own way through a universe that didn't care. And now too were they just like her — stranded without anyone to care for them, a few loose creatures soon to be forgotten by both history and the world.

Left to be too insignificant for anyone to notice. Just like Ann. Just like the particles all around them, and—

Suddenly, a thought came to Ann. A thought so bright it nearly made her shout in joyous realization.

Barlowe wanted to scream with joy, the second she came to know what she needed to do. She wanted to tell her companions about what she had just realized, to bring that final spark of hope into their lives. But she knew she had no time or energy for such nonsense if she wanted her gambit to succeed.

So instead, she got to work.

Gently, like a mother touching her newborn baby, Ann felt the particles of the world once more. That almost cosmic consciousness of matter, of the Aethers around her, came to her in an instant. Once again she saw that they were fragile and little, far too insignificant to actually amount to anything, even in the hands of an Artist as skilled as her. But now she knew that she didn't need them. In a world like this, where there was virtually no limit to her skills, no Seals to dampen her range down, no outside influences or structures that could disrupt the flow of energy through the universe, she could do so much more than anywhere else.

Within just a second, she realized that here, the universe was her canvas — and she sure as hell held the brush.

It was in her fingers, in her hands, in her whole bloody body — she could feel it all, now, everything about the world that entombed her. Her whole soul, her whole mind, her whole body; they all became little more than conduits for the universe around her, bringing every particle and energy that could have ever existed into her palms. No matter where they were, no matter how afar on the spectrums of range or immateriality — Ann could touch them all now, tapping into that cosmic background that held an irreal soup of what once used to be a universe.

With a firm hand she grabbed that background and took it, then took some more, until she couldn't just feel it — she was the universe, now. With no bounds to hold her down Ann was perfectly in tune with the cosmos around her, freely capable of picking and choosing whatever part of it she wanted to manipulate — an island to herself, a single point of reason amongst a raging sea of chaos. But she only needed one part of it — one very, very specific part of it. So she focused all her attention on finding her desired element, pushing all parts of her that were still Ann Barlowe in desperate pursuit of her final hope.

An infinitesimal moment later, she found it.

Buried somewhere behind all of that cosmic junk, behind the leftovers of a universe that once was — she found the final, barely-lingering sparks of this universe's SCP-6172 energies. Their own portal — the one back home, the one that had brought them all into this nonsense in the first place — was flawed, but it fulfilled one of its functions well: no matter where they landed, they couldn't possibly connect to a world that didn't also have its own version of the device. And even here, even at the edge of the multiverse and at the edge of reason — even here, she could sense what had remained of this world's portal, a half-pathetic mix of energies left somewhere in this universal soup.

So she took it, molding it to her will.

Putting all of her into the task she took the energy of the portal — its alchemical essence, the very metaphysical being of what it was — and shaped it until she recreated the hole in reality which the device had been created to form. She took the Aethers of other forces — steel, power, electricity, and wind — and put them into her construct, embuing it with alchemical stability so that it wouldn't just disappear the moment she let go. And indeed it didn't — the way remained there, a leak in the otherwise impenetrable fabric of reality, allowing them all entry into the rest of the multiverse.

Without further hesitation, Ann made all three fall through the hole, throwing them into the impossibly vast nexus of what lay between realities until she could feel that part of the multiverse, too.

With a force she didn't know she was capable of wielding she bent the multiverse itself to her will, subjugating it to her own desires and likings, and in that moment she told it just a single thing, a single whisper into its otherwise cold and uncaring ear. She told her to take them home, redirecting the beam of non-energy that they had traversed into the reality that matched them, still bending the structures that upheld this Multiversal Compass with her very own hands.

The second she felt they were close, the second she sensed they were entering their own dimension, she flicked a finger, and closed the gateway behind them, once again making the world which they had just left a prison to itself.

Having no other choice but to listen, the jaws of the Rat snapped shut.