Shadows Out of Time

The Voices could not tolerate the Adversaries; indeed, they could tolerate no voices other than their own. As they had done before, they swiftly imposed silence on those competing voices. Their whispers from the darkness infested susceptible Adversary minds, spreading like flesh-eating insects until they consumed all other thoughts and those minds heard only messages of madness and despair. The Adversaries’ civilization consumed itself in fits of suicidal rage and horrific violence. And the Adversaries fell into their final darkness, despairing, weighted with the knowledge that their best effort had been insufficient. Many subsequent voices that arose were extinguished similarly, until all that remained were the Voices.

For billions of years after they’d fallen into the Adversaries’ trap, the Voices chittered among themselves at the heart of the galaxy in a place where gravity curled so tightly upon itself that all sane descriptions of space and time ceased to apply. So tightly that even the Hounds of Tyndalos found no angles upon which to fasten. Then, as had happened before, a new vessel for the Voices arose outside their prison, far out on a spiral arm. They knew of its imminence, since all of time was one to them, but those lesser voices had begun to intrude on their eternal debate. That was unforgivable.

Though the Voices could not escape their prison in corporeal form, their thoughts were not bound by the mundane laws of physics and could range instantly throughout all of time. The strongest cannibalized their weaker siblings, then cast their thoughts outward. In space-time, they would have been bound by the laws of Einstein — and at the fastest speed permitted them by beings even more ancient, it would have taken tens of millennia to reach the new vessel. But their thoughts permeated time, stretching from what came before the most distant past to what followed the most distant future. Their consciousness crossed that vast gap in a blink of their tens of thousands of multi-faceted eyes, as they had done so often before.

And the vessel heard the Voices and gave them entry.

Sam raised his head from the keyboard, where it had come to rest when he passed out towards the end of an epic programming session. It wasn’t the Jolt Cola, nor his painfully full bladder that woke him. It was the voices in his head. He sat up, sweat springing out upon his brow. It had been years since his diagnosis, and the transcranial magnetic stimulation he’d been prescribed had worked flawlessly to suppress the voices until today. He’d been one of the lucky ones for whom the headset technology worked. He tugged at the USB cable, saw the green LED had gone out. No problem, then. One of his arms must have unplugged it when he fell asleep across his keyboard, and the battery had run down. He pushed the cable back into its socket.

The voices strengthened.

“No no no no no no…” Sam rocked back and forth in his chair, cradling his head in his hands. That motion unplugged the headset from the computer, and the voices quietened. Sam blinked, then plugged the headset into a charger. The voices faded, almost, but not quite, below the level of perception. That was weird. He plugged the headset back into the computer, and the voices returned, stronger than before, like thousands of dry, brittle things rubbing together. Saying something that raised the hairs on his neck, though the message lay just beyond his grasp. He plugged his headset back into the external charger, and they faded once more, but not nearly as much; once heard, they lingered, whispering and teasing at one’s attention. He resisted the urge to plug his headset back into the computer, but it took a serious effort.

In the meantime, his bladder’s voice had grown stronger than any other, so he unplugged, relying on the headset’s internal battery, now recharged sufficiently to offer some protection, and fled the computer for the lab’s tiny bathroom.

When he returned, more alert and pain-free, he examined the progress indicator on the screen, once again ignoring the urging to plug back into the computer and listen to the voices. The development work for FERAL, the Fact and Evidence Research Acquisition Library, had taken nearly two years, but the compiler had finished its work and his program was finally ready. He was excited to see how the software would work in real life. If it worked as intended — and the simulation runs had been promising — it would scour the social media networks and flag untruths, both deliberate distortions and inadvertent errors.

Excitement helped him ignore the whispering voices while the program loaded and began running.