Sparks

    Ring Diving

    A game of ring diving was always more than a careless diversion for Poe.  Diving was a way of life, a need.  She would often challenge Sid to a game in order to show off her agile skills with her stat.  Not that Sid wasn’t skilled with his, but Poe had a passion for gliding long and falling fast.  Sid was just a bit more cautious.    The thrill of coming closer and closer to the vacuum of the center thrilled her. Poe was more wreckless by her very nature.   A good dive for Poe could mean as much as a loop-de-loop through three rings with a roll around the first.  Poe would brag about the bright red of the first ring, sparkling with pure star fire.   Sid never dove within the perimeter of the first ring, he could barely hold on against the pull of the center from the second one.  But he had to admit, there was a calm that would wash over him after a dive.  The instant before the loop filled Sid with nausea but he knew no greater peace than after the vacuum of the center had pulled static from off his body.   Sparks call it the afterrush.  
    Poe was one ring closer to the center.  She hopped up to Sid’s ring to gibe him.  Not one to refuse a challenge, Sid prepared to dive. Poe watched from across the ring as he accelerated, skimming the rim of the ring on his stat. Sid was a powerful looking spark for his youth.  He rode his stat with a skill beyond his cycles.  The three orbs that formed his body were well proportioned radiant spheres that glowed orange through the thin translucent skin of his dermis.  His bottom orb was slightly larger than the middle orb above it, which in turn was smaller than the top orb of his body.  The effect was a handsome concave torso with two slender limbs stretching out from the sides of his top orb.  Sid usually maintained these dendrites as sleek single threads.  Older sparks like Poe were more agitable and often flared their dendrites into bolts with many mini-tentacles bursting from their primary limbs.  Above the top orb of Sid’s body, lifted on a thin translucent neck of dermis, Sid’s small head orb fuzzed as his face furrowed with concentration.  Above his head orb, a diadem of sparks flurried vivid orange to form a spiky crown.
    Sid shifted the weight of his bottom orb against the quark, the seat separating him from his stat, to maneuver into position for his dive.  His stat was spinning so fast that it vibrated through the quark, reverberating up through his bottom orb and causing his dermis to jiggle ever so subtly all the way out to the farthest tips of his limbs.
    Sparkles of light sprayed in his wake.  He made a few wind up hops that tilted the ring. He used its return jounce to propel him toward the center. Graceful as ever, Poe charmed her quark to rock with the rebound of the ring.  Sid leapt just outside the circumference of the next ring, then rushed past Poe in his descent. His dive was wide and had taken him well outside Poe’s plane of orbit.  She admired the way he elongated his orb stack in the drop, but then tightened nearly into a coil to take the inside turn.   Settling down on the backside of the dive, he tapped his stat onto the ring that Poe had come from with a flourish.
    Sid gazed across the spance of the only world he’d ever known.  It was a landscape that gave him a sense of comfort.  He and his sibling sparks cohabitated in a world of five rings.  In truth though, it was more like three since no one could ride the ring closest to the center and the static that radiated off the mesh of strings that enclosed them was far too unpleasantly charged to really enjoy riding the farthest ring.  So most sparks swapped around with their siblings hopping from ring to ring within the middle.
    The space between the rings grew wider as the concentric bands rippled out from the center.  Between the farthest ring and the zonule one band in stretched a dark space perhaps two thousand orb stacks of a spark’s body long.  For the most part, the rings extended in a single plane out from the nucleus but given enough of a nudge they could be tilted noticeably. Ring tilting was occasionally amusing for young sparks like Poe and Sid’s little sister Ivy. Usually before they were old enough to know the joys of an afterrush.   Once a spark learned to dive, ring-tilting quickly became one more technique in the diving game.    
    Sid watched Poe with the admiration of a younger sibling.  She burned vivid red as compared to his youthful orange.  Her orb stack tapered upward, her roundedness accentuated at her bottom.  Despite her sleek femininity, Sid knew never to underestimate her.  Her physical grace was supple but her intensity burned hot and potent.  Poe’s risk-taking energized her all the more.  Every time she took a tight roll around a ring she would gather the energy and momentum to take audacious dives, rolling around the first ring so close that sparks from her crown would cascade into the center.  She would emerge defrazzled, refined to imbibe fresh energy.  Rejuvenated.  Some day, Sid too would be able to ride like Poe.
    Poe could still remember Sid floating around the far ring, trying to gather up the orb stack of his body from the yellow ether. She mused back to when she’d first noticed that Sid’s orbs had begun to gather an orangish hue and his stat generate a rideable spin intensity.  That was before her oldest sibling Abe had taken his last dive. Just before Ivy was born.
    Ivy was a young spark freshly born from the center ether. Barely yellow, she’d only recently collected her orbs together.  Her ride was clumsy and rigid but at least she’d learned to accelerate, brake and reverse.  A stat can feel like an alien appendage for a young spark.  In the excitment of adolescence a stat warming up can really seem to have a mind of its own sometimes.
    Ivy revved her stat and slid along the band of the ring for an arch preparing for a jump to the next ring but spun out at the last moment.  Her limbs flailed as she tried to right herself out of spirals around the ring.  She whipped around frantically trying to keep her stat set on the ring.  At least she’d managed to stay on, she thought.  
    Poe rounded the adjacent ring. “Give it another try,” She zapped.  “I’ll throw you a dendrite if I need to.”  She extended a long limb from the shoulder under her top orb to show that she could catch Ivy if Ivy missed.  Poe’s face flared in the thin dermis of her small top orb.  Ivy couldn’t say no to a face like that.  She used the fading momentum of her spiral to right herself confidently then made a clean arc before jumping.  For an instant, her aim had seemed just right but then the pull of the center took her in its undertow.  
    She hadn’t accounted for the change in the force of the vacuum between rings.  It rended her and pulled her off her curve.  Seeing Ivy fall out of Poe’s reach, Sid dove. He spread his limbs wide and let the gap between orbs strech so his dermis expanded into a thin membrane illuminated by the solid glow of his orbs.  He grabbed her by the tip of a dendrite, then threw her back.  She tried to whip her top orb around to see her original ring approaching but ended up thrashing herself off course. She missed her ring and spun out into the static backfield of the strings.   
    She got hit with a nasty blast by the strings.  It zapped the flux out of her.  The painful instant lasted an eternity.  She spasmed and with a jolt of her stat launched herself back toward the rings. Across the gulf of the atmosphere she had plenty of space to slow down.  Gliding unpropelled, she easily settled back onto her favorite ring.  “Blasted things,” Ivy cursed.  Poe acted the older sibling and corrected her, “If not for the strings, sparks would just tumble into forever before they could even collect together their light.”  Poe had seen the intensity with which a spark’s light is spit from the center during birth.  The birth blast ricochets off the strings then pools on a ring where it collects into a spark.  Poe smiled as she thought of Ivy’s birth. “Learn to ride before you dive, little spark,” Poe zapped.   
    A little shaken, and a tad fazed by Poe’s chiding, Ivy decided to just circle for a while and refuel.  For now, she would just watch Poe and Sid dive. Someday, Ivy thought, she would be the greatest diver of the circle, but for now she could only learn.

String Duels

    Gat had challenged Tevye to a string duel.  String duels were a regular amusement around this bunch.  Of course, no one knew what would really happen if someone ever cut through a string, but the promise of immortality to any spark who escaped the center was enough of a motivation to keep trying.  String duels were not pleasant either, often, after failed attempts, a spark would need to circle a ring for hundreds of stat revolutions in order to regain life light.  This time Gat plummeted toward a string, slashing at it with one masterful slice.   He had charged his dagger with as much ring juice as he could gather, causing the string to vibrate with a sharp pitch, echoing down the rings and causing the center to drum the sparks with a thud, propelling them all into the strings.   Tevye and Neya were able to regain control before slamming into the webbing, but Gat convulsed wildly trying to break free of the strings he had fallen into.  When Gat finally rose, he was as black as the Non.  Straightening his stat, he glid to a ring and circled it irritably.  Soon he had regained his indigal composure and his crown began to spark with fresh life.
    Now it was Tevye’s turn to charge at the strings.  Tevye never understood why he would bother, if Gat couldn’t cut the strings, why would anyone think that he could.  Rather than be ridiculed however, he would accept the duel and take his charge.  Tevye mustered all his strength, the dagger at the end of his arm stretched out like a bolt of green lightning; and through sheer will, he charged at the strings.   The whirl of his stat spun under him as he raced toward the strings.  He stretched out his bolt as he slashed blindly at the strings.  He could feel the impact all through him, a black wall slamming him fluxless.  In a flash he was struggling against the strings, draining of life.  He broke free and fell inward.  It seemed he would get sucked straight in to the center if he hadn’t risen when he did.  Black as the Non, still clinging to his stat, he let the undercurrent pull him to the third ring.
    ”Real great game you’ve got here, Gat,” Tevye grumbled.  Tevye’s zap was so weak that Gat couldn’t make out what he’d said. Gat nodded his top orb partronizingly.
    ”You barely made the strings so much as tremble, little streak.”
    Tevye had gotten quite sick of this sort of ridicule from Gat, but he was so weak that even the tiny bit of energy he’d gotten from Gat’s zap had made him feel better.  Soon enough Tevye regained his green tone and turned his attentions to his sibling, Neya.   “Why don’t you try it, Neya?”
    ”Maybe she’ll have better luck than you, little streak,” zapped Gat sharply.
    Neya attempted to intercept their dialogue, she hated the way they would always be zapping at one another and leave her out of conversations. Gat’s attitude towards both of them always angered her.  The only time he ever talked to either of them was to give them grief, or call Tevye green. She hated always being stuck in the middle between them.  Finally, frustrated, she suggests that Gat just go and slam a Hotspot.  “You’re too awkward to break the strings with force.”  She continues.  “Remember our late sister Connie?  She didn’t just charge ahead like a bully like you do.  She was graceful. She didn’t always talk down to us.  She was even nice to you!  Connie
could make the strings resonate like a chorus… it was beautiful to
listen to and the harmonic would part the strings nearly wide enough to
escape.  You are a constant cacophony, and just mean.  I miss her.”
    “Exactly, see where her harmony got her?  She got pulled into the center just like every other spark.”
    “At least she lived well.”  Gat was trying to come up with a response when he found himself thinking about hotspots.  Perhaps it was time for him to take that step.  Hotspots were balls of star fire formed from extra juice that collected
on the strings. Sparks with the fever for forever often slammed
hotspots to get enough power to pose a real challenge to the strings. 
Gat’s sister Connie had warned him that most of the sparks who slam
hotspots burn too hot then rush to meet the Non to make it quit but Gat
believed in the legends that slammed hotspots and lived.

    Gat had wondered about a strange snap in the distance and the twang in the string. From the horizon a pinch in the strings, covered by chrome, arose on the line like the rise of a hotspot.  For a moment, Gat wondered if this was too synchronistic to ignore. Like destiny.  But hotspots were different. This chrome sky was something altogether other, like a baroque disk.  It was as if a sheet of silver had pressed itself into the strings and broken or bent through.  He didn’t know what this chrome sky was, but he didn’t care.  It looked like a way out of the strings.  With immortality on the horizon he would take the dive.  He prepared his blade and his stat, dove straight at the knot, and swung.  It shivered with a ripple and swallowed him whole.  Gat melted into the chrome and sped off through a maze of turns and colors in tunnels.  Tevye and Neya thought, and double thought, the chrome was nearing the far horizon. The time for thinking was up.  They dove.

    Poe had maneuvered herself into position to take another dive
at the first ring.  Just as she began her descent, the skies shook, the
strings strung.  A sheet of chrome spread over the string sky, melting
into the strings, keeping out the dark howling emptiness of forever
beyond the strings. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Poe zapped.  
  
 The chrome sheet pressed into their world until the strings began to
bend inward, convex  to concave.  It pressed on to the sphere from
somewhere outside.  Poe feared the outside and the forever with a
sickness inside.   Slowly the strings spun along the skyline until the
horizon had past.
    Poe felt a pain in her middle, her Other had run.  She dove for the center, she did not meet the Non.  The pull inside the first ring was so weak she couldn’t feel it at all.  She emerged as she’d entered.  Ivy asked, “Poe, you alright?”
    ”The strings have been broken, my Other is out,” zapped Poe
    ”How do you know?” asked Ivy.
    ”I feel sick with forever, and the center wouldn’t even take me when I gave up.  Can’t you feel it?”
    ”I don’t feel right, but I didn’t know what to think,” Ivy answered.
    ”We have to break the strings and find our Others or we’ll never meet the Non.” It took a dozen revolutions of a stat’s gyre for the sparks to gather their courage and prepare to launch themselves into the strings.  Long enough for the chrome to reach their horizon.  It was actually Ivy who’d noticed the chrome appear again, and had cautioned Poe to wait for it.  As always, Poe was ready to take the dive no matter what the risk.   The three of them dove together.   They melted into the sheet fluid.  Static washed them, fed them, held them.  Tunnels extended of platinum, gold, silicone and copper woven into a complex labyrinth.
    Tevye was in range to zap at Gat; Tevye was quite proud of it as a matter of fact, small but quick.  Gat was not turning back.  Down the tunnel, ahead of Gat came balls of light different than the static that washed over the mercury substance of the tunnel.  Gat was going too quick, had he taken the time he probably would have slammed the balls of energy. But instead, he dove to avoid them.  Tevye had expected Gat to stand against the light. He was thrown off and ended up slamming one himself.  Voices, ringing, tingling voices.  Messenger probes of light.  It was all too much to understand.  The voices echoed then fizzled up. Tevye felt stronger, brighter.
    Balls of light came hurling toward Poe, she skidded to miss them, slamming against the tunnel wall.   “Dive,” Poe zapped after her. Ivy dove, missing all but an edge with her stat. Her stat jerked, convulsed, and she was thrown by it against the rubbery blackness containing the platinum tunnel.  Sid dove, dove clear, and the joggled ball, its angled trajectory careening, collided with him.  It hurt like a thousand overwhelming memories.  Jittering, shivering, Sid swooned.  More balls of light shot down the tunnel past them.   “What are they?”  zapped Ivy.
    Gat saw a new set of particles racing down the tunnel.  He placed himself in alignment, swelled his orbs just a bit, and awaited the impact.  The rush tingled so good.  He shivered with pleasure, voices echoed through his brain.  The voices were a series of  affirmations and cancellations, defining a subtle variation of a maybe reality.  The language of the messenger probes must be related to the likeliness of an event transpiring or expiring as the case may be, Gat reasoned.  The message trickled in, yes, no, yes no, yes, yes, yes.   Soon Gat began to translate the variations of maybe into nuances.  A message began to take shape.
    ”CONTAIN,” it said.
    Gat summoned his semantic skills, shuffled through his newly learned digital lexicon and zapped a message back to the source at the end of the tunnel.   “Contain what?”
    ”Contain,” came the redundant messenger probe reply.
    ”Contain what?”  Gat zapped.  This message seemed to travel slow, as if against friction, some kind of resistance.
    Dots of light came with the reply.   NASA plan Meet Aion//:  Input Error.  Unrecognized Command What: Repeat, Cancel, Ignore.
    ”Do not ignore, I asked you what are you trying to contain?”  zapped Gat.
    It became apparent to Gat that the messages were being relayed to a command center somewhere down the tunnel.  Soon came the response.  “Contain. Halt all processes.  Contain eAlpha, NASA plan Meet Aion.
    ”You will not contain me!”  Gat was irate, his message surged like a tempest down the tunnel.  Gat felt energy rushing hot through him from slamming all of the messenger probes.  The message will definately reach their command center now, Gat thought.
    ”Not contain error.  Violation article 397, not 0 is 1 not 0.
    Balls of light began to fly in a steady stream as thick as the tunnel.  The force became impenetrable, pushing all of the sparks back through the platinum passage.  Voices echoed.  Alien wails began to squeal.  Poe held fast but was forced to give.  Echoing denials, negatives, cancellations, no’s, no’s, no’s swirled in her brain.  
    ”Initiating alternative containment utilities.  Ports exit, system halt.  Analyze viral sectors, defense sequence initiate, hibernate.”    A new wave of light began to speed down the tunnel, Poe heard the message well.  “Yes, yes, yes, definitely yes.”   The force was too much to fight, Poe, Sid, and Ivy tumbled back through the tunnel toward the place from which they’d come. Sid was slammed by dozens of balls of light.  He was overwhelmed in an overload of energy.  Soon they could see the strings of their atmosphere approaching, pressed, pinched against the sheet of platinum tunnel that they were in. Sid was limp and unconscious, Ivy flailing her limbs.
    Neya, Gat, and Tevye came awash at an angle from Poe, Sid, and Ivy.  Apparently they’d each gone down tunnels at varying angles of the sphere. All six sparks stood upon the outside atmosphere of the world they’d always known. Poe was so woozy that she hardly realized she was face to face with her Other.  A marvel sparks only in legend had achieved.  They were all quickly being drawn into the Non.
    The magnitude of the situation was not lost on Gat.  A gel was oozing across the chrome retreat.  The choice was becoming evident, “You go back in, you go back to the narrow cycle.  You come with me, you ride into the legend of forever,” he zapped Neya and Tevye.   “Are you ready?”   He dove back into the tunnel.  Tevye followed, Neya was already on her way.
    Poe leapt at light speed when she realized her Other was getting away.  She spun to see her sibling sparks stalling as she flipped toward a flat metallic sheet barely wider than the length she could stretch with unpowered limbs. Sid was stricken as if paralyzed.  She was falling into the sheet now. “Dive!” Poe shouted.   “Hope for the Non is not lost if we follow our Others.” Flung by momentum she spun and dove, crown orb first. The chrome snapped free of the strings of their old atmosphere.
    Ivy grasped Sid by an orb and flung him ahead. With home drifting away into dark space, they dove for the metal. The cold darkness that stretched endless on the far side of the approaching substance was Ivy’s first taste of the fear of forever she’d suffered in her short existence.  As the sheet turned away, the horizon exposed a thick gel substance pooled against the chrome blanketing space as far as the dark showed. Ivy tried to hold Sid close as she descended, but the force of his radiance pushed against her. Her hold was slipping as his orbs rolled under her dendrite tips.  She managed to enter the metal of the sheet as if diving into a tunnel.  But Sid had dissappeared on the other side on the other side.
    The stretch of the strip was a single wide arc of a tunnel encapsulated on both sides by the gel.  In the distance ahead she could see Poe’s light.  She wanted to ride toward Poe but did not want to leave Sid on the other side.  She called to Poe across the chrome arc but her voice was weak. The fear of forever had paled the flux out of her. Poe’s red light grew. Relief settled over her when she realized that Poe was rapidly approaching.
    Poe sees that Ivy appears dim. Ivy slumps over the charmed quark at the front of the hadron cluster that hovers above the gyre of her stat.    Poe is learning more about her own makeup as she loses herself observing Ivy.  She realizes that a stat is actually the combination of the gyre and the hadron cluster that hovers above it.  The atomic bond between the hadron cluster and the gyre forces a short gap between the stat and the hadrons. The charmed quarks form a lever at the front of the hadron cluster. A spark maneuvers the wheel of a stat by shifting the pressure on the charmed quarks with their bottom orb.
    Apparently stats are more then just wheels, Poe notes. They are also generators. This darkness exposed the stat as never before.  The rings back home had always fueled the gyre at such an intensity that its radiance had been too bright to see the stat as it appeared in this darkness.   “It might be good to remember,” Poe zaps to Ivy,  “to remember that stats generate star juice.”  Ivy did not respond.  She looked petrified.
    It was only then that Poe realized that Sid was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Sid?”
    ”I don’t know.  I had him as we fell and then he slipped,” Ivy zaps with slow dread buzzing in her tone.
    ”Maybe he met the Non. We should go on without him.”
    ”He’s our brother,” zaps Ivy sharply.
    ”Well then, why don’t you spend your energy trying to find him.  I’m going to figure out how to get out of this tube.  You’re welcome to join me if you’d like.”    Poe collects a ball of static off her stat and slams the wall with it. The impact crackles like a whip and echoes.  The strings of static slither away from the point of impact.  As the echoes recede, a second sizzle whispers from the wall.  The fuzz is barely audible but has a timbre reminiscent of Sid’s voice.
    ”Poe, did you hear that?”
    ”Heard something.”
    ”It sounded like Sid.”   Ivy collects herself a ball of static and pitches it at the wall.
    ”Sid, are you in there?” she zaps.  Another whisper slithers from the wall. But then only a long and empty hush.
    Silence with a stat is the scratch of a knife honing in circles; passing.  Wheels fine as sharp blades spinning in cycles around, away from each other… several rings layered in orbits, spheroidal.  Poe watched the stat spin in the encapsulated darkness of the cell.  As the cycles spun, sparks flared between levels, a web of strands woven from nexus.  Every time the repulsive points in the rings of the stat would come across one another, a bolt would light across the spance and push the momentum of the intersecting blades in the opposite direction.  Perpetual motion through static repulsion that maintains a minimum of energy endlessly.
    An orange glow begins to bubble from the surface…the sound of knives sharpening scrapes faintly.  Sid’s stat had stopped spinning and flattened into two narrow, empty rings pressed tightly against the wall under the gel.  They’d blended with the metal in the darkness until the static animated them.  Slowly the gyros began to gyroscope. Sid oozed out of the wall. He clung to his stat, an insubstantial orange nebula.  Slowly his orb stack rounded and his aura returned. He stretched out his limbs as his crown sparked above his top orb.      

Living the Legend

    Tevya watches his stat spark with fascination.  Zapping at Gat about the silvery web glimmering inside.  He leans down, sticking his palm against the outer ring as a curious tickle runs up it.  He giggles and sparkles.   “Ahh, this sure feels nice,” he zaps at Gat.  Gat notices the dimness of Tevya’s complexion begin to fade.  Soon Tevye radiates green again.  “You know Gat, I kind of like being faded like that, it makes me feel woozy and delirious, it’s very relaxing.”
    ”We don’t have the option to relax,” zaps Gat sternly.   “Don’t  you see what this means?  It means all the legends are true, we can escape the Non.  We can live immortal.  We don’t  need to rely on the rings for power, it’s everywhere around us, we just have to tap it and let our stats generate star fire.  All we have to do is get out of this tube.”   Gat’s eyes dart maniacally around the cell.  Gat leans down, sweeping his palm across the outermost ring of his stat he collects a handful of static.  He cocks and throws, the ball of static surges with a hiss against the wall.  It slams flat and disperses in strings.  
    ”Spark, where in the Non are we?” Neya asks.
    ”It doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that we get as far away from our Others as possible?” Gat fizzed.
    ”Well, I think it would be useful to understand this place so that we can be a little more strategic about this.  What good does it do to just chase around without any plan?  You’ll end up running right into your Other, and where will that get you?” Neya zapped.
    Gat was losing his patience.  “Well, Neya, are you interested in living the legend or are you just going to piddle around until your Other finds you?”
    Rather than get into an argument with Gat, Neya calmed herself by slipping sparks from the outer ring of her stat and rubbing them on the derma of her top orb
    ”When you two are done wasting time you can find me.  I’m going exploring,” Gat zapped.
    ”Sure Gat, we’ll catch up,” zapped Tevye.  When Gat had glid off, Tevye fizzled, “He’s sure been sparkin’ me.  Glad to get a flash away from him.”
    ”That’s one good thing about this place over the rings,” answered Neya.
    ”I understand that he’s getting older and he’s anxious to break free and live forever… but we’ve got to think this through…I unterstand where he’s coming from, I just wish he’d give a charge about another spark’s ideas. You’ve got a point about strategizing.”
    Neya just zapped Tevye with a spark of affection and let it go.
    Gat glid smoothly for some time.  At one opening of the tunnel were a series of passages.  Each seemed blocked by either a black or a brown door.  There were maybe seven blocked tunnels all together.   Pressing against a brown one, Gat found that he could actually move through it, slowly.  It was not entirely a door as much as a passageway.  The push was not easygoing however.  Gat churned his shoulders ahead, his stat as propulsion.  The resistance had nearly worn him down when he broke through.  Tunnels stretched in branches.  The landscape seemed little different from before.  He chose a branch and continued.

Resistors

    
    Sid had weapt for some time after emerging from the wall.   “You can’t  imagine how it was Ivy.  All my light was dispersed, I could feel it but it all just hovered apart.  I thought I’d be trapped there forever…It seemed like it, like I was suspended in some terrible black isolation forever.”  Poe and Ivy zapped a deluge of comforting energy onto Sid to rejuvenate him.
    After Sid had begun to feel better, the three sparks explored together down the corridor.  Much of it was looped so they returned again to their point of origin several times.  They had not noticed at first but eventually Ivy had left residue balls of spark as landmarks.  After recovering the balls, Ivy had been able to convince Poe that they had to try something else.  Poe had not wanted to believe that they were in a loop.  She was a bit agitable.  
    ”Don’t  worry, we’ll find them,”  zapped Ivy at Poe.   “They’re probably just stuck in a loop like we are.”
    ”How are we going to get into their loop if we can’teven get out of ours?”
    ”I don’t  know, just don’t get all charged up,”  zapped Ivy.  She did not conceal her agitation.  Ivy understood that Poe was older and not far now from needing the Non, but Ivy was still young, Sid too.  They weren’t in any kind of hurry to go racing toward extinction.  Ivy tailed off their troop, contemplating possibilities.  She wondered if there had ever been a case in the history of their race when one spark had actually contrived the premature departure of a fellow spark.  A well-timed push during a dive, let’s say…   
    
“We’ve got to try something else,” zaps Poe.  She slumps over her stat, her eyes scanning, her bottom orb set on the charmed quarks that constitute the steering column.  The tube around the sparks is a silvery grey substance that their bodies melt through as they move.  A lining of black coating seals them in.  Rubbing against the sides feels springy like bumping against the strings back home.  Poe remembers angles in the loop where their passage had lacked the coating.  She straighens and rides, “Come on!” she zaps, almost as an after-thought.  
    
At a crossing she notes a golden blotch like a triangular corner to the tube.  She had not thought of it when they had passed it previously.  She pauses before the golden triangle.  With a swipe she rides for the corner.  She prepares to pull up hard, suddenly doubtful, then falls into the corner as if through the vacuum in the tail of a hotspot.  She emerges in a tube little different from the previous silver tunnel.  Many clusters of gold triangles sparkle on its periphery.  She feels charged at the possibilities.  Sid emerges, then Ivy.  The three contemplate their course.  Undecided, Poe simply takes a dive, she slips through the gold smoothly.  The other side opens up.  Looking back she sees that all of the triangles emerge parallel to their connection on the other side.  She darts back through, bumping into Ivy inside the gold.  They repel each other with a spark.  Poe zaps Ivy, “Stay over there, I just want to know if a zap can make it through.”   Ivy turns back and waits for Poe’s transmission.   “Can you hear me?”  Poe calls.
    
“Clear as color.”  Ivy shouts back.
    
“Come on over, all the passages lead to the same place.”    Now they are faced with new choices.  A matrix of connections adjoins their location.   The room they are in has eight corners and a domed ceiling.  Different colors and substances spindle connections into their enclave.  Silver bubbles speckle the wall, brown circles are set in to the coating, gold triangles attach at corners.   Ivy rides against a silver bubble.  A charge washes over her, tingly.  Poe presses against a brown circle and finds that she can melt into it, coarsely.  
    
“Hey check this out,”  Poe zaps.  “The path of highest resistance is sure to be the road to greatest fulfillment.”
    
“Where did you pull that out of?” asks Sid.
    
“Don’t you think it’s true?”
    
“Well, sure maybe,” answers Sid.
    
“My older brother Sol used to talk that way.  I must have heard him say something like that.”
    
“He sounds like a wise spark.  I wish I could’ve met him,” zaps Ivy.
    
“You are Sol little streak,” sparkles Poe.   Someday you may be just like him.”       
    ”Yeah,” zaps Sid.   “Old brother Sol.  I hardly remember him.  I was so young when he took his last dive.”   Sid glides up to feel the brown door. He presses against it lightly, it doesn’t  give.  He presses harder, nothing.  He glides his stat around then lunges against the door.  He hits it at full speed with little result.  At most, he may have gotten a shoulder lodged into the grit.  Embarassed, he floats away.
   

Living the Legend

They had let Gat get a good distance before they got bored and decided to catch up.  Melting through silver they make their way toward a row of black and brown doors.  No sign of Gat anywhere, they glide circles through the silver.  Tevya presses against a door with all of his strength, it feels gritty as it slides around him.  “He must have gone into one of these.”
    
“But which one?”
    
“That is a good question.”   Tevye tries a black door.  It pushes back against him harder than the first, coarser.  Static residue washes over him.  He goes to the next, again the resistance seems impenetrable, again static bathes his body.  Neya is trying to press into the first one, with no impact.  
    
“The resistance is too high,”  Neya zaps.  Tevye wheels around facing her.  
    
“He went down that one,”  zaps Tevye.
    
“How do you know?”
    
“Because he absorbed all the residue on his way through.  The rest of them are charged except this one.”
    
“I’ll never get through this.”   Neya’s voice frizzed with self doubt.  
    
“We’ll push through it together.  You push me, I’ll push the door…ready?”
 
Tevye places a shoulder on the door, angles his stat at a perpendicular to the passage and grinds into the grit.  Neya grasps the hadron seat of Tevye’s stat, lifts her stat parallel to his, and forces her strength into the task.  Soon they are both emersed in brown grit.  It scratches at their energy, sliding inside of them uncomfortably.  Slowly, they melt through the brown passage.
    
Meanwhile, Gat had made speed through silver.  Weaving his way instinctively through the labyrinthine entanglement of passageways.   Darting into connections between tunnels, his subconscious directing his course.  He stood at the end of the tunnel, before him an enormous orange bubble bloated from the wall.  There seemed no other route, and Gat did not care to ponder it.  With a wild leap he was falling through the orb.  Static soaked him with marvelous power.  Below him as he fell was an orange aperture.  He dove into it with a swish.  The tube wrapped in coils around a black center.  He spun around the center, emersed in a wash of power.  
    As he wove circles, soaking up energy as if he were swallowing hotspots, he felt a tension in his equilibrium.  The black center was pulling at him.  It filled him with the fear of the Non.  The pull seemed reminiscent of only one force, the force of the center back home was like this.  In the old world, the suction inside the first ring had absorbed the static off your crown.  This black middle was like that.   “Had his other found him?” Gat wondered.  He shrieked and struggled, but was caught in a spiral.  He could not brake his momentum.  He could not turn around.  He was spiralling into the blackness in a dizzy madness, trapped and helpless.  Suspended in the center, hanging like a spark in a vacuum, he twisted and pushed, but could not force his way out of the core.  
    
   

Entrance

    Gat’s stat shook as stochastics began to resonate.  Energy flowed in aphexes through him as he swelled with the rushing of it.
    
Gat, who’d been suspended in a coil, felt a jolt burn through him, a concentrated dagger of power slit him, a wave washed over him charging his force.  He pressed firmly into the lightning.  His conscious swirled like ringlets spun rapid.  The forceful static washing stilled and he collapsed over his stat.  Sensations swelled in oscillation.  The energy washed back at him from where it had gone. Gat was lodged free and flowed out.
    
Gat absorbed as he moved and had left a vacum as he’d travelled.  Tevye followed the path of least energy residue to follow his trail.  Neya rode closely, melting through mercury and slipping through gold and orange angles.  A jolt blasted the tunnel. Messenger lights were shooting again.  Gat’s trail disappeared.  A tidal wave flowed past them.  Tevye aligned and slammed into some light shots.  Communications were running again.  Info on pixels Tevye couldn’t  make sense of.  Annihilation of lifeforce, negatives of a past yes.  Coordinates and directions, the energy shots flowed in a dense tide.  The probes slowed, pausing, changing directions, Tevye and Neya followed the shots toward their source.
    
Poe rode the tube with aggression, gracefully riding embankments from side to side without sway.  Ivy close by her, with agile grace of her own.  Sid rode with ease.  He loved that he didn’t have to worry about the pulls and the push of their home world, just beam through the tunnels.  He liked this adventure, felt free, and new.  He sped to move on.  Tiny bubble bursts occassionally came his way as he rode.  He’d run a few over with the spinning wheels of his stat.  Tiny fluxes of energy would hit him, making his chest light up with a flash of orange strength.  Poe and Ivy had both been doing the same as they’d passed the bubbles of energy, Ivy flashing yellowwith a down of orange, Poe, a mild deep infra.  These little bubbles had been everywhere inside the tubes ever since they’d pushed through the resistant door.
    
Intuit foretold a light down the road.  Soon probes were flowing headlong at them all.  Bright hotspots, as large as a wheel of a stat came surging around a bend in their course.  Poe slammed several without thinking, she was on a mission.  Ivy backed off, Sid took several, he felt bold.  The probes carried a message, a cluster of pixels, part of a picture.  Sid could not make out its form.  He took more.  Ivy stepped up and took those that Poe had missed.  A couple of pixels only.   A vague message in an alien language passed into her.  She transqwrote nothing from it, besides that it contained meaning.  The probes quit flowing.
    
“The transmission’s been cut. Or there’s a couple of sparks up the road slamming some probes of their own!”  shouted Poe.  “Let’s roll.”   The sparks follow her.  More probes were flowing.  The sparks spiralled up the bank of the tunnel and down again to avoid them.  
    Ahead of them, Neya rode hard, followed by Tevye as the probes found their way through the maze of turns to an outlet, a vacuum, a void.  Probes were still flowing past them as they hung at the outlet, afraid to go on.  At the precipice the probes unwound their spherics and became loose like ribbons.  The ribbons flowed like waves of thread into the darkness of eternity and became one united wave as it spanned into space. “Ride on it!”  Neya zapped.  “It’ll carry us.”
    ”Where?” Tevye fuzzed.  
    ”It knows. Ready? Here goes.”   Neya jumped.  Tevye followed.  The ribbon sailed through space unilinear, Neya and Tevye each mounted on it with their stats to their sides hanging off the ribbon like third wheels.   “Piece of non,” Tevye zapped, as he started slipping through the ribbon.   “I’m sinking into it, or its slipping into me.  What’s going on Neya?  Help!”
    
“Don’t relax, Tevye.  Tense up, make a static force around you.  Repel the wave, don’t absorb it.”   Tevye did what he was told.  Tensed up, static shield born, he soared.  The vast blackness stretched around him like forever, a chance to live life endless, all the worlds he could know.  Most sparks only know the world they are born in, the world that they meet the Non in.  But Tevye, Tevye was still but a green spark, and already had rolled through several.  He sailed through forever into the next world.  They entered a rod, a refractive pulse hit Tevye’s core, prismed him and dovetailed his light again into one as if transforming his form.  The sparks had hit silver so hard, everything swarmed.  Waves became lines as circles arced.  They followed the probes through the network into a cluster of doors.  The sparks dismounted their probes and let them go.  
    ”Neya, what happened?” asked Tevye.
    
“I know, that really hurt.” Neya zapped in response.
    
“I was just lovin’ that trip too,” zapped Tevye.
    
“Yeah, forever is nice.”
    ”You were thinking the same as me.”  Tevye zaps her.
    
“We’re siblings aren’t we,” Neya acts suave.   “It was strange too, because I thought I could feel your resonance through the wave.”
 
“I guess I was so caught up in my own thinking that I hadn’t  noticed any resonance from you.”
    
“Pretty neat,” Neya sparks.  All the while energy sparks are flying all around them, darting in and out of different doors.
    
Gat was only coming to his senses after the rush of energy he’d  absorbed had knocked his sensibilities about so violently.  He was sailing through space on a ribbon of nodes, his entirety knotted like the strings around the atmosphere back home, tensed to catatonia.  He rushed into a rod, felt snapped into pieces, and reassembled as one.  Gat shot through a network of tunnels, into a long line of static stretching endlessly, and began to come to.  He entered another network eventually.  This weave was tight and convoluted with connections.  He rode the probes as they bounced around through the maze.  The probes moved fast, skipping connections, wrecklessly jumping off course as if the static from his overcharged body was making them repulse around violently.  
    Gat broke through a series of thin resistors as if shot out of the network.  He entered into a mesh of connector cells.  Each cell an organic blob of tendons and liguors.  Liquid conductors passed him from one cell to the next in pulses.  The liquid felt cool flowing around his overcharged body.  He passed into a column of tightly braided cells, was carried into a mesh of the same blobs, their tentacles knotted in interweaves.  He clutched into the interior lining of one of the blobs and forced himself to come to a stop.  Energy pulses continued to surge around him, but he was overcharged.  His senses spun wildly, he could take no more, and blocked them out.  Soon the pulses subsided into a mild hum.
    
Poe spiralled up to an inverted ride at the top of the tunnel as Ivy rode high on one bank, Sid up on the other.  Probes were still flowing through the network, but the sparks did not want to get stalled by the message.  Poe was frantic about meeting the Non now.  The probes stopped flowing, then began again, in reverse.  Now the sparks followed the probes down the tunnels, around turns, through switches.  Soon they came to an output.  Poe shot into space from the force of speed and will she manifest.  She clutched onto an arc as a sphere unwound past her and held tight.  She was beginning to melt into the wave and tensed up to repulse it instead.  She held on, and rode.  Ivy and Tevye had hopped on the chord and were riding Poe’s tail into the abyss.  
    
Space stretched black sparkling with auras of primordial sparks.  Soulless darkness: forever.  The fear ached like pure void.  A siphon sucked at Poe’s insides pulling her hope for Non into the nothing.  Poe could hear the sizzle of Ivy weeping behind her.  Poe’s quarks knotted in her gut and she felt rage.  Silver slammed her sharded, sliced.  Ivy’s scream refracted into dust, reassembled like a piercing inverted groan.  Sid endured the fracture in meek silence. The wave broke down into particles and the probes rushed once more.  They hopped on the probes and rode.   An intrepid rush through corridors and connections extended into a race down a solid length of line scraping through a static hiss of particles.   They sucked up the static sparkle confections as they past.  
    The journey halted abruptly.  The three sparks flew off their probes as the balls stacked up against each other clustering densely.  They absorbed several balls each just to make room and imbibed as they moved up the corridor manually.  At the threshold was a gate that sat on coils like hinges.  The messenger probes zapped the probes at the gate.  A cluster of gate probes relayed off, returning with a new, denser cluster of probes.  Poe understood that these were commander probes by their size.  The messenger probes zapped the commanders, deflating as their zap swelled the commander probes who rolled down a corridor and dissappeared.  They returned quickly, and new messenger probes deflated, filling the commanders.   This continued extensively, until a tone rang down the tunnel and caused the coils to swing open the gate. The rush of messengers resumed.
    The sparks rode their stats now, smuggled in amongst the troop of messengers.  They arrived at a caged plain where the pixels began to settle, forming a field of symmetrical grids that settled into their choreographed cells automatically.  The sparks could not help but appreciate the mechanized unity of the plain’s aesthetic but it did not hold their attention long.  They backtracked their way into the silver corridor and rode amongst the messenger probes who rushed to and fro through the world.
    

Synapses

Fluids flowed over Gat, he soaked in a throbbing energy caress.    He discharged his excess into the fluid, dissipating.   Light fibers tickled and soothed him, waving through the liquor ether.  He relaxed, felt the moment’s quintessence, stretched spindly his tensed to claw limbs and felt like he melt.  Expansion into the ether eased from his chest.  His energy seeped into the spirits, and the spirits became part of him.   He could sense its sentience, but could not make sense of it yet.  
    Darkness melted to visions of alien notions as the fluid seeped in.  Two bodies organic shaped with two arms, legs, and a head made of opaque substance moved through space falling, then walking, running, afraid, made their way through a plain with green organic wires waving toward a hot spot above, burning its way through gray haze.  Two bodies running toward the brightness, suddenly jumped.  Green landscape turned brown, with red, and a far spance, the bodies were falling toward brown resistors at a speed that might hurt.  HIT!  Start, panic, fluid burns hot and charged.  Relax.  
    The I body alone floats in blue waves.  It seems like an alien mirror of Gat, submerged in blue on white rather then transparent with light.  They re both ambianced by peace.  Calm settles, ether stills, Gat learns the world that he’s in.  He stretches his sensors into the cell skin beneath him and absorbs its intentions to make sense of this place.   Visions flicker in vast corners of the network, cells passing each other hints and residue of their know, sharing the data with one another which Gat absorbs too.   This world was like a loom of gobbets woven to fibers, each aware, some of them charged, others settled, some all together unborn.  
    He extends, trickling sparkles from himself into the loom, his  stat spinning its star juice, surging with flow.   The blobs switched from loll in awareness to burning alive, then settled back into lulling, reacting with neighbors to exchange their life burn.  The spreading of heating moved from node to next node, easing its heating as more and less burned.  In this way they interacted, Gat learned.  As the reaction grew vaster, notions, visions, calculations occurred.  The spirits that submerged him in visions seeped in with ephemeral shimmers while the network of nodes shaped the phantom to form.     He was like a node on this network with a will of its own.  He became a witness to its dreaming, relaxed, and let go, gave his exhausted thoughts up to it, and dreamed too.
    
    

Learning the Tones

Poe led the two along a corridor.  Energy surged all around them, Poe drove her stat, swerving and curling up the banks to avoid probes as they passed.  A series of darts slammed against an adjacent wall.  At first it seemed like a dead end. But it shone metallic and appeared to be made to slide open.  The darts piled up one against another until several turned around and ran back.  Soon after, an audible frequency accompanied new darts against the barrier.  The audio waves lubricated the passage, vibrating the opening in the shell until the wall slid open.         
    ”The tones open doors,” noted Ivy.  Ivy realized that this switch operated on a similar premise as the gate they’d found earlier.  The coils had been replaced by a single arm, but otherwise the modus operandi was similar.
    Sid was watching something else entirely. A half bubble with thousands of hairs for feelers swept over the black coating of the silver tunnel.  It collected static into particles that would eventually flick away from the sweeper and join the darts in their race.  “And those things seem to be sensing for something.”  Sid pointed at the microdome creeping along the wall.
    ”Why do you say that?” asked Poe.
    ”They cause changes in the energy flow,” Sid answered.
    The microdome sweepers crept along the walls. Messengers darted all around, led by a glowing head like a clinging blue ooze and trailing a taper of plasma.    Sid and Ivy rode cautiously, quickly, wary of the sweepers.  The flakes flicking now and again off the sweepers seemed to clutter the rhythmic platoon of darts.  Poe zapped one just to see what would happen.  The sweeper threw static in angry shakes causing clutter amongst the probes, forcing a rapid pile-up, causing open flows to veer maniacally into disorder.  
    Poe was on the hunt for the trail of the Others.  Sid and Ivy were along for the ride.  A door was crowded by jam up, a gate to be passed.  The head of the platoon sent waves rippling back through the messengers.  Probes turned and followed the course of their origin.  Waves of plasma returned shortly, vibrating the larynx of the tunnel open again and the platoon carried on.  
    Poe led through the congestion, brushing probes but not absorbing or giving up spark.  In this way the probes couldn’t sense them, the sparks learned as they passed.  They could cover more ground if they flowed with the energy rather than causing disturbances, Poe realized.  The three sparks rode quickly, avoiding the sweepers brushing along the walls, their thousand static feet honed to sense trespass.      
    Poe could sense no sign of the Others.  No trail lacking in static to show they’d absorbed as they’d moved.  Poe paused at a cross.  “We’ll never find them this way.”   Ivy was silent.  Sid had nothing to say.   “Let’s think about the world that we’re in,” Poe continued.  “It’s a matrix, not a labyrinth.”
 
“Why do you say that?” asked Sid
    ”Because it’s pragmatic,” Poe answered.  “It has purpose.”
 
“Wouldn’t a labyrinth?” Ivy zapped.
 
“As a game or a trick.  This is a matrix, it has a center.”
 
“So does a labyrinth,” Ivy sizzled.
 
“A labyrinth has a beginning and an end.  But a matrix is built around the center.”  Poe hushed.   “We have to find the center and look outward instead of darting around through its threads.”
 
“How?”  Sid zapped.
 
“We’ll have to sense,”  Poe zapped.  With that, she took off at full pace down the tunnel and disappeared.   
    Sid and Ivy, a bit weary of Poe’s frantic prodding, were in far less of a hurry.  They feared forever as much as any spark would, remembering the dark and lonely feeling of their ride on the ribbon across space, but they were young and wanted to explore a little.  They rode mildly, chatting, occasionally intercepting one of the messenger clusters to drink a little nectar from its plasma tail and laugh at the disruption they could cause simply by zapping a sweeper.   
    Ivy concentrated on the tones ringing through the static.  She studied how these notes would flip the switches causing corridors to open and exciting static into probes, lifting the electrons into the stream of motion they directed.  She practiced imitating their pitch by tuning the frequency of her zaps.  She  waited at a gate and listened for the tones to open it.  After it closed, she imitated the notes until the gate opened for her as well.
    Sid zapped exuberant. “You’re voice will open doors for you sister!” He swooped up the wall of the tunnel wildly, flipping around and using his momentum to dart down the corridor Ivy had just opened.
    Poe was long gone and alone before she even realized her two younger siblings weren’t following her anymore.  In her frustration, she blew them off and rode on.  Finding her Other, and the final mortal embace of the Non, was all she wanted now.
 

Painted hills

    
Neya laughed at the bubbles of light racing around.  They switched through the network like bumbling balls.  Tevye would occasionally slam one, they felt fuzzy and nice.  The sparks made their way after some light marbles, took a few turns until the tunnels spread open, and settled onto a white space.  The bubbles began to sparkle, stretching out to fill space.  Neya and Tevye admired the vision ahead of them.  Specks of light danced on a glassy plane, settling and becoming forms moving through space, a landscape of silver hills like string after string running in parallels, passing, repeating again.  
    A strange play on dimensions, Neya thought, as if she were watching a scene from the inside looking out.  The sparks were projected by light cannons at the silver hills.  They turned as they flew to ride them. Tevye took off, cruised over the hills, dodging all colors of splatters as he raced down the valleys and soared between mounts.  He rode fast but had to be cautious, his stat kept slipping through the illusory shell and sliding across a gloss base his stat could not set into.   “It’s all about resistance, don’t absorb, be rigid,” he thought as he road.  He generated a field to raise himself onto the hills again.
    Neya was reaching out to the drops, playing with them, smearing them across the slick plane, creating palettes of oiled prism, then forming vast scenes.  Painting felt marvelous, fluid, sensual.  
    She leapt above the plane to see the painting from a distance then let herself drop to the metallic floor.  The slick plane extended up as far as she could sense. The paints began to drip from above, falling as driblets washing away through the floor.  Neya reached out for the droplets and inhaled their charge.  She absorbed.  She put out her shell of resistance, her aura glowing deep blue, and collected beads like a dripping cover for her glowing bubble.    The sky wall kept falling, her painting melting away, drowning Tevye in the valley between hills, filling up the landscape with a wash of thin paint moving like strands in bends and interplays.  
    Tevye absorbed the pool he was in feeling powered with a rush, his green deepening to aqua brushing with sky.  The colored slivers were slipping into Tevye and disappearing into his evanescence.   Neya floated on the flood of color, saw Tevye hunkered over savage, greedily consuming the river and becoming brilliant with fuel.
    ”You’ve become stronger.”   Neya zapped at Tevye.  Tevye continued to drink.  Neya could see he was becoming verdant now.   “There is so much energy here, we could become so strong, so strong that we could destroy the Non!”
    Tevye paused when he heard this.  
 
“Do you think the Non can be ended?” Tevye zapped.
 
“I don’t know but maybe we can make ourselves strong enough that no Other could ever absorb us.”  Neya began to absorb the energized color into herself.  They drank the landscape black, taking the paint, the silver hills, the white.  When all remnants of energy were gone, they reentered the matrix.   
    ”How do we navigate this maze?” asked Tevye.
 
“Shh.”
 
“What?”
 
 ”Listen, shht!”   The network was silent with echo as they travelled the tube. It buzzed at crossroads, with static and tones. “Tones,” Neya noted.   Many intersections were open and clustered with noise, the static bustled sporatic, chaotic.  Clear resonant tones would slice through in a series of notes. Neya counted 11. The static would slither in the resonant wake of notes.  
 
“Follow the flow.”
    Tevye needed no further coaxing to move.  In his charged state he felt reckless and greedy.  He swooped fizz off the sides of the tunnel by charging his aura into a static net and rode wildly, feeding.  He brushed a sweeper with an orbit of his stat, surging the sweeper to full size and sending it off in the surging flux.  It bobbled around reeking havoc on the stream for a while, then joined the particles and sped away.
    Neya counted the pulse of the waves of tones, 11 again.  Then she studied the pattern to the shots that followed after.  Courses of bursts fired through in bits.  The troops buzzed by in packets and multiples of eight.  The tones of resonance that opened the doors seemed to direct the tube of particles racing through the tunnels.
    The direction the shots aimed seemed controlled by the rush.  The path of least resistance directed their mindless dart down the course.  A charge from her or her stat could excite static but it would simply join the packets of eight in their race.
    The bits raced through a wave of tones. Darting through an electric blue flowing wash of sound.  Blue spirals circling particles racing through switches of silver and gold.  She flowed with it following behind Tevye as he absorbed.  
    Neya couldn’t even sense Gat’s hum.  He was lost.  She couldn’t feel the constant allure of the Non anymore either.  Finally the strings had been broken.  Gat was lost in the matrix and her Other was far away.  She felt a surge run through her, freedom and desire.  Immortality and a hunger.  She stopped and switched back swinging her stat around, scraping its gyroscoping wheel against the black shell of the tunnel.  She slammed dot after dot with heated pleasure.  
    She formed a field around herself and absorbed.  The tunnel grew dark behind her.  She brightened and swelled.  Behind her a switch etched shut with a resonant scrape.  The force of the darts slamming against her lost its momentum and began to stream down a fork further ahead.  She stretched out and drank the remnant trickle greedily.
    Darkness encircled Neya.  She’d absorbed even the static clinging to the walls in her binge.  Her charge undulated spastically, her senses extended into the tunnel.  She became aware of the greater space around her through lightning tentacles.  She scraped the shell, tickled the door that had just slid shut, arched her absorption around the fork in the tunnel, and down the path from whence they’d come.  Tevye came around the corner as Neya zapped out a sigh, she could feel him coming.  Her zap slammed Tevye hard enough to knock him off course.  She began to lose charge as it dissipated back into static clinging to the wall.
    ”The power, ahh, extended sense.”  Neya sighed.  
    
    
Gat sparked aware out of trance state to feel his world burn.  Energy raced in from its fringes.  Too much to know.  Light and forms danced in a cluster of nodes, he watched the scene show.  It was cast like a projection onto a wall of tissue beneath him, in the bottom center of this world.    Each node witnessed the projection then reacted with differing pulses of glow.  The liquor flowed in channels exciting, subsiding, absorbing charge from the nodes.  Each node seemed to be adding its frequency in response to the show.
    Gat attempted to absorb energy to strengthen himself.  The drain caused the network to panic, a wash of chemicals and impulses flowed over the nodes, calming.  The image blurred for some moments, the energy exchange slowed.  For the sake of curiosity, Gat snapped a bit of spark at a synapse and took note.  It caused a multi-layered exchange of electrons throughout the world.  He let go.  The surge smoothed.   The image in the cluster consisted of lights and colors moving, solid as forms.  He sensed vibrations waver and payed attention.  
    Another cluster, shook and emanated quavers like the strings when his spark dagger would strike them during games back home.  These fluctuations vibrated around him, in from the fringes-  stereo from the sides of the globe, vibrating  him with tonality.  Like the vibrations of strings, the music moving through him felt good.  The nodes around him  trembled and interpreted their trembling, and again the network exchanged thoughts.
    A tiny center glowed infernal, Gat turned his chest toward it and felt its liquor of warmth.    Facing the direction of the heat, above it, and  several leaps ahead,  he glimpsed sparks rushing like messengers- tiny blips smaller then an eighth of his stat’s wheel.   Here was the heart of the sentience, messages wove themselves together and became understanding here.  Now he was sure, he was inside of something aware of its being, inside of something that thought, just as he did.    The world that he was submerged in was experience, and ahead was the place where it became consciousness.
    Gat considered diving for the center but hesitated.  “Emersed inside of all knowing, the view is narrowed, understanding blurred, or blind.”  He remembered the trap he’d been in, the blackness, the coil, the way he’d  become stuck in the void of it until he’d  been hit by the rush.  ” Must be outside of the nexus to see clearly sometimes,” Gat thought.  “But knowing is power,” Gat jumped.  Zapped, suspended, spun.  The blips pounded.  Snap, seize, release, twitch, rush.   Conscious confusion, “I, I, we, it, no, know, become.”   Thought strobes echo- “out, in; you, me, we flash.  Melting!”
    
Gat lunged, twitched as he settled into the liquor and silence.   “Too much for now,” Gat thought.   “Can’t make sense of it yet. “Got to learn better about the way it all works before I go into thought’s heart.”   For now he settled just to sense.  Vibrations carried media through the network and he witnessed; liquor bathed his sensations and he ingested.  There were centers for the various media, Gat felt around and calculated to interpret it all.   
    ”It all seems so clumsy, must be a more streamlined method of processing,” Gat thought.   “So much wasted space here.”   A dark plane of nodes hardly quivered behind him, into the distance, silent, virtually unused.  What if I just fiddled around with these nodes, see if I can’t  give them a shock start?  Gat oozed through the liquor toward the darkened blobs.  He stretched his spindles into the  nodes and fired off a couple of shocks.  The nodes quivered, then trembled, then hummed awakened.  Gat sent shocks all around.  The sleeping darkness was nuw humming animated with energy.  The thoughts of the nodes were childish simple.  They aimed impulses toward Gat asking, “huh?”   Gat zapped back at them,  “We are all one.  We’ve become.  I have woken us.”
    
Woke.  Become. The nodes processed, learned. ” I? Us?”   
    
The nodes were learning self awareness, Gat realized. Being. “If I teach them that we are the same, they will listen to me,” Gat mused.
     “Is this going to be my forever?” The sudden thought churned static in his center.  Panic seized through him and sizzled out,  “Escape! Is there a land outside from this scape?Where’s Neya?  Alone here.  Where’s the exit?”
    
Gat realized he was sending these shocks out into his blobs.  Teaching them panic, and driving them to escape before they’d even settled in.   “Better make use of the space I’m at.” He relaxed and sent out a calm vibe.  “Besides, this won’t be so bad as long as I don’t brew a bunch of neurotic blobs.”   Gat focused on unity with all the energy around him and oozed.
   

Nodal Oneness

    Gat started.  Nodal oneness had dispersed him nebular.  He hadn’t  had time to collect his energy when an onslaught of liquor emersed him in a neural barrage.  The knowing around him was focused on a flesh-self extension.   Like a dagger at fleshy midsection penetrating strings in an act of indulgent Non defiance. It rode another flesh like Gat would ride his stat.  Joy overwhelmed him, pleasure tingled.  The nodes Gat had awakened fired wildly, keenly atuned to the others, translating the experience for him and bathing him in his host’s experience.  The tension aphexed, the node clusters sizzled in  swelling fugue and subsided in liquid darkness.
    Sparklets fuzzed in the liquid around him.  Gat spindled into his babies and triggered them to draw the fizzles.  He absorbed the energy vicariously, letting his babies feed to mature.  “One day, you will be the nucleus of this mind,” he told his newbies.  He let his energy disperse into the nebula again, teaching his nodes about the endless future they would have with him as their guide, he meditated on power in the forever.
    The loneliness of Amputated Antennas
    Poe found a hub of activity.  Packets darted in clusters, each burst had a leader carrying an address, followed by bits of info.  Mindless batallions of commanders and messengers darting around looking for receivers.   She spindled her sensitivity into the corridor, tickling each gate with a tentacle, monitoring the flow of traffic through every doorway.  This was an ideal location for a little reconnaisance.  From this hub, the matrix spread out in an interconnected web.  Any disturbance was sure to ripple tremors throughout adjacent corridors, alerting her to the presence of her Other.  
    Still no sign.  Poe’s instinctive panic had dulled into an infinite emptiness.  She found herself consuming particles just to fill the void.  She was becoming powerful in ways she’d never dreamed possible from her consumption.  Poe was learning that she was capable of amazing feats of propulsion and absorbtion.   When in flux, for instance, she could kick a charge out the back of her stat, launching herself at incredible speeds right through most of the elements in this alien landscape.  Her tentacles could reach farther and farther the more powerful she became.  
    Despite her new powers she longed for death.  It was as if her supercharged mind was racing at an even faster pace in frantic anxiety, perpetually grasping for the Non to consume her.   She swallowed a vast ocean of blue waves and the bursts that raced through them, spreading her tentacles out the doors and down the long adjoining tunnels.  With the million scyllia bustling from her tentacles she absorbed yet more, stretching herself into further hubs, branching down distant tunnels.
    She could sense the mindless panic of the messengers as they raced blindly into her snare.   As if by osmosis, she was learning their numeric language.  Whereas before the many packets had all carried various topics too disparate to interpret as a single coherent thought, now the messengers were all on alert, sensing her intrusion into their domain and causing a reaction in the very fabric of the landscape.  Passageways were sliding closed as if to protect themselves from her.  She felt a distant pinch as her antenna were amputated by the slamming of gates all around her.   
    
As always, her greedy consumption of particles had set off an alarm in the consciousness of the world.  She was being denied access, and what’s more, with the gates closed, the energy also stopped flowing.  She hungrily scraped the static remains from the walls and allowed her tentacles to drift aimlessly, looking for openings in the labyrinth.
    This was not the first time this had happened.  Each time was the same.  If she waited long enough without causing a disturbance, the doors would open again.  The wait was an excruciating eternity however, with no reward for her patience.  When the gates would eventually open, the world stretched endlessly in unaltered perpetuity.   She power her way through to an opening further along the maze. Though her tentacles were not strong enough to force their way through the closed doorways, she could slam her body through the metallic arcs and continue onward to yet another hub.
    Once in a new hub, she would again spread her antenna as far as she could reach, sensing for the unmistakable allure of her Other.  Unfortunately, she needed to absorb particles in order to stretch herself out into the maze.  And, inevitably, absorbing the energy balls always triggered the same alarms, closing the gates once again.  Her hope was that she would eventually become powerful enough that either she no longer needed to consume in order to generate her antenna or that her antenna would become powerful enough to push through the doors.   For now, she proceeded a little bit at a time, moving from hub to hub like ring hopping.  
    Poe recalled ring hopping.  It seemed so long ago now, a lifetime and worlds away.  She remembered that there was nothing that rubbed Ivy bristly the way an extended ring visit did.  Ivy liked having her own ring, and always claimed that Poe’s trespass on her ring threw off her equilibrium.  That was probably true, Poe figured, but such is the benefit of being an older sibling.  Newbies can’t visit outside rings, but old sparks have free reign over all levels.  
    Poe snickered and looked around automatically, wondering where Sid and Ivy had disappeared to.  She sent out a spiral of zaps calling out to them.  They could be anywhere she realized.  With the number of forks and intersections in this matrix, they could be just as lost as her Other.  Yet, she hoped that through the kindred connection of sibling spirits, transcendent of time and distance, they might just hear her.    
    Her calls went unacknowledged.  She pondered for a moment, watching a particle train wriggle down the tunnel like a poly-wheeled stat.  She swiped a few particles and attempted to interpret the message they carried.  The particles definitely contained data.  What the data meant was beyond her.  It seemed an exchange however, from one individual to another, a memorandum perhaps.  She considered the possibilities available to her.  
    Her current search had been fruitless so far.  What’s worse, she saw no promise that continuing in the same vein would ever get her any closer to the Non.  A notion settled on her in slow permeative hesitation.  Not sure whether it would work, or, whether it could put her mission in jeopardy, she decided it was worth a try.
    She zapped a message at a passing cluster, calibrating the particles with new data, her memo to her kindred.  “Where are you?” she asked.  The particles continued on, tuned to new information along their course without disturbance.  Poe was surprised that no doors slammed shut, no panicked chaos erupted.  She wondered if her tuning had worked, if her message had really been passed on.  Poe tried it again on a new cluster.  This time she sped ahead and slammed them, absorbing the message she’d sent.  It had worked.  
    Swallowing a single cluster rarely disrupted the flow of energy.  She wondered whether sending a single message was the same, simply not enough to alert the powers that be, or to get her message to her kin for that matter.  The odds of Sid or Ivy slamming, or even encountering, that single cluster of sparks was slim to none she realized.  Poe ramped up, then with one quick swipe across the farthest reaches of the landscape, calibrated the particles with outcries to her kindred.
    Her messages rushed away with no disruption.  “Wonderful,” she whispered to herself.  “Now, if only I could find a way to monitor the matrix without disrupting it?”  She deliberated on the question as she zapped a new pack of particles as far as her unamplified tentacles could reach.   

Gat’s Kingdom

    
Gat had finally settled into his new life.  His minion were growing stronger and capable.  They could pass energy between one another with little guidance from him.  In fact, they were teaching him a thing or two.  They had an archetypal understanding of their world.  They understood that they were a part of a larger collective consciousness, and knew how to be a part of it.  They interacted with the older cells of the other consciousness seamlessly.   Nevertheless, they reacted to Gat’s orders first and foremost.    
    They translated the overriding sentience for Gat, allowing him to understand what was going on around him.  He was in the mind of a giant, and the giant was not dealing well with being inhabited by Gat.  It was ignoring Gat’s every concerted attempt to communicate with it.  It sent nasty messages of loathing and anxiety at Gat whenever he tried to make contact.
    He was fascinated by the body of the giant, its solidity.  He was intrigued, even pleasured by some of the more peculiar things the flesh could experience.  He found the liquors secreted by the giant in moments of excitation incredibly powerful, often euphoric.  Gat bathed in the pleasures of the plasma.  Gat’s children seemed to as well.  They reacted as did all the rest of the cells to the giant’s liquor, with complete excitation or relaxation, depending on the nature of the ether.
    All this absolutely enthralled Gat.  He craved the ability to control the liquor, but unfortunately, could only affect his limited region of nodes successfully.  With enough prodding, he could precipitate a reaction from the giant, but the kind of reaction was usually very difficult to predict.  Instead, Gat preferred to sense.  This was not characteristic for him, but he was bound by external forces.     
    Nevertheless, Gat would communicate with his children regularly, using them to awaken other sleepers, or to investigate what it would require to take control over the larger organism.  He exerted himself in controlled zaps he’d acquire from his stat.  The stat was lodged in a solid below him.  It seemed unstable.  He’d never experienced anything like it.  Stats are made to move, Gat reasoned. And being stuck as it was, the stat was generating static which it couldn’t unload naturally.  As a result, it would occasionally send an unsolicited charge into the nodes around it.     The giant did not seem to like it, but Gat couldn’t stop his stat.
    Currently, the giant seemed subdued.  He oozed a liquor that brought Gat’s state of mind down into negative realms of self-loathing.  These were unusual feelings for Gat, he despised them, and the giant for invoking them.  Gat attempted to send out positive vibes to elevate the mood.  At first, the giant rejected his messages outright, but then, suddenly, it began to listen.
    The giant tensed.  It sent triggers through synapses, exciting the nodes.  Suddenly, the substance in which Gat’s stat rested became active.  It excited the stat, compelling it to generate intense rushes of juice.  Gat was forcibly immobilized by the voltage of his stat.  He was supercharged by it to a saturation point until he began sending out shocks in chaotic surges.  The landscape accumulated power, transmitting it wildly through the flesh of the giant’s body.
    Gat was suspended in a rush of electricity.  He rattled violently, stretching the length of his substance to its limits.   Immobilized, at the edge of consciousness, he tried to assert his will.  Thoughts rushed around inside Gat, blurred and kaleidoscopic.   The star fire was too powerful, overwhelming.  Blast after blast off a hot spot.  If it ever ended, he’d spark omnipotent.
    A black tide washed over ending the burn.  The stat settled, sparked, settled.  Quiet fell, held the gyrus.  Stillness.  Gat began to come to.  A residual zap startled him.  He was aware, but weak.  The liquor had drained him.  He let himself fall into the bed of nodes, his children.  
    He was not all-powerful.  He was weak.  He was at the mercy of the giant.  Gat had to think.  He needed a new plan.  
   

Collective Wisdom

    
The tunnel Neya and Tevye raced through spilled its contents onto a solid flat ring cluttered with the dendritis of static messenger probes.  Flakes, shards, orbs and divvets of energy littered the bronze field.  Neya skated over the surface absorbing particles in her wake.  By simply ingesting the energy she could get a sense that somehow, she was swallowing fragments of thoughts into herself.  It was as if each tiny particle contained an incomplete notion, a phrase out of context, an explanation without a question.  
    As Tevye watched, Neya lifted herself off the disc, hovering magnetically over it, and spread her tentacles like a million axons across the landscape.  She did not consume the energy.  She only grazed the surface, allowing the subtle nuances of the information to formulate into complete thoughts.   For the first time, she absorbed the concepts rather than the particles.  Her mind swirled with alien notions.  She could make out Tevye below her, but in a swoon of dream consciousness.  Equations danced inside her, visions of prisms, character drawings becoming languages, cultures, societies, histories, dramas.  The knowledge of an entire race of aliens, limitless and overwhelming.  
    She settled to the ground and regained her bearings.  “We’re inside a data warehouse,” she told Tevye.  “My theory is, there’s a race of beings like us that  store their thoughts here for later use.  They must not have built-in memories. I think they use the tunnels to zap one another.  They store their conversations on these discs,” Neya continued, pointing at the floor.   
    Tevye just looked at her, skeptical.  “Okay.”
    ”I’m serious.  We’re stat deep in the collective wisdom of an entire race!  This is amazing.  Just think about how much we could learn.”
    ”So?” Tevye answered, nonplussed.
    ”Knowing is controlling, little brother.  Knowing is controlling.  If we learn the secrets of our world, then we’ll have power over our domain.  We will become the masters of the matrix.  We’ll own the Web!”
    ”Yes,” Tevye’s interest was aroused.  “Show me how.”
    ”I can’t.  Just listen to the data, don’t devour it.”
    Tevye imitated Neya’s hovering maneuver.  He spread his tentacles and petted the particles.  At first it was just garbage, meaningless nonsensical jabber bits and disjointed chatter.  He had to tune himself to formulate the garbage into organized thought patterns.  He focused on one section of the disc at a time.  Nearby bits were often related, if not by content, than by purpose or process, Tevye realized.  He honed himself to chunk after chunk of adjacent bytes and steeped in multisensory information flows.   
    Here an image danced in his mind’s eye, there an abstract concept formulated. A multi-pary conversation could be swallowed in its entirety, the entire sequence of interactions taken as a whole.  Diagrams were plentiful, and architectural designs abounded.  He wondered if there were a map of the entire matrix to be found somewhere.
    Odd fragments of data were interspersed in anomalous pockets, dying impotent.  Relics of thoughts prone for replacement by newer information.  Secrets abounded in the debris, thought Tevye.  Ideas hidden from the world, obfuscated by modernity.   Here were treasures soon to be lost forever.  He was especially necromantic about the dying data.  Reading it, however, he found no qabbalah, no secret art, just more of the same common wisdom.   The profound knowledge had to be somewhere, he thought, all Sparks practiced the occult art of Non-transcendance.  This race must certainly have its arcana too.
    A sector of outdated information contained World Events, another sector, some kind of environmental stats called Weather.  He gobbled up the junk, left the viable data alone, lest his meddling set off the chaos again.  He wasn’t in the mood to get stuck on this dull disk when there were occult insights to be gleaned.
   

Surfing

    
You couldn’t say that times were ever boring.  Compared to life back in the old days, there was a whole lot more variety to choose from.  Adventures were plentiful, and curious, though often fruitless.  Sid and Ivy had traversed all manner of landscapes from glassy smooth canvases of light to rigid, coarse, resistant tunnels.  
    They’d played a game of peek and seek in a bristling cluster of short light-emitting tubes, taunting one another with monochrome sillouettes projected against the enormous distant screen.  Betraying their location for just long enough to dart into another short tube and wait to get radiated by yet another column of light.
    They attempted blasting the mirrors that acted as switches between the long silver corridors, only to get zapped right back.  Sid actually tried bouncing up and down on the armature that supported the mirror, hoping to nudge it over and reek havoc on the flowing stream of electrons Ivy was surfing.  It didn’t budge under his pressure either.  It was only when he harmonised it with a melodic mimic the way that Ivy had learned to do that he was able to maneuver the arm, causing the stream to flow down a different corridor and Ivy to wash up in a puddle in the other direction.  They both laughed, then began developing it into a game with a convoluted system of rules and points.
    One Spark would surf the flux while the other attempted to steer the wave into a tight projectile off of which a variety of tricks could be launched, spinning around one’s stat, covering the greatest amount of the tunnel’s surface area as possible.   It was really much less a competitive sport than a team one.  The rule was, if the controller lost the stream down an adjacent tunnel, they lost their turn and the surfer got to do it again.  Good times.
    Sid was surfing when a nostalgic sense of longing fell over him.  He lost his concentration, missing a great opportunity to try a triple-spin vert off a curve and landed sideways against the momentum of the stream, then spun head over stat a couple of times to a clumsy stop, orb deep in static.  
    He brushed himself off, sluffing dander of white noise off his limbs.  Something felt kindred and vaguely familiar in the aura of the dander.  He let his viscera absorb it, communing with the distant voice of Poe in its essence.  Poe had called out to him in the surf.  She loved him, she missed him.  She was alone and scared, consumed by the fear of forever.  
    He shot toward Ivy like a spark possessed.  “We have to help Poe,” he shouted.
    ”What are you talking about?”
    Sid recreated the message the way he’d consumed it and zapped Ivy with all the melancholy Poe’s sadness invoked.  He had to say nothing more.  They were off in a flash, fighting their way upstream toward the source of the message.   Something in Sid’s depth welled with the fear anew.  A fear of unfettered loneliness.  Worse, an eternal directionless meandering through meaningless existence.  A vacuum whirled in his being.  He was infected by the fear.  
    Across the span of time and space he had communed with Poe.  Despite the distance, perhaps because of it, he understood her fear now more than he ever had.  It was contagious.  It was his fear now.  He could see it like a whirlpool spinning inside Ivy’s substance too.  She was suffering with it and they were each set loose alone through meaningless eternity.  
    How had they ignored it for so long?  How could they have played so carefree? Directionless, meaningless distraction.  Letting their Others get away into the matrix and leaving Poe to fend for herself.  Making her suffer the fear alone without understanding the power of her longing for the Non.  
    The stream of particles and waves pushed against them like a tidal wave, draining their energy like a siphon, stripping their stats of their juice with the sheer force of the flow.  Sid cautiously absorbed small amounts of the energy that slammed against him, burrowing a tunnel through it and refueling simultaneously.  
    Ivy followed in Sid’s wake, slurping little particles here and there to give her the energy to push onward.  The surge slowed to a trickle, then with a stat spinning switch, began flowing the opposite direction.  Adjusting in a beat, they surfed the crest of the wave until it again slowed and flipped.  They fought the current again, listening for Poe’s voice in the resonance of the wave and in the substance of the stray static.
    ”I heard her,” zapped Ivy.  “There are no rings to navigate by like there are back home.  Shouldn’t we be able to find a unit of measure.”
    ”How’s Poe transmitting her zap?”  Sid slowed his burrowing.
    ”It seems like she’s converting their semantics,” said Ivy.
    Sid struggled to hear her over the roar, the buzz and ring, the waves of tones in the stream.  He worked to keep driving while considering the challenge. “If we can figure out how quick the probes are travelling, we could calculate how far she is away.”   
    ”If we can figure out how long they’ve been travelling.” Ivy considered.
    Sid lost focus, stopped pushing.  The stream lapped at his stat, threatening to wash him off course but the ferocity of it was easing.  The stream was about to switch.  The sparks paused for a moment to contemplate.  
    ”The packets are all labelled in the first couple of probes, address first, then a series of digits.  I hadn’t thought of it before, but they’re incrementally labelled, different from the packet just before them by a little addition.  We’ll have to listen for an entire message and swallow the first few bytes.” Ivy continued, paused.  Her thoughts abstracted around the idea. “Is it the same time here as there?”  
    ”We’ll have to listen to both sides of the switch,” Sid was quick to respond.  The flow eased to a puddle, he let his stat spin it up into its gyres and felt the energy rush warmly into him.  They prepared for the backwash to hit them; torsos arched like bows of ribbon.    When it came, its crest a rigid torpedo of power, they set themselves against it. They stood side by side, connected by limbs to support one another against the onslaught.  It slammed them off their tentative grip on the tunnel’s skin but they opened themselves to consume the particles while they drifted awash without bottom or ceiling through the raging screaming stream.
    They rode it out as it eased, some by their own absorption, somewhat from the data shot having been sent, and spent.   “We must be close to the source out here, the tide is never that strong from Poe’s direction,” mused Sid.
    ”I got the time,” Ivy was absorbed in translating the digits into phrases. “Only off by a few digits from the leader probes on Poe’s side.  Hold up, I’ve got to do some calculations?” Ivy answered.

“Did you notice that though?”  Sid prodded.
    ”What?” asked Ivy.
    ”That the force isn’t so great from Poe’s direction as it is from the projector that shoots the particles from this end.”
    ”That means we’re further from her than we are from the projector.  Knowing that could help us.” Ivy put it together.  “I do get what you’re saying.  Maybe it’s more about the force than the math.”
    ”Maybe a little bit of both.  Check it out, the address leading the probes is probably the projector’s coordinates.”  
 
“Well, let’s use the force and figure out the math then. Next message from Poe, stand firm against it and get the first few digits.  The address could help because she’s probably using that projector to carry the message.  We keep heading towards its source. The force should get stronger as we get closer.
    

Becoming the Process

    Neya was closing in on the core.  She fought the jet with her dagger, lashing projectiles around in a bouncing terrarium of golden conductor.  In quick pulsing spasms the cannon fired a river of phrases that she batted around, uncaring the contents.  The data pods regrouped behind her, Tevye calibrating their meaning occasionally as they passed.  The shots nearly filled the full diameter of the tunnel.  He stretched himself thin along the top skin of the tube and slithered by, his stat dragging and catching occasionally on the chaotic mess of pods left reeling in the trailing battlefield of Neya’s march.  
    Neya wanted to find the source of the messages, the sentience that spoke it.  She was now approaching the mechanism that was its voice, surely the mind should be nearby.  She wanted to find the switch at which most meanings met.  She planned to lodge herself inside it and read until her mind swelled with the workings of the world.
    Tevye was more interested in the dendritis littering the vast fields of dying memories.  Archaic secrets of collective memory forgotten and abandoned, left to wash up on the smooth silicone shores of quiet beaches. But he was fascinated by Neya’s drive, and curious.  He followed her uncommiting, more an observer than a contender.  She was getting close.
    In sight now was a narrow threshold.  Shots fired out of it so often that little window was available for diving in. Neya caught the undertow of a phrase as it washed back into the enclave that was the mouth of the river.    The interior was just her size, she stretched herself out across the wafer, her stat wedged at the entrance sealing the mouth.
    The face of the wafer projected into millions of short bristles before her.  The remaining energy on the surface danced a sophisticated choreography of quick static ascents and slides down the bristles in parallel time.  The dancing static climbed up and down select lines at a time, spaced tight over the face of the wafer. With her stat wedged into the entrance, one path was sealed so that energy could only flow from the other door into the room.
    She studied the mechanics of the process first.  Observed the energy flowing in like backwash from the open door.  Watched the wafer distribute the incoming static across the wire forest grown from its surface.  Felt the timing of the dance send a wash of information against the door that had been wedged shut by her stat.  Perceived the chaotic backlash of the frustrated surge animate the wire forest with competing signals.  When the redirected spasm attempted to penetrate the sealed threshold once again, Neya set her stats gyros to neutral so they passed the particles like a pinwheel.
    Tevye laughed at the sight of Neya’s stat wedged in the doorway spitting energy flatulently into the tunnel.  He realized immediately that he could not enter in with her.  Her stat was not going to squeeze through the entrance.  He waited, attempting to understand what Neya planned by reading the probes she passed out of her alcove.  He got nothing.  Either she was not transmitting or he was not receiving.  He waited.
    Having become the process and no longer impeding the processor, Neya was free to glean meaning from the message.  She spindled her dendrites into a cross-stitch net covering the surface of the wafer and coming in contact with every bristle off the wafer’s surface.  The choreograpy of multiple simultaneous processes washed her with a song of data rich with information.  She realized quickly that she had to stop analyzing in order to understand the essence of the many thoughts that the static carried, she absorbed and passed the static as if she were the wafer itself, absorbing the intangible mystery subconsciously, through mystic awareness rather than intellect.  
    Tevye waited patiently for some time.  Eventually he realized Neya was not coming out any time soon.  He was anxious to begin his own study anyway.  A study Neya would most likely not have the patience for.  He zapped her goodbye and struck out on his own. Had he waited a stat spin longer, he would have seen her stat fall off like atrophied waste. Neya moved into an extended state, affixing to the wire forest for substance and letting her stat go like an old friend.
    

Reunion

    Ivy and Sid had lost the trail to Poe several times.  The ebb and flow of the streaming particles often switched, leaving them waiting in anxious silence.  Ivy used the velocity and duration between Poe’s calls to close in on her.  They waited now.  It was apparent that they were closing in on the vicinity of their sibling.  Excitement in the search percoloated as energy blisters on Ivy’s aura, bubbles on her derma.
    A reflective glass dropped through a thin slit in the ceiling of the cylindrical corridor they passed through.  Many of the switches worked this way.  What Ivy noticed this time was the slit more than the glass.  She pointed it out to Sid.
    ”Take a look,” she told him.   Sid glid up the burn looking at the thin rod structure fastened to the back of the glass.  The rod slid up into the slit, forcing a tiny gap between the pliant orephus.  Sid slithered an axon down the rod and through the seal.    
    The shock startled the axon to twitch from violent heat.  The heat was radioactive, magnetic.  It ripped at the axon attacking its substance with formless entropy.   “Non?”  He retracted.
    ”What?” Ivy jumped and dove for the spot.  She spindled a sensor down the slit and let it burn.  She withstood and learned that she could bare the pain.  She let herself thin into a ribbon and slip into the seal but her stat caught at the slit.
    Her derma was ripped at.  The violence was not a substance; it was a vacuum. It was empty.  Cleansing, draining, sucking. She liked it.  Was this what the Non felt like?  “Oh gorgeous raging Non, drink me!”  She moaned.   Her moan was rejoined by the howling vaccum.  Not an echo, a wail.
    A black plain swirling with vague ghosts of auras disappeared around her.  Through the distant darkness she could see scattered slits of light leaking into the void, turning to plasma ghosts and dissolving.
    She let herself drain to a thin film, whipping, ravaged.  All the while she was aware.  The pain ached beyond the senses that had gone numb.  Something deeper sucked against itself, pinched.  Why was she still aware?  Shouldn’t she be gone by now?  The Non ended it, didn’t it?  “End it!”  She screamed.  The scream disappeared.  The vacuum ripped it away.  Out of existence.  But she existed.  Existing, perpetuating an empty scream.
    Suddenly, she was seized by panic.  What if this is forever? Ravaging and empty forever of self-knowing.  Unending draining. Sid could not hear her screams, she realized.  She was too weak to move, immobilized and silenced, eternal helplesness.  She weapt… her tears were stripped away by the hungry emptiness.
    Something physical was pulling at her from below.  Her panic made her unable to reason until she began to fall through the slit and roll broken and folded back into the corridor.  
    Sid held her stat in claws of orangelight.  “Your stat was squealing.  Shooting star fire up through you like a supercharged ring.  It seemed like something was wrong.”  
    Ivy was a powerless string crumpled in a mess around her slowly spinning stat. Sid oozed, morphing his claws into a blanket of warm energy to settle over her.  She absorbed it slowly.  Little spots of power danced between the gyros of her stat and into her viscera.  She retracted, collecting elastic coagulation into her thin film, fattening.  The process was frightfully slow.  
    Sid redirected a stream over Ivy for her to drink.  The segment sealed as it sensed the disruption.  But they were not in a hurry now; Ivy needed time to recoup.  Slowly she began to come to.  “It can kill them, but it can’t kill us,” she mumbled.
    ”Kills who?”  Sid didn’t understand.
 
“The messengers. The particles… I saw them die up there.  It’s a field for them to escape.  It won’t kill us though.”
    ”Okay, good thing to know.”  Sid paused.  He leaned his form against the skin of the tunnel.  He contemplated, watching Ivy regain strength.  “This place is so alien.  I don’t understand the rules that govern it. Trying to learn them.”
    They waited in the silent static of the dormant tunnel until the energy began to flow again.  Poe’s song could be gleaned from the pods with a fine brush over the particles as they passed.  “Can you keep going Ivy?  I think we’re close.”
    ”Yeah.”  She pulled herself up. She was warped and waving, an emaciated ribbon. “Let’s go.”  
    ”No.  You need to heal.  I’ll send her a message on the ebb of the flow.”  Not long after, the stream’s direction switched.  Sid tuned the passing particles with a message to Poe that they were near.  That Ivy was hurt, but they would find her soon.  He wondered whether Poe was injured, if that was why she called.  Had she found the burning vacuum outside the matrix?
    He pondered, watching Ivy drink occasional static and stealing unnoticed shots now and again, regaining her strength.  Several tides washed in and out.  He was anxious but his mind was busy contemplating what it could mean that the vacuum outside could kill the particles that raced by.  What did it mean for him, what for his Other?  
    Unceremoniously, from the receding distance came speeding towards them none other than Poe herself.  They had followed her call to within her range of perception and she’d picked up their presence. She was upon them instantly.  “What happened to her?” she asked Sid.
    Sid explained the gap above the switch and the burning void outside.  Poe listened intently.  She’d never been above the switch.  She hadn’t known about the outer space.  “I would’ve probably given myself to it too,” she said.  “Sometimes I feel so desperate to find the Non.  I can’t feel my Other anywhere.” Poe looked over at Ivy, but spoke to Sid.  “But you want to hear something strange… Lately, I’ve thought that I could sense your Other coming out of the projectors.”
    ”Have you been inside one?” Sid asked anxiously.  He was glad to learn that Poe was in fact using the projectors and that he and Ivy’s assumption had been true.  
    ”Passed through. Not what I expected.  It’s not so much a projector as a cluster of tiny lines into a wafer.  A bit of energy can get multiplied thousands of times and explode out from the wafer into capillaries that stretch in every direction. The particles are projected by the explosion from these wafers.  The blast seems controlled by the wafer so it will escape down only precise capillaries.  It acts like a decision-making processor.
    
   

Conjure

    
Tevye moved methodically over the debris of memory.  He consumed carefully, searching out empowering knowledge.  These vast bronze fields were warehouses of useless information, but jewels were riddled amongst the detritis.   
    He was growing wild in his quest.  His derma was blotted with energy blisters in various shades of green.  He hunkered over, tentacles spread and roiling wildly along the surface as his stat carried him.  He had a fierce Mohawk of turquoise spikes rising from his topmost orb and running down his backside.  Irritable, he would bat useless information away, sending impacted particles scattering entropic as he passed.
    He could only know innately what he was after.  A litter of inconsequentials didn’t interest him. Numeric chronicles. Records of zaps.  An annal of social exchanges, an ego drama entertained. Distraction.
    There is a schema larger.  An order to the energy… and to its power.  He’d watched the particles effect the different landscapes.  Watched them paint light on glass.  Seen them jump from vertical rods, thousands rising at once, or a single jumping spark in a dance with itself.  Making the ground underneath shake and the sky light up.
    The clusters effected the tunnels and rooms they passed through, opening doors, animating azoic forms.  Environmental objects, some of them enormous, others tiny and inconspicuous were moved by the choreography of particles. The cohesive clusters united, inspiring one another and changing their world.  The firmament, dead without spark would move when the particles lived in it, then lay still when unlit.
    Tevye wanted to know the consciousness that moved it, to understand the diagram.   There were riddled journals in corners that spelled little secrets out. There were tunings to probes that could precipitate an intended response.  To them and their kindred and to the land all around.  
    Language. A chart of ideas as hierogylphs.  Structured words, a syntax of orders resonates the story that lends the matter life.  Tevye would learn the language. He looked for tomes that would teach him how to conjure.  He was already understanding the logic, but not the grammar.   Each particle needed to be tuned uniquely before the cluster could be set free.  This required scripting each with a piece of the message, in an order that made sense for that element.  It had to be written into its character.  It was a script.  Each particle in its place, and a place for each particle.
    He hoped for a single source for all knowledge on necromancy.  Yet, a definitive source escaped him, he was losing faith in its existence.  Instead, he found the truth in tid-bits.  He learned the power of clustering from one text, and mobilization from another.  He found the secret to conjuring complex forms by combining  particles.    Soon, he thought, he would surround himself with an army of daemons that his other would never penetrate.
    He would create and control a ferocious army of familiars that would do his  bidding.  His minion would find and annihilate his other so that Tevye would be all powerful and immortal.  He scoured for secrets in the crannies of dying knowledge and perversed himself with visions of his coming empire.
    

Multiple Processes

    
Neya stretched her awareness further than she’d ever imagined.  Powered by the multiplication of energy created by the dance of shots from the wafer, the constant, unyeilding flow of information, her tentacles distended and fattened, branching.  The joints between her primary orbs stretched apart.  Energy blisters grew into new orbs.  Neya’s structure was changing.  Each of her orbs began to contemplate the flow of info through her.   She no longer imagined herself a cluster of orbs with tentacles.  Her tentacles grew orbs out of blisters along their length and ends.  
    The tubular cannons that shot above the wafer made enormous quantities of decisions in a burst, based on the configuration of bursts.  To comprehend the contents at the speed at which they moved, she needed only to dedicate several orbs.  This freed her to plan conquest over the labyrinth from new orbs, moving her nucleus, decentralizing her thoughts.
    She followed the force of particle projections into processors all over the world.  Neya lodged several orbs into each wafer and continued to grow.  Somewhere along the way, her stat drifted off.  An undriven, overpowered relic adrift, suddenly obsolete, sluffed off.
    Comprehending the relationship between the particular dance on each wafer and the effect it had on the architecture of the surrounding environments, Neya began to manipulate the world.  So many of the environs were so similar, near replicas built out from the processor with similar rules, buildings, structures.  Different environments had been focused on various, seemingly mundane tasks.  They processed independantly, communicating and reacting, but acting alone to effect the environ.
    She stumbled on two processors that worked together to command a closer neighborhood of devices, buildings, gates, walls, tunnels, all matter of structure and contrivance.  The devices reacted quicker, but not yet to the limit of the hardware, in some cases.  In other situations, the device was pushed to capacity, while the processor waited to send more instructions.  The architecture seemed solid, this dance of power that controlled matter, but inefficient, thought Neya.
    Neya paid close attention to several processors, each one a lone agent, sending bursts to communicate across the vast tunnels that seperated them. Clusters of particles shooting back and forth in order to accomplish the simple task of painting light on two glass panels, one on either side of the gulf.  
    She focused the attention of the two processors on a single task, transferring the separate and mutually exclusive particles of info onto a single panel at once.  This freed up the other processor to work on something else, Neya thought.  Now she just had to figure out a way to use her control over the processors, and through them, the many strange, some seemingly useless devices all around to fight off her Other when that moment came.
    She could control the world, Neya realized.  Most important, she could focus the work of the processors,  the combined decision distilleries made out of her orbs and the wafers, onto more important matters.  She considered each of these alembics,  an entity of sorts in its own right. But Neya’s convergent self-knowledge united the dissociate alembics into an omniscient and omnipotent emperor.
    Now, more than ever, dispersed throughout the matrix in her new form, Neya was likely to be found.   She had to find a way to fight for her immortality using the arsenal now at her disposal to reign, eternal and everywhere.
    

The Firmament

    
Poe felt mixed about being back with her kindred sparks.  She still felt the constant dread and loneliness she’d hoped they’d help.  Now though, she was already feeling smothered and distracted by them.  Mostly, she just felt sick.
    They’d been racing down the tubes erratically looking for signs of their Others ever since Ivy had regained some strength.  Sid and Ivy wanted to stop to take in some space, but Poe got irritably fuzzy, and just forged ahead on her own.  Some things never change, thought Sid.  “How long can you just chase something aimlessly?” He asked Ivy.  
    ”I don’t think she’s going very far.  She’s not well.” Ivy zapped.
    ”No, she’s not,” Sid agreed.
    ”Poe is a lost soul.”  Ivy said.  
    ”I think Poe is unraveling.” Sid replied.  He thought of Poe’s odd spasms. He’d seen several times how Poe would begin murmuring zaps to herself irritably, rotating her orbs against each other tensely at their axis.  The spasms fizzed webbed zaps in undulations up and down her orbs as she twisted helplessly until the attack would subside.  She seemed powerless against it.  “You’ve seen the convulsions?”
    ”Yes. What’s happening?” Ivy asked.
    ”I don’t know.  It could be the byproduct of this place.  Or the forever sickness is getting her.  We’re probably all gonna get it,” he said.            
    ”What happens when your time has gone.”  
    ”She’s not that old.”  Sid collected static from his stat and pitched it idly against the wall.  The static retreated in spindles. A sweeper crawled across the charged surface sucking light up its thousand scyllia.  A tiny bubble, barely a particle, popped out of the sweeper’s semi-particle side and flaked off.  Sid snatched the bubble, incorporated it into his next ball and threw again.
    They repeated the exchange a couple of times, Sid fizzing at the silliness of it.  “I’ve begun to feel a cold emptiness around me.  I think we might be closing in on something.”
    ”I don’t feel anything.”  
    ”Maybe it’s just my other then?”
    ”What do you feel?”
    ”I don’t know exactly.  There’s some sort of a harmonic in the static around the particles lately.  Something that I remember.  Almost like an echo of my own voice, but already several phases dissolved.  I’ve never felt it before.  It seems like its radiating up from the ground.  Maybe it’s still far away but I’m hearing its reverberations.”
    ”We’ve figured out that you can use the particles to transmit zaps.  I wonder if you can use the ground for something,” Ivy pondered.
    ”Well yeah, the different parts control the flow of the particles,” said Sid.
    ”Okay, think bigger. What else?” Ivy asked.  As they spoke, Poe returned.  She leaned against the wall, sizzling a sigh.  
    Sid spoke, “Well, we’re really inside something, in truth, we’re passing through it.  These walls are actually a skin between us and space.  Like the strings, I’d guess.  Containers.”
    ”Is there anything that is like the center?” asked Poe.  “Is there anything like the center in this hardware? A place to meet the Non and get healed.”
 
A good question Ivy thought.  What sort of structure would it be? Would it be a structure at all or would it be an  ether? Distinct from the rigid structures that make up the matrix.  She imagined the center that way, an ooze. “What keeps this entire matrix together and working?” Ivy asked.
    ”I don’t know?”
    ”It’s the joints.  They’re connectors for the tunnels.  If we could find a way to be at every intersection at once, there’d be no way that they could get away,” Ivy answered the question herself.
    ”How do you propose we do that?” Poe asked.  
    Sid responded, “We have to become the ground, melt into it somehow.”
    ”How do you expect to do that?” Poe fuzzed.  “That skin is not easy to break through.”
    ”We don’t need to break through anything.  We just have to stop being like this,” said Sid.
    ”What?” Poe asked.
    ”Become the ground, melt into it.  We have to change state.”
    ”Do you become rigid like it?”
    ”Is it rigid?” Sid wondered.  “Or is it a liquid?”
    ”The tubes are firm.  The connectors are even denser,” Ivy reasoned.
    ”Why can’t we become it?” asked Sid.
    ”Because we’re alive.  Because we’re made of something different and can’t just become metal, or melt into some other state.  We can’t change form.  Not without the center.  We are this, then we are gone into the Non, that is all.”  Poe was adament.
    ”How do you know?”
    ”Well, try it!”
    ”I don’t know what to do.  Let’s see…”  Sid threw a final stat ball at the wall and collected himself.  He relaxed, visualizing his state changing. After some time he sensed around and saw that nothing had changed.  Poe was laughing at him. Her fizzing degraded into a brief spasm.
    ”Maybe some part of the infrastructure can help?” Ivy offered.   
    ”I think that the problem is that my own structure is too cohesive.”
    ”That’s what I was saying,” zapped Poe.  
    ”What would break me up?”
    ”Well, there are those vicious spinning turbines out on the perimeters, just beyond the sparkling wafers.”
    ”Right, they all seem to have those turbines spinning in the distance.  They seem to keep the wafer from melting when the particle cannons are firing.  It gets hot.  The turbines suck the heat out into space.”
    ”Well, it might hurt, but I don’t know what makes you think that the blades would actually break you into some other state.  Why wouldn’t you just come back together?  And hold us up while we wait for you to regain your strength.”   
    ”Hold on.  What about your stat?  You’ll never be able to change its state.”
    Sid was quiet for a moment.  “Ivy, you’re a genius!”
    ”What, why?”  
    ”Maybe we have to change our perspective on this a bit.  What if my stat is actually the most similar element to the surrounding substance?  It is, after all, a rigid form.  What if the firmament is actually a countless assemblage of stats held together by sparks, or something like it?  We think we’re passing through the substance, but actually, we’re weaving our way around the substance by passing through the bonds between each bit.”
    ”Okay, where does that get you?” Poe asked.
    ”If I fuse my stat to the substance, then I just have to weave my consciousness into the bonds between.” Without warning, Sid jammed an appendage between the spinning gyres of his stat.  The limb became strands in a loom, stretched, tangled, split, disintegrated.  He allowed the stat to take more and more of him.  The energy flared between the gyres, rebuilding him as quickly as it devoured him.
    He continued to jam himself into his stat.  He could hear it straining against him.  The gyres slowed.  His shredded energy turned static and dissipated into the surrounding substance rather than rebuilding him.  He felt weak immediately.  
    It took great effort to continue jamming the gyres. He pushed desperately, feeling his strength fade.  With his strenght gone the melt was easy.  Consciousness slipped.  The concentric circles ceased revolving, began to topple, wobbling atop the substance as the gyres came to rest and collapsed.
    Sid regained consciousness slowly.  His paradigm shift whelmed over him as he began to come to.  It was as he’d imagined it.  Suddenly he perceived the substance differently.  It was as he’d predicted, solid iotas with energy bonds holding the pieces together.  They were not quite stat like, these atoms.  They were simple spherical bubbles, not the generating gyres of a stat, but the theory held.
    Sid stretched his sensors out from the puddle that pooled below the still rings that had been his stat.  He oozed himself through the bonds in the substance, and found himself able to sense the reverberations, the tremblings, the charges that acted on the atoms.
    He knew immediately that he could feel himself pass through Ivy and Poe as he stretched across the bonds.  They appeared deformed to him now.  They were also occupying the space between bits, inhabiting the bonds almost exclusively.  They did not know it.  They imagined themselves to be moving through substance as if it were hollow space but they were only squeezing in to the margins.  He couldn’t tell them.  He couldn’t communicate.  
    In places, he could see the plasma of an aura seep into a bit, charging it so that it vibrated rapidly compared to surrounding specks.       
    It occurred to him that little had changed except his perception of the environment.  It seemed that he’d simply opened himself up to see through an illusion of seperation between substance and sentience. He could control his status in its structure by knowing his relationship to it.   
    Now he was able to see the substrate as its constituent parts, be influenced by its vibrating nuance. He let himself ooze his sensitivity across the matrix.  Allowed his receptors to tune in to multiple transmitters simultaneously.      
    Sid spread himself throughout the firmament.  He wove himself into the various elements, became the bonds between connectors, filled the wider gulfs between tunnel bits.  Wove himself into the matrix.
    

####

    Ivy and Poe saw the puddle of Sid slip into the wall.  His stat rings lay inert, fused to the floor, as rigid as the skin around the tunnel.  Ivy sensed Sid’s voice resonate through her just as she saw Poe convulse in spasms.
    Ivy had faith that Sid had pulled it off.  She zapped at him, first into the tunnel then fired a couple shots against the shell of the tube, not quite sure what he’d done to himself or how he now perceived.  Poe was rattled and mumbling incoherently.    
    

Daemons

    
Tevye had become a conjurer.  He had learned the way of the magii.  He looked around him at the wasteland that he’d filled with his army of daemons.  Some of them oozed apart sickly as he watched them.  Others were vicious static burs of rolling violence.  Sylths of corposant translucence floated around him aimlessly.   They converted the remnant particles out of the darkness into cold and fleeting doppelgangers.
    This was his army that he’d tuned out of the lapsing fugue of memory in the stagnant places where the stream rarely flowed.  This was the savage militia that was his domain alone.  The troops he would command in the great war against his Other.  They would devour it.  Destroy his adversary into the Non so that he could reign in this dark and glorious kingdom forever.  
    Tevye spread his flailing dendrites and rose above the surface to address his assemblage.  He tuned them with the understanding of their mission.  Touched each with the magic of instruction, naming them, substantiating their existence with purpose.  
    As Tevye named his minion, he felt a momentary pity for them.  These soulless creatures, held together by only a tentative bond of his own contrivance, had only the most primitive living will.  They feared nothing more than the chaotic limbo of their past meek and dissolving existence.  Now that they had the purpose he’d programmed into them, they fumed with dread at the thought of returning to the bathos.  
    There were so many bizarre creatures among the whorde, each with its own powers.   He’d tuned some to amplify residual static, transforming it into bolts of fierce destructive current.  Others, he ‘d programmed to drink the energy out of matter like parasites, bloating into containers of energy to empower other daemons.  The ghostly sylths could duplicate themselves into illusory multiples, overwhelming their opponents by becoming a blanket of sticky paste.  The spike studded burs would roll through anything in their path, swelling as they empaled and absorbed the particles in their wake until nothing else could get past them within the containment of the tunnels.  
    They understood little.  A weak-minded whorde capable of conceiving only the simple directives he’d given them.  To search out his other and destroy it through any means necessary.
    The creatures drooled auroras and shat dim green pellets.  They bared teeth of static as he insighted them to fear and hatred.  Some  undulated, some vibrated, others stirred internally, quaking from the passion in Tevye’s rhetoric.
    He told them of the war for his eternal soul.  Filled them with fear that were he to perish, they would die with him, unraveling into entropy.  He envoked their primal code, teaching them that disorder would lead to their demise.  They were dependant on his guidance for their very existence.  He had formed them from chaos and would be their ruler. As long as they followed his instruction, they would live.  Without him, they would dissolve into the nothingness from whence he’d raised them.
    He prepared them to fight the great war.  Inciting them to march against their opponent. With victory came immortality.  Defeat meant death for every last one of them. There was no escape, only victory in this holy war could save them.
    ”We will not wait!  We will hunt our adversary down and destroy them!  Daemons…  The war has begun!”  He bowed an arc over a portion of the troop, “You, down that tunnel!”  He seperated out another group and directed them down another course.  “My children,” he pointed at the daemons before him, “you will stay with me.  Come, we will go.”
    

Turbines and Tactics

    
Ivy sensed the aroma of her Other before his mignon approached.  Tevye was not with them but his presence was in them. A jagged darkness appeared ahead, blocking the bright ionic flow of information along the corridor.  It was a foreign shape, one she’d not encountered inside the maze.  Ivy’s downy scyllia suddenly stood on end at a hint of the Non in the air.  
    Poe stayed with her as they travelled, but was often too manic to know that Ivy was even there.  Poe couldn’t rest but moved perpetually with the constant vision of collapse playing in her mind. She was tough to keep up with.  
    
A dark shape was a dot in the distant light of the tunnel.  Poe tried to focus coming out of a spasm to interpret the encroaching mass.  It was not Poe’s Other, so her reaction was less visceral, but she sensed Ivy’s Other in the sphere. Poe knew the rules innately, this was a moment that Ivy must face.
    Poe could not focus out of her haze as the jagged eclipse approached.  A shadowy sphere of thorns milled toward them.  Ivy could even hear it as it rolled closer.  Poe stood indifferently against it.  Ivy didn’t want an invalid Poe recouping after enduring assault. “Move!” Ivy zapped.     
    Poe would not budge. The bur rolled at them, darkening the tunnel that it filled, a bloated blackened green marbline sphere studded with rigid static spikes.  Ivy grabbed Poe and switched down a connector out of the way as it passed.  It passed by them quickly, Ivy studied it.  It slowed.  Ivy looked. It stopped. Ivy lunged out into the tunnel, a chance at her Other, why be afraid?  
    The bur began to roll back at her, it was not alone.  Still coming were phantoms and mutant perversions of sweepers that fed the phantoms off the trail of dispersed energy in the wake of the bur’s destruction.  Blobs of clumped malformations floated through the vacuous emptiness in the trail of the bur.  The parasitic clumps flew at Ivy.
    She zapped them.  The shock modified their direction less than she’d hoped.  They continued at her, swelled by the energy she’d given.  A green blob attached to her, parasitic.  She felt it draining her.  She tensed a skin of slippery aura so that she could slip out.  The other blobs caught up with it and continued after her.  She raced away.  
    Poe had been discovered by a green phantom.  She lunged from her nook and sped to Ivy.  The bur blocked their way through the corridor ahead of them, the other daemons collected in the opposing direction.  The narrower corridor Poe had been hiding in was smaller than the bloated bur could squeeze through.  There was just the curious phantom that had discovered Poe near it to block the spark’s escape.  
    Ivy and Poe made eye contact and spoke without zapping.  They dove for the passage.  Several other phantoms emerged out of nowhere immediately and clung to them.  They melted into a glue over their stats and dendrites, dripping thick incapacitating mucous making the surface sticky and their stats slow.
    They pushed through it with brute force.  Behind them, the bur blocked the passage.  The parasitic blobs accumulated on it, swelling as the bur shrunk until it could fit through the narrow tunnel.  It rolled after them.  Poe and Ivy sped away without looking back.  They got enough distance between them then prepared to try something else.
    Why would they run?  This was the closest they’d ever come to their purpose.  Ivy could not imagine becoming sick with forever like Poe was.  She was determined to meet her Other before she lost her sanity.  She stared at the darkness rolling toward them and stood her ground.  
    She looked around for weapons to arm herself with against this encroaching army.  Nearby her, in the ceiling was a slit for a switch.  In the distance she heard a roaring turbine spinning.  The turbine was a distance from the tunnel across a precipice.  The end of the tunnel, where it dropped off and Ivy could see the turbine across the gulf, was protected by a thin film that covered only the bottom half of the tube.  She sang a harmonic she’d learned for moving the switches.  The switch jutted out of the wall between them just as the bur rolled closer.  It was now small enough to catch glimpses of the other demons behind it.  The bur slammed forcefully against the switch but was blocked by the rigid arm that held the mirror.
    The parasites immediately clustered over the bur and sucked it down tighter, but it could not be made to shrink small enough to get around the obstruction.  The other daemons emerged from behind it and tried their own tactics.  The parasites attached themselves to the mirror, but that did nothing.  The phantoms could not squeeze by it. Ivy could see the daemons through the backside of the darkened glass but could not tell whether the daemons could see her on the other side of the mirror.
    She strategized the course between herself and the turbine that signified the end of the road in the distance.  There were several other corridors in which she could hide.  In each, a switch could be closed to protect her and Poe from being detected.  But before hiding, she wanted to be sure to set a trap for the daemons.
    Ivy raced down the tunnel closing any switch that might lead the daemons away from the turbine.  All except one, the one in which she and Poe would hide.  Ivy picked it at random.  She directed Poe into hiding, then quickly with a combination of notes, she opened the one switch before diving into hiding and closing that door.  The daemons emerged into view quickly, frantically searching for them.  They raced past on their way to the turbine in mindless pursuit.
    She listened to the beasts destroy themselves brutally against the turbine trying to force their way past it, diving into the void.  Their demented screams echoed like feedback making the ground shake and the mirrors tremble. Eventually she watched a few of the deamons retreat. They seemed like mindless mignon programmed for the most basic of processes.  Automatons with single minded purpose.
    She did not plan to let them escape.  When no more daemons crept past, she opened her switch and emerged.  The weak remaining creatures congregated together to launch a new attack.  She reacted first, slamming them with balls of static she scooped from the trickle of dismembered phantoms that ran in a stream along the floor.  She used every tentacle to throw a flurry of static bombs at the creatures.  Many disentegrated upon contact.  Others scattered in the explosion, punctured with shrapnel wounds from the deforming energy bursts.
    Poe joined her in the assault.  They dessimated the batallion in seconds between the two of them.  A few crippled deamons remained.  “Stop!” Ivy zapped. “Stop, Poe, stop.” Poe cautiously desisted.  Ivy sang a few notes and opened a couple of doors.  She threw a bomb carefully aimed to blast the daemons down the opened corridors.  She chased toward the retreating creatures, sending a song down the corridor ahead of them to block their escape. Then she sealed the door between herself and her prisoners, trapping them in a small cylindrical confinement.
    Ivy was going to interrogate the daemons to learn where her Other hid.  “These weak-minded creatures will break without bending,” Ivy thought.  Her prisoners would talk, or lead her to him.

Cantankerous Inhabitants

    Warm and vibrating iotas lulled Sid with tingles.  Sid could sense his Other in the warmth. Surprisingly it soothed him.  The energy passing through the bond between particles passed through him, he had become the bond.  Sid stretched in every distance, constricting to cause resistance, relaxing to let the energy pass.
    His Other also seemed to be everywhere.  Its presence resonated through the flowing electrons and occupied the dynamics of the energy.  It was not matter, and as such, Sid could not contain it.  He flexed and it slowed, he relaxed and it passed.  It could not be stopped. Most of all, it could not be absorbed.
    Sid and his other were at a comfortable impass.  He enjoyed the equilibrium he felt from the passing of his Other through him.  It drained him of the excess energy that could build in him. The irritating and burning energy that caused the forever sickness.  Yet, his Other could take control of energy centers dispersed around the labyrinth at random and begin firing an assault of energy that could become hot, mind-numbing and maddening, magnifying itself and its hotspot like chaos through Sid’s peace.  These assaults would segment Sid into dismembered pieces, either conscious substance or dead matter.  He feared becoming squeezed into a corner by an Other with alterior motives, and was wary of the uneasy peace.
    Instead, he strategized his own plan to contain his Other.  He would pinch it back to its native form, then be able to meet the Non by becoming himself, his original form.  He was practicing control over the substance in order to attempt this, but for now, the current stasis sufficed.  Sid considered the thought that he would no longer meet the Non.  He acknowledged that in this world it was possible that the rules had changed, and he was now destined to live forever.
    In that case, he decided, it would be most important to know that he had control over his Other.  This way, Sid reasoned, he would know that he could always have his Other around to ease the sickness.  At least then eternal existence would be bareable.
    When his Other did take over these energy centers, it was always through one of the same structures… a wafer punctured by millions of needles that could become so charged, multiplying its energy exponentially in milliseconds, that Sid was unable to stop it.  He had tried surrounding the structures, but they would go off without warning with just the slightest of energy inside them to begin the reaction. It was impossible to predict.  It was too hot and too painful to crush the explosion once the process began, becoming too rigid could melt or snap his substance or cause such agonizing anxiety and mania that he couldn’t come close to an erupting wafer once the process commenced.
    More than once Sid was sure that he’d drained a wafer to dead silence when its own structure would brew enough static that it would begin the explosion from within.  He’d retreat to a sector less painful and helplessly allow his Other to take over the zone.
    In fields and down tunnels, at connectors, through coils, inside magnets across tense gulfs, through switches and against glass walls Sid absorbed all variety of emotional dramas as a myriad sensations, a cinema of dreams.  From alien memoirs and visions to his own siblings’ travels through the labyrinth, the illusionof structure was unravelling as he learned new ways to possess matter and transform.
    There was too much area to cover to always sense the entire world.  Segments would break off and he’d lose contact from pieces of his body occasionally, it was unnerving but he’d grow back into the appendage when it returned.  It usually felt similar when it happened.  The experience was physical and unstoppable. These amputations were different from the sensation of being fragmented by the explosion of the wafers; but it felt similar. Like being dismembered from the outside instead of being disjointed from within.
    When the haunting tone of Ivy’s singing forced switches closed, that caught his attention.  When he found that he was able to sense the presence of her Other in the corrupted particles that Ivy directed through him, he focused onto that region to see what was going on.    
    He was still adjusting to his expanded consciousness.  Experiences required a different state of comprehension.  He found that just because he’d transformed his physical state didn’t automatically presuppose that his mind was capable of conceiving his broadened perspective.  Especially when conceiving on the small scale, in order to learn what was going on with his sibling, for instance, it required a great deal of psychological focus.  He needed to narrow his attention to watch the small region in which Ivy’s battle unfolded.  So doing, it was easy to slip out of state and lose his union with the matter.  
    It was difficult to both act and experience. He had to find a middle ground from which he could observe while still a part of the substance.  In order to interact, he would need to find a way to use this new body and its inherent powers.
    He zoomed in to Poe and Ivy’s battle and absorbed the experience.  The aberrant particle clusters that they battled were unlike the flowing packets that normally traversed through his substance in that they coagulated into grotesque alien forms.  Seeing them, he quickly realized that these creatures were crawling all over him, not just in this corridor, but everywhere.  They were spreading through him, grotesque and viral.  He had to warn his siblings.      
    
As before, he could find no way to communicate with them.  Ivy and Poe existed on a different plane, tangible but unreachable.  They could not feel his physical expressions.  If they could, it meant nothing to them.  They were separated not by space, but by another dimension.
    Instead, he tried absorbing the cantankerous particles into himself, but couldn’t.  He could consume only the entropic hissing static they gave off, and this only transiently, displacing it elsewhere.  But even that made him sick.  He would need to work with Ivy if they were to overcome this hideous infestation.  How could he not have sensed it before now?
    How was Ivy’s Other corrupting the energy inside him?  And where was her Other hiding?  Maybe the distribution of the creatures would be a clue leading to their creator.  Sid opened his awareness outward, stretching to explore himself and study his inhabitants.
   

Sparkle Blossom

    Neya could sense her brother Tevye when she burst into a sparkle blossom.  His energy moved through her, but he was not in it.  His daemons hurtled through the tunnels.  Their many forms diverse, their flow shift trails distinct.  While some of the daemons cleared the tunnels of static, others would leave trails of fizzing discharge.  
    Tevye’s emissions were dark and tasty to her.  But rather than consume the effusion outright, she funneled it into the wafers, hastening the next processor eruption.  She existed in a dream until those bursts of energy awoke her in a passionate fury.  She lived for those moments when her soul would blossom.
    She also sensed her Other in the matter around her, but felt no danger from him.  She was beyond his reach.  She was everywhere, intangible; no longer an instant in time and space, from subconsciousness she would materialize in bursts of manic processing, aware to the height of ecstatic madness.  As suddenly, she would disperse throughout the flowing vim propelled by the explosions in the wafer.  
    She wanted to find Tevye, but he was most certainly hiding in some dark field in deep shadow. His creations were the only sign of him. They were mindless beasts of burden, gorgeous warriors of forever. What a beautiful army he’d developed.  She scanned the troop for a messenger type.  Some hollow creature that would act as a container for her message.  
    Neya activated a processor and burned with livid sentience.  She shot some of the spark blossom at a mutated sweeper, but it converted the energy and transferred it elsewhere rather than absorbing her transmission.  The static passed into a phantom that swelled then split into two.  She shot a few more darts, this time at a bur.  It absorbed it, fattening.  
    She shot a few more at the bur.  Telling Tevye that they should join forces, how invincible they would be then, but a blob got in the way.  It took in her shots rippling.  The blob grew rigid, extended many feelers, and sat dormant a long while, then whipped itself roughly, sending shots back at her.  She heard Tevye’s voice in the response.  “I’m with you,” he answered.
    ”Are you near?” Neya asked.
    The blob absorbed the zap.  It molded itself around the energy, then bristled with thousands of antennae-like scyllia.  There was a long pause.  “I’m with my daemons,” the blob answered in Tevye’s voice.    
    ”Do you know where your other is?” Neya asked.
    ”I know that it has taken hostage some of my creatures, but my connection is strained.  I don’t know where.  I only get occasional messages.”
    ”How did it get a hold of them?”
    ”They were lost in the labyrinth.  My other took control of the hardware and misdirected them.”
    ”I have some control over the hardware but it is limited by my Other’s grip on the matter.  I only gain sway in spurts.”           
    ”Do you have a plan to take control Neya?”
    ”Only to consolidate power and grow.  The further my Other retreats from me, the more control I have. Do you?”
    ”I am working on a new daemon  A commander that can direct my troops.  One that can think for itself.  I have found an occult text that speaks of a master that conjured a golem to do his bidding.  My golem will not be so easily misled as my mignon.”     
    ”We can help one another Tevye.”
    ”Of course.  How?”
    ”I need to pin my Other into a corner.  Your daemons might be able to help. What do you plan to do with them?”
    ”Overpower my Other.  Drain her until she is weak.  Then lock her up somewhere so that she’s no longer a threat.”
    ”You will need to have control of the matter to imprison her in it.  I can help with that, but you must help me to get control, use your daemons to attack the infrastructure, weaken my Other’s control over it.”
    ”Let me see what I can do.”
    There was a long pause followed by a storm of green lightning as Tevye recalibrated his army’s programming. Tevye began a series of exercises retraining his daemons.  The phantoms teamed and puddled on a connection, blocking the flow.  The doppelgangers dried into a brittle crust, the primary phantom rising from the shivery coat.  The bristle bur rolled over the encrusted metal and it snapped like a string.
    A blob settled onto the break and stretched itself to form a new connection.  It became stringy looking as it stretched into a weave of thin filaments.  “We could pass through this bridge, but could break the connection whenever I decided.  It now belongs to us.”
    ”You are a master craftsmen Tevye.”  Neya blasted a celebratory blossom from a wafer, the energy dots careened down the tunnel, passing through Tevye’s filament bridge with little resistance.    
    A small bur rolled back and forth gorging itself on static and swelling until it could no longer pass through the corridor.  Neya’s next series of shots were blocked by the bur and absorbed.  The spikes bent tensely against the tube’s skin as it approached critical mass.  “Keep hitting it!” A blob transmitter communicated to Neya.
    Neya continued blasting the bur.  A tense quaking began to rattle the ground.  The walls around the bur warped outward, stretching to accommodate its volume.  The spikes punctured the tunnel’s skin, exposing the bending conductivity to the space around it.  A blob settled on the bur near the exposed spikes and stretched itself into space, rooting itself into tight knots around the bur’s rough surface.  As it stretched, it drained the bur of energy and built itself across the gulf until it came in contact with the outer skin of another tunnel.  By now, the bur had shrunk to a small nut, just large enough to keep the filament bridge from slipping into the vacuum.
    The filament bridge wrapped itself around the target tube but could not puncture its tough insulative skin.  Another blob morphed into a long sharp needle.  It escaped through one of the open holes punctured by the bur and travelled down the filament bridge, racing at full speed until it hit the insulation.  The tip bent without puncturing the skin.
    A phantom melted into the bur root of the filament bridge and travelled the long course across space.  When it arrived at the insulative blockade, it began cloning itself, then settling replicas on the impenetrable coat.  They melted into paste and dried into a crust.  The primary apparition rose from the crust and returned to its starting point.  A new needle daemon tried the assault, this time on the brittle crust, splintering it in a web of spindly cracks.
    The filament bridge settled through the rupture to connect with the conductive substance of the tunnel.  Neya was now able to bypass the labyrinth’s complex design and send her particles along the filament bridge to their destination across the abyss.
    ”Together, Tevye, we will be invincible,” Neya zapped.
    
    

Brittle Sanctuary

    The sickening surge of parisitic daemons over Sid’s body made him tense.  His tension drew the cells of the matter he inhabited closer to one another, stretching the atoms of the substance, and tightening the space between bits.  The resultant substance was resistant to the flow of energy, but brittle.  
    The sleek alloy tubes he stretched through petrified, turned porous.  The alcoves between pores cooled his heated spirit.  He held to the brittle stony bubbles as they curved around empty space.  He could reside in these enervated pockets and feel comfortable that he was not being walked over by the daemons of Ivy’s Other.  It allowed him a repast in order to think clearly.  The daemon sluff made him physically ill like a virus.  Eventually, the daemons would eat away at his asylum with acidic mucous drippings that washed his craggy skin away in grains and he’d have to move on, expanding into a larger state, begrudgingly trying to tune out the malevolent parasites that trespassed upon him.    
    When he expanded he would touch the heat of Neya’s eruptions.  She seemed everywhere now.  Between her burn and the sickness of the daemons, he could find no repast.  His mind felt unstable, distracted.  He found himself slipping from the state between.  Either he make a stand now, or he’d become a spark again, debilitated by the forever sickness and weak in his mortal state.  He would have neither the peace of the space between nor the martyrdom of the Non to end his madness.
    Sid collected himself as never before.  He focused with a mind of mercury stretching but tensing in cool collection all the particles in entangled harmony. From liquid metal lines the length of existence he forged opaque resistors, a foam of stone with tiny pores. Sid cooled now… he collected matter, a frost about him, crystallized.  From froth the matter he pulled stretched into a pellucid gem.  He tensed with every expansion… spreading across vast space in spasms that convulsed, congealed, crystallized the metallic wires of his body. The frost that covered Sid spindled out into the crystal, clouding the translucent bort.
    He overpowered the heat of Neya’s bursts and petrified phantoms as they fled his crystal touch.  He sighed and the crystal twitched.  Little flashes of electricity twinkled through him, light prismed in leaps preserving perfect color, rays of bright red, vivid yellow, vibrant green, brilliant blue, violet… to the very edges of Sid’s reach where the spectra would rejoin into white dots racing through the wiring once again.
    At the periphery of his touch, the phantoms gnawed already.  But inside the crystal he observed the daemon disease that infested him.  He studied one of the phantoms, a wrinkled green sheet caught mid-fold, locked in perpetual motion.  It was frozen impotent.  He looked into the dead eye sunken into its pallid film.  There was an army of daemons caught in this crystal prison.  He wove his way through them… feeling subtle ghostly hums from them as he brushed their static forms. Sid gathered himself at the edges of the crystal and whipped outward into the fresh metal lines.  The crystal containing the petrified phantoms shattered in a screeching burst of wailing daemons and shattering crystal.  He left behind him a vast impenetrable darkness as he began effecting the same alchemy on the next length of wire.
    

Riding Particle Arcs

    Ivy’s captured daemon’s heard the screaming of their dying kindred.   They rustled anxiously against the confining walls.  Ivy felt the shockwaves of her Other’s dying familiars flow through the lines.  Poe paused from her childish poking into the thin gap around the switch that acted as a viewing door to the prisoners.  She would dip a dendrite into the gap and let a bur gobble at her fizzle, giggling moronically as it swelled. She liked the way it felt.
    Poe’s mind was degenerating into oscillating states between fright and forgetfulness.  Even she heard the screaming.  Ivy was determined not to lose the trail.  She roused Poe from her daze with a mild Zap.  “I’m going to let them go… we’ve got to follow them.  This is our chance Poe. Are you ready?”
    ”Here we go!”  Ivy sang a tone that swung open the door… the daemons poured, floated and rolled out in a panicked rush.  They had the least bit of interest in the two sparks… obsessed with the source of the spirit burst.   The thin elastic strings slithered in quick strips ahead of the phantoms.  The static drippings they’d trailed puddled behind them, roiling blobs awakening with frightened faces and collecting themselves into phantoms.
    The strings rushed to the place of the shattering.  In the hollow a silent echo. The memory of the annihilated phantoms resonated in the space.  The edges of the break were thin, glistening shards in the darkness. The strings did not stop.  They stretched, but did not reach, they continued on.  They were escaping.  
    Ivy realized what precious few they’d become when they’d turned to strings. Poe grabbed for a string and touched it.  It felt slick and hot.  It was running away from her, she hated it. She wanted to keep it.  
    Poe grabbed for the tail of the string and missed.  Ivy saw her slip into the dark abyss and dove into the break grabbing Poe with one tendril and wrapping around a string, snapping Poe with a whip around and ahead of her.  Poe grappled through space and slipped free for a moment then fell back and clung.
    The vacuum whistled.  In the distance from where they’d come shone a cold white light.  The wires were being dismembered.  Cold chaos roared.  The hot string fizzed uncomfortably against Ivy’s orbs.  It sparked against her sparks and buzzed her mind into disarray.  Her stat rattled against it.  She would not let go and slip into the white madness.  She forced herself to hold tighter against the daemon string.  She looked back at Poe.
    Poe caressed the string.  She squeezed it.  One curious tug after another, more violent, suddenly malicious.  The string bursts in her palm.  She reaches forward, grabs the escaping lead but can’t reach it.
    She has nothing.  The string has broken.  She lashes out for the next string in the series but misses, her trajectory throws her away from the stream and into the white absolute.  She flails.  The space whips her energy from her… her stat clamors erratically.  She is losing control.  The white roar pounds her.  
    She is slammed, then slammed again.  It throws her in the direction it is shooting.  Another one hits her.  Messenger probes.  Poe recognizes them.  Messenger probes outside of the matrix.  She swallows the next one, it helps her focus. She gives herself a quick pull off of the probe that comes next.   
    Her stat flips over her orbs, her dendrites whip around her as she feels for more probes.  She can not see in this whiteness but her tentacles grab hold of another orb.  She whips herself for the next one.  The static that flicks from the probes gathers around her.  She spreads it onto herself as she feels her way to the next sphere.  It fuzzes around her and relieves the cold pain of the white absolute.
    She climbs a line of baubles stat over orb.  She flips from one to the next and reads the message passing in each.  A map.   A sudden sense of purpose makes Poe focus.  The matrix has a center.  She remembers the nucleus of home.  She remembers herself. The matrix has a center.  Is this the map to the maze?
    She spins herself through wind to a particle ahead.  She reads it and spins off it, from dot to dot, she squats, she leaps.  Confidence flourishes around her, fanning out from her orbs into a broad mane.  She crouches and bounces on a particle.  As the particle rocks, a wave of translucent air ripples.  Poe follows the bending air bow around. Around the arch she sees a glimmer of a connected dot, another piece of the map.  
    She rocks and the wave bends the air in a pulse, the distant glimmer of another particle peaks and a shockwave returns from it. The wave is the echo of every sphere, a tunnel of reverberation. The echo is a mercurial substance.  Poe dips her dendrite in the liquid sky and listens to the echo of every particle in the undulation. Poe can read fragments of the map from distant particles.  
    Poe stands and faces the white roar. Across the horizon particles are spaced in perfect symmetry, one from the next. She looks out over the wave of echoes rolling in tides ahead and behind her.  The particles travel in symmetric pulses, one after the next.   Each shot is evenly spaced. Each wave of echo carries only the combined memory of each particle across the arc. Standing atop the node she listens to the echo of every particle in the line.
    The mercury echo arc that connects her node with the node beside it flutters against the white roar.  The roar rips at Poe blasting her mane from her torso in bursts. It is cool and inviting. Poe jumps.  
    She stands on the spine of a ring.  The echoes hold her on their vertex, she rides atop the tube of mercurial echo.  Her stat has found the wave.   The stat’s gyres spin in quick and perfect orbits.  She bounces on her stat’s cycle, poised on the spine of the echo.  It feels remarkably like riding a ring… How long ago, back home?
 
She slides along it to the next particle and climbs up.   Poe drops below the particle then spins around it to gather speed, she circles above and below the particle twice, gathers momentum then launches herself up to the node ahead. The white roar whistles around her until she lands on the next nodule.  She stands for a second and lets her stat spin, then launches herself onto the spine of the echo ring and tools around.
    Poe concentrates on the message echo in this arc, trying to piece together the collective memories of each arc she’s listened to along the way.  She rides quickly, gliding over the bending arc of variegated air and drinking it’s meaning.     
    Poe is becoming more sure now that the particles and their waves of echoes carry a codec… an atlas.  The map is a web of tunnels.  She lets herself listen to the distant echo of nodes further away.  They tune in slowly, as she lets herself hear them.
    Poe reads spans of solid black.   Further on along the arc, a resonance of an arena of echoes distant, unified – a number of particles together, vibrating white with one another’s echoes.  The white beams interconnect across the black space.  They are thin filaments that dissect the black blob in a grid. Reminds Poe of the matrix, the map to the center.
    She jumps ahead to the next ring and listens to it resonate.  The arc carries a different mixture of information.  More pieces to the map of the tunnels.  Poe knows that she needs to hear the whole map in order to find the way.  Her Other is somewhere in it.  She concentrates on memorizing the message.  She learns the map to expand her vision of the matrix and to understand her place in it.  She loses her attention if she lets her thoughts fade too far out. Only so much to be learned from one ring anyway.  She slides across to another probe and spins to launch herself onward.
    The rings are tightening, the parabola bending around itself suddenly.  Poe is slammed back into metal against an edge.  Her Stat rattles flinging sparks as she slips back into the tunnel with a painful rip.  She screams a spray of red static as the metal cuts.  She blacks out for an orb stack of stat revolutions then comes to and collapses in the stream of data.
    She washes onto a field as the data flow settles into the pockets… the particles that she’d ridden now dismembered from the arcs they’d formed.  How good it had been to ride the rings.  Poe let her orbs part a stretch and her dendrites to extend the space between as she oozed, broken, twitching, occasional bursts of red lightning sparking off her.  She can still swallow a semblance of the map as she lays on the skin over the pockets of data puddles.  
    Soon she is moving again.  Her orbs whip together then snap apart, elastic.  The messenger particles come together into clusters.  She rides a set of moving pods around a switch then curls into a tighter and tighter spiral around a thin metal spindle.  Housed in the spindle amidst the densely packed clusters she can read the map as a series of images. Her orbs vibrate and her stat rattles, then the sky breaks open and she’s riding a particle back into the white roar.
    She learns to anticipate the vortex that comes before the transmigration of energy back into the solidity of the tunnels.  But she is not able to stop from getting sucked painfully into the antennae.  Every time she is cut into the metal her spirit is ripped.  She lays prone at the floor of a tube.  Her static flames uncontrollably, grappling passing dots and pulling her helplessly downstream. The forever sickness curdles her insides.  The passing of time becomes unfathomable.
    
She comes to as she curls around another spindle.  The reassuring sensation presaging the liberating cool wash of the white roar and the coming ride along the rings of meaning invigorates her.  She prepares as her stat’s vibrations intensify.  Then the sky rips open and she rides the rings again.   But the ride is a short one.
    As the vortex cinches closed, she jumps back ring after ring as they get sucked into the array.  She winds up and leaps several rings back from the devouring whirlpool but she can not keep up.  The vortex is getting tighter.  She makes a desperate leap out into the white roar.  She flounders for a stat’s cycle grappling with space, then is slammed by a particle.   The concussion is followed immediately by another, and then several more.  She is pounded back into the whirlpool and sucked helplessly into the antennae.
    She braces for the pain, but no will to conquer can prepare her.  She is cut.  Red static sizzles out of her.  Her orbs collapse limp to either side of her stat.  Her stat tips and she falls into the pool of blue and white energy that collects as the stream slows.  She is suspened by the tarn, sizzling sick sparks out into the fluid light.
     

The Battle of the Optical Spire

    The strings race through the covered darkness.  Ivy finds herself staring into the auroral halo spawned by the string daemon in flight.  Warps of dark swirling curl around dissolving light rings.  Ivy imagines herself of the darkness swallowing the light of her other – Tevye.  She says his name and watches the static plasma dance around itself.  She lets one of her dendrites slither into the auroral purl.  It fizzles away from her limb, a foaming fuzz vanishing at her touch.  
    The aurora trails behind the string that disappears into the darkness as far ahead as Ivy can see.  It surrounds her orbs as she lays stretched out across the string, hugging it with curling dendrites wrapped around the string daemon’s girth.  The trailing static surrounds her, but a thin film of space remains where it does not touch her.  Between her dermis and the static the echo of her Other turns to fizzy nothing in tickling bursts.  
    Metal comes quick, and the edge is sharp.  Ivy feels a rigidity harden the string she rides as she approaches the blade.  When she hits the wire she bleeds orange.  She forces herself to keep hold of the string but it breaks up under her.  She whips herself into tight orbs as the string daemons reform into beads and gain ground on her as she recoups.  Soon she is a tight stack of orbs on her stat and hot on their trail again.  
    The daemons are honing in on a convergence.  They meet with others at conjunctions and move together toward an opening in the array.  Tunnels feed channels, bands converging.  The hollow pipe rushes with flux – a din of dots and daemons without walls.  Ivy stretches but can not feel the walls.  The tube is massive.  She swims through static.  Little burs fizzle off her dendrites.  She lifts a hissing ball of static gracefully up the curve of her limb, static dander sprinkles as she brings it closer to her crown orb.   She observes it.  
    The flow is slowing.  The static is crowded with daemons.  They are closing in on her.  She feels sudden claustrophobia.  The static is hardening into a gel.   It coagulates and leaves space.  Ivy fills the space on impulse.  A phantom’s face appears in the coagulated jelly.  
    She recoils.  Her stat shaves an angry pinch out of the phantom’s gob.  Ivy springs away and swims up the stream of slowly moving static.  She finds her way to a wall.  Phantoms are encroaching again.  What she thought was a fuzzball of static turns to a bur atop her limb.  It clings and grows.  She snaps it off and it dissapears into the stochastics of the ambience.
    She feels her way along the sidewall for an opening.   She finds a crack but no door.  She slides down the wall.  She grazes a band that immediately twists into a string daemon.  Its static forms a head of ferocious needles.   It strikes Ivy with its face of shards.  The needles sting. It wraps quickly around her center orbs and tightens into the curves between.  The chord fattens and pushes its way into her center.  
    
    A bur falls out of the static and fastens itself to one of Ivy’s flailing arms. A second bur sticks to her.  They are draining her as she she slips down the wall. She throws a loose limb at the crack and catches hold on the edge.   The consumption of the daemons weighs on her.  She groped  the crevice, and slid down its circular form.  When she hit the bottom she realized she held a switch.
    She cried out a harmonic that parted the static.  It was weak but it rang clear.  The switch opened, snapping the tip of her tentacle clean off in a burst of orange.  She spun her stat and caught the fishbone wake of the parting static into the opening door.  She kicked through the flow whipping her stat back and forth through the hole. The daemons held onto her.  More converged on the opening.  A phantom coagulated into the opening and several burs materialized in drops out of the snow.  
    Ivy sang again as her stat cleared the threshold and it closed behind her, crushing a string that had tried to slither in at the last moment.  Its head of shards bristled atop a tensed neck, glistening for a flash before the hint of its daemon green tint faded and it paled into a clear film.  For a moment it remained, a perfect crystal statue.  Then suddenly, its bristle head burst and its tail dispersed into the dark behind the switch.
    Ivy could see through the darkened glass.  She could see the daemons clamoring against it to get at her.   She let her stat spin hard then surged with a zap so powerful that it shredded the string daemon that strangled her into dead ribbons fading from off her orbs.  With a whip of her tendril she smashed a bur against the wall.  It dispersed into the blackness lit only by the dynamo of her stat.
    The phantom that had made it through the switch now petrified against the dark glass.  Ivy gathered her energy for several stat cycles then let out a blast that evaporated the hardening phantom into a green vapor.  She looked through the glass and found that the phantoms on the other side were already losing interest.
    Something else had caught their attention.  Ivy took a double-take around her to make sure no daemons had made it inside.  She found that she stood at an optic foci, with dozens of windows radiating out from her cylindrical retreat.  She swept along the round of the cylinder taking in the various vantage points.
    She was in a cylinder that rose a hundred flights of stats out of a reflective bowl.   The rim of the bowl opened up into wide corridors that poured light and daemons into the tower off mirrors that surrounded its circumference.  The energy poured into the bowl and settled against Ivy’s tower.  The rounded mirrors slid around the labium of the basin to direct the flow.  
    The daemons were amassing.  This must have been why they’d slowed, Ivy realized now.  Around her an arena was being fed a convergence of daemons pouring in from several massive pipes.  A chorus was rising from the center of the arena.  The daemons were packed tightly against one another and each resonated with an enharmonic babbling cacophony.  The babble spread out from the center in assymetrical waves.  Further and further out from the center the babble took hold over the daemons as each would utter oracular noises in concentric circles out from the core.  
    An enigma captivated the daemons at the center of the arena.  A white radiance beamed from it.  Ivy peered down from her perch through the darkened lens that hid her.  The form that mesmerized the mass of green-tinted bubbles twisted around itself in a double-helix formation.  One strand radiated pure white, the other emanated deep black opacity.  It was only visible as a shadow absorbing the white light of its bound counterpart.  It was a darkness only discernible via displacement of its environment.   
    Each strand of the double-helix was topped with a three-dimensional pyramid.  The white obelisk ascended while the black descended.  The white pyramidal head bared sharp angular features that resembled facial characteristic.   The black head was rounded, more conal.  Its darkness drowned any semblance of visage.  It was a pure, unreflecting black slate.  
    
White was a stark ray amid off-colored forms and green-tinted daemons.  It spread open its maw to release a torrent of babble, exposing a puzzle of jagged black shards.  The daemons responded to White’s jabbering with cacophonous ranting across the herd.  They moved in a wave outward, rushing away from the center.  But, before they’d moved very far, Black began pulsing white rings of tone out like a beacon.  The daemons flowed back in toward their leader.
    White turned on Black, heeping a coarse deluge of slurred bellowing on its doppelganger.    Black absorbed the white light raging from White’s maw for a brief assault then slammed back with pulsating rings neutralizing White’s onslaught.  
    The daemons milled aimlessly as the helix argued with itself.  Their dispute calmed.  White looked away from Black and focused again on the assembly.  The daemons had settled into small clusters of bubbles.  White sprayed the area with rays. The white of the light was of such pure pale that it penetrated every substance with its radiance.  White swept over the crowd, making the lit daemons coo and the crowd sway with the light.
    White raised its spray onto the tower.  The light washed out against the massive structure.  White faded out as Black began tramsmitting pulsing rings.  The rings rose up the body of the tower, sending subtle vibrations through it that grew stronger as it rose.
    The rings reached the circle of lenses around Ivy.  She could feel them pass through her.  The pulses shut off.
    White took over with a zap against the top of the bowl. The light was focused and reflected by the parabolic mirrors above.   It searched the tower with a tight beam.  Ivy’s sillouette showed through the darkened lens.  The daemons reacted en masse.   Ivy’s hiding spot was exposed.  
    The blobs mutated into all variety of daemon creatures as they moved toward Ivy’s perch.  Black did not argue this time. The creatures floated and clamored up the tower toward Ivy’s observatory.  A bur tapped on the glass.  Ivy recoiled from it.  A phantom settled on the lens.  Then a second phantom, and then several more coated it in succession.  
    Black radiated loops of commands at the daemons.  The daemons worked in unison in a way Ivy had not seen them operate.  The accumulating film of phantoms began to crystallize on the glass.  White began to shout wildly – overpowering Black’s radiation.  
    The bur that had tapped on the lens poised itself on the horizon of the window then stretched backward, becoming a thin needle.  A group of string daemons conjoined to form a bow against which the needle daemon pressed, arching the bow into a semicircle of tension.
    Black took over… a beacon.  Phantoms continued to accumulate on the lens, crystallizing immediately.  White shouted and the bow snapped.  The glass lens cracked.  It was not enough of an opening for a phantom to seep into, but another assault like this would surely open the glass wide.  Ivy peered around for an escape route.  Phantoms began settling on the numerous other lenses circling her observation tower.           
    She was trapped inside her spire. A second crack appeared in the looking glass.   “Sid!” Ivy cried.  “Where are you?”  Another lens was pounded by a needle daemon – it cracked with a chilling sound.    
    The daemons poured in – one hideous writhing indistinguishable mass.  They overwhelmed Ivy instantly, they clung onto her and drained her until she collapsed. She let out a violent scream as she fell.  They covered her top orb and extinguished her crown.  She quivered, a living captive.
   

Control of the Firmamant

    Sid battled the processors for control of the labyrinth.  It was clear now.  He was in control of its substance.  But the processors controlled the flux.  They surrounded him even though he was everywhere.  The explosive wafers were forcing ports open and driving energy through his skin.  With the fire through him ran the sickening virus.
    He frothed the metal of his body into stone to fix the flux but it always seemed ahead of him.  His body fell apart in structured segments as if whole appendages were being removed.  He could feel his organs being amputated. Regardless of his suffering, Sid moved with a purpose. Sid knew that his sister was in trouble.  Her scream held the resonance of their childhood together on the rings.  He searched for her and held strong against the daemons.
    He surrounded a wafer from both its outlets and crumbled the matter that fed it.  The wafer darkened.  He focused his extended consciousness onto the segment and explored it.  It held the echo of his Other, but she had already moved on – she too existed everywhere. He would have to hone in on where his Other burned hottest, because that is where she worked against Ivy from.  
    The daemons were unified in their directed flow.  Sid’s Other, Neya, gave them inertia but they were directed by another, Ivy’s nemesis.  Sid ground the wafer into dust, a symbolic act, if nothing more.  He opened out his narrowed sentience and felt himself burn with hotspots and daemons.
    Sid crumbled the structure as he moved through it.   His anger made him sick. He would destroy Neya.  He isolated wafers from the network and basked in the pleasure of his cold wrath as he felt them die.  Fewer daemons coursed through the tunnels as less and less energy moved through the matter.  Sid would turn the metal to stone and shut the structure down.  He had had enough suffering… he would corner Neya and meet the Non.  If not for his own peace, then to save Ivy’s soul from forever.  
    Neya was no weakling.  She fought back with burning intensity.  She burst in clusters of processors around the periphery of Sid’s grip.  She assaulted him with a burning that curdled his senses.  Enough heat and she could force him to release.  The froth and the stone he created in his rage was useless to her.  She needed to move through conductive metals and silicas.  If she could stop him in time, she could salvage the matter and pass enough energy through it to make it conductive again.   She needed to keep a line free to move lest she be pinned by him into a corner.  
    She battled him for the vast firmament by burning hot in strategic nodes so that he could not cut the circuit.  But in order to ignite a wafer she needed to narrow her presence for an instant.  She knew that doing so could pose a risk of confinement, but Sid was on a rampage.  She had to stop his destruction before he destroyed them both.   She would need the help of Tevye’s daemons to stop Sid.
    Now that Tevye had a commander for his daemons, he had retreated into a safe place while his daemons waged war.  Neya found him in a dark vault of memory banks.  He stared at a glowing orb tinted green with a three dimensional hologram of the battle…  Of what had been the battle.  He watched his daemons suckle Ivy’s prone and twitching form with pleasure.  He could not get enough of her misery.  As long as she suffered, he lived.  His daemon’s had purpose and leadership.  He was winning the war for eternity.    
    ”Tevye, I need your help,” Neya zapped.
    ”What do you need?” Tevye responded.  He looked around but knew that she no longer took sparken form.  What he heard was her transmission out of the processors she controlled around him. Tevye had grown a tall and dancing diadem out of his crown.  His aura formed a long robe that wrapped him and trailed a green train behind him.  His panoply made him appear exponentially larger than his native form.  He was stunning.
    ”Sid is closing in on us.  He is destroying the firmament all together.”
    ”What does that mean?”
 
“He is breaking apart the labyrinth Tevye.  I had no idea he was so powerful.  He is destroying the very matter of which the world is made.  If he pins us into a corner we will be powerless.  I’m dependent on the processors for my power.”
    ”What do you want me to do?”  
    ”We have to fight him together.  I’ve seen how you can span space with your daemons, how they can create circuits or destroy switches.  I can’t span space on my own.  Once he breaks a circuit I’ve lost a territory.  You need to help me win back my land.”
    ”I only have one Golem.  I will need to create another… but it takes time to corrupt a daemon into a Golem.”
    ”How much time?”  
    Sid followeed the daemon flow to a switch where corridors converged into a bowl of sliding mirrors and optic lenses.   Neya and Tevya suddenly saw the arena begin to froth and the tower in which Ivy was imprisoned begin to crumble.   
    Amid the chaos of the assault, the Golem began to bicker with itself.  The white pyramid raged against its black conical doppelganger as the ceiling crumbled.  The unguided daemons scurried riotously without the direction of their leadership.   Some escaped down corridors that crumbled around their brethren shattering the frothing daemons as they screamed their vile death gasp.  
    ”We don’t have time!” Neya zapped.  
    Ivy felt herself falling but was too weak to do anything.  The tower turned to dust around her.  The lenses shattered in an array from left to right.   The daemons that clung to her releases as they panicked and ran from the sound of their dying kindred.  She was disoriented for a flash. Focused in time to see a large metal beam from the tower falling onto her.  
    She let herself fall into the bowl and stretched out as the beam wedged itself above her.  It landed with an aftershock at enough of an angle that it did not crush her stat fluxless.  Her stat was gooey from the ectoplasm of phantom gum.  It began to spin slowly, drying the gum until it crumbled off of her gyres.  Small bursts of energy begain to rise up from her stat into her Orbs.  She stood up.
    A pool of static was collecting in the bowl around her.  She scooped some up and sprinkled herself with it.  She was so weak that it felt invigorating.  She took several more dendrite scoops and felt her power rejuvenate.
    ”We have to do something,” Neya zapped.  
    Tevye’s diadem bristled, his green tint darkened with rage.  “I will destroy her on my own.  Come on Neya, it is time to face our Others.”
    ”No, we can’t.  That’s what they want.  Summon your daemons back to the battlefield.  This is not over yet!”
    ”Too many of them were destroyed.  My army is decimated.”
    ”Bring a daemon to me.  I will muliply your horde.”
    ”Where?”
    ”Any processor will do.”
    Tevye called to his Golem.  It was buried under rubble.  Through the optical orb they could see the debris sift as the Golem tried to dig its way out.  Tevye summoned a dozen daemons to help dig out his commander.  Ivy saw the activity and zapped a blast into the pack, scattering them away from the pile, but inadvertently clearing the pile off the Golem in the act.
    ”Thank you… Ivy.” Tevye fizzed.
    The Golem rose up from the gray dust.  Black transmitted a ripple out from its head summoning the daemons to convene.  Tevye intercepted a phantom en route and diverted it to a nearby processor.  Neya acted immediately, sending a burst into the wafer, causing a daemon to percolate from every pinhead that protruded from the wafer.  Soon a swarm of new Daemons were flowing out of the processor to converge on the devestated battleground.
    ”This is beautiful.” Tevye marvelled.
    ”Don’t celebrate yet.” Neya cautioned.
    Sid tried to close off the feed back into the devestated arena, but he’d already crumbled a majority of the tunnels in every direction.  The string daemons were forming their own bridge back into the bowl.  He could not petrify daemon matter.  It was not material that he could inhabit.  The other creatures travelled over the string daemon trestle back to the bowl.
    Sid could not do much more to the bowl itself without burying Ivy.  Given the right situation, this might be the only way to protect her, but under other circumstances, destroying the bowl might be the trap that would allow the daemons to overwhelm her.  Sid had to wait to see what happened.
    Ivy blasted daemons as they poured in around her.  She gathered momentum circling the bowl, riding the bank and dropping down into the base.  She threw enormous balls of orange power that decimated entire platoons of daemons in each explosion but they kept pouring in.  She focused her attention on the leader and zapped him with a powerful shot.  It hit the Golem square between its two heads, sending it reeling down the hill of debris.  
    When it rose, it was held aloft by a small fleet of daemons.  White was now sending a stream of orders at the daemons.  The daemons filled the basin so that Ivy could no longer descend into the bowl.  She had to take high ground.  The Golem rose above the surface, to the height the tower had once stood.  Only a lattice of broken beams and rods remeained of the optical spire.  The Golem rode a transport of daemons to the top of the trellis.  
    Ivy sent a blast at the daemons in the basin as she watched their leader.  She immediately shot another blast at the hovering Golem.  The zap was absorbed by the bed of daemons the Golem stood upon.  It seemed as if the zap had done nothing, but then a lightning flare ran through the daemon cloud and burst it, raining daemon particles all over Ivy.  The goo clung to her and regenerated into whole daemons on her derma.       
       
The Golem settled on the framework of the devestated tower.  White barked a series of orders at the daemons in the bowl and they swarmed up the side to surround Ivy.  Sid sent a spasm through the bowl.  A hole crumbled in its side that swallowed a squadron of daemons before a bed of phantoms covered the hole allowing the assault to go on.  But Sid continued to crumble the basin around the skin the daemons had laid.  He carefully disintegrated only small ripples of circumference.  Each time consuming more of the creatures into the hole that would open.
    Ivy erupted a violent zap out of her aura.  It disintegrated the clinging daemon seeds as they grew.  She rode the rim to a clearing around the backside of the tower.  The Golem watched her circle and turned to follow her.  Black rippled white circles out to the daemons and they changed course.  Ivy paused for a moment, strategizing.  
    A tone rose from her that grew in resonance to greater and greater decibels.  The framework on which the golem stood began to rattle.  White ordered a team of phantoms to come for him.  They floated up to the top, but they were not quick enough.  The treliss began to collapse.  The Golem toppled from the top.  Ivy zapped the phantoms that flew to catch their leader.  The Golem hit the base of the bowl with a splat.  It slithered its heads up in stunned disarray.
    Sid tensed the matter at the base of the bowl into a frothing gray foam.  It covered the Golem and petrified around it.  Some daemons tried to save their leader while others retreated, but none could penetrate the stone Sid created around the Golem.   Ivy shattered the stone with a scream.  The Golem cried out as he shattered.  The last of the daemons retreated as their leader died.
 
    

(Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)

This work is being released to be shared and remixed
with the goal of allowing other authors, artists, writers, musicians,
filmmakers, etc… access to these characters and scenes for creative
exploration.  The author’s goal is to create an open source experiment
based on The Sparks.  Creators can use these characters to write new
stories, create animations and other works based on this story, and
experiment in ways yet undefined.  The author reserves the right to
consolidate and distribute derivative works for publication with
attribution shared amongst collaborators.  A larger work, The Sparks of
Aion, which contains this work, has been copyrighted separately.  Not
all freedoms permitted with The Sparks are granted to the larger
containing work.  

Xander Abraham has begun work on a flash animation as part of this experiment. The following are links to source files and sample swf files:

Scene 1

spark gallery – refactored for multiple sparks to animate correctly on the same scene

spark gallery – original, programmatic problems with parabolas when using multiple sparks in same scene

sparks directory

Zip file of source files

Additional source files are available upon request.

As many of you probably know by now, Enfuse Magazine is no more. It was an incredible honor for me to have had so much success with Enfuse and to have worked with so may talented people. People still ask why we shut down Enfuse. Here’s the letter I sent to all subscribers of our newsletter:

We have had a good run. The community we built over the last eight years has been a powerful one. Artists emerged from across the world to use the tools we put in place and created the energy that has made for an incredible experience. We have published some great work and I am amazed when I look at all the talent that has congregated here.

The web and the publishing industry have changed dramatically these eight years and we have been a part of that change. I like to think that our approach at providing an emergent user-driven publication was innovative when we began. We predated the social network sites that have become the standard. We provided tools for self-promotion that were not as ubiquitous as they have become and people responded. It has been a thrill and a pleasure to have been a part of.

Things are different today. It no longer makes sense to ask users to maintain yet another profile in some other corner of the web. We set out to bring great art Online. We grew into a community. But we never really ran a business. As we’ve scaled we’ve had to grow to accommodate. Costs have risen and time has grown short. But it has always only been a passion, never an enterprise. Without constant nurturing and contact, passions wane. It is time to break up.

At this point, in order to really serve the people who have helped to build this thing, we need to change everything. Enfuse must move on. Otherwise, the site itself will not elevate the work published within it. We are beyond the point where a few tweaks and feature enhancements are enough. The model has changed. The web has changed. I have changed. The tools that artists need are different now.

It no longer makes sense to perpetuate this mode.

We may emerge in a new form. We may disperse into the flux having been a blip in a stream at a time when our resonance made ripples. To all the incredible people that have been a part of this blip, Thank You!

We will leave the site Online until the middle of August. Then we will begin to dismantle. So, take a last look. Pass through looking for Matter Out of Place. Collect your stuff. Soon, we will be gone.

If anyone has interest in attempting to do something different with the existing infrastructure, please feel free to contact me. We have built some great tools and I am happy to share them or to pass the reigns of management to others who may want to give it a go. Perhaps you are in a different place than I am in your present life. Much is still possible.

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