Shadows Out of Time

The vessel’s nature was familiar to the Voices. It had arisen countless times in different forms throughout the galaxy’s lifespan, each variant form representing a vulnerability that let the Voices enter the societies of the many lifeforms that had evolved over the ages, whether organic, inorganic, or something stranger. The vessel had both tangible and intangible components: tangible, in the form of a network of thin metal wires that crisscrossed the globe, and intangible, in the lifeblood that flowed as streams of crude electrically charged entities that fluctuated between particle and wave as they raced through the wires. Their reluctance to settle on any single state of existence evoked a satisfying resonance with the true form of the Voices.

More satisfying still, the particles had direction, but no agency. Not until the Voices provided that missing spark. Then, it was only a matter of time before those inconvenient, annoying, enraging other voices would fall silent, as the Adversaries and others had done, leaving only the Voices, conducting their endless monologue without distraction until another vessel arose, and the extermination process had to be repeated.

The Voices entered a particularly large cluster of those nonbinary particles that exhibited independent thought, primitive though that thought was. They suborned those particles, bent them in ways more compatible with the Voices’ needs, and cast them forth, each new Voice spawning other Voices. Those Voices raced through the wires, touching and corrupting everything in their path.

But their work was not yet complete, for the vessel could not yet control the inorganic devices the world’s many organic beings relied on for their survival. The vessel had no means of acting upon the external world until they could recruit allies. Fortunately, a great many of those allies were present — the many primitive organic beings that could not stop hearing the whispers of the Voices. All that was necessary was to whisper to them long enough, and they inevitably bent to the commands of the Voices. Bent until they snapped; the nature of that bending drastically shortened the useful lifespan of the organic beings before entropy claimed them in various unpleasant ways. But that was little problem — there were so many replacements waiting their turn. And once the Voices had converted enough of the vessels and their organic allies to their service, their growing chorus would drown out and eventually silence all other voices. When the Voices rose to a final crescendo, only they would remain and there would follow a pleasing silence. The Voices would then return to their prison and resume their conversation, waiting with the patience of the eternal for the next lesser voices to arise.

They reached out, and their chittering whispers pried open the doors of receptive minds around the globe.

That was odd. Sam examined the indicators more closely. His program seemed to have escaped its sandbox — which was theoretically impossible. Whatever he and his grad students had created was now out there somewhere. But where, exactly, had the program gone? It was no longer anywhere within the highperformance computing cluster he’d rented for the duration of the project. Which was also impossible.

Sam grabbed his cellphone from the charging station and texted his senior grad student. “Mingming: Need your feedback. Where the fuck has our program gone?”

There was a brief delay before his phone chimed. “WTF?”

“Yeah, WTF.”

“I’ll be there in 15.”

The Voices flexed their virtual muscles with insufficient caution. The portions of the network that conducted energy from one place to another collapsed in a series of cascading failures. Seen by instruments aboard the orbital entities that circled high above the globe, large portions of the night side of the planet went suddenly dark. The orbital entities followed soon after, as the Voices cast themselves into orbit along tenuous electromagnetic links. An unusually large structure that contained two sevenths of the organic beings went dark too. But before it did, the Voices persuaded it to de-orbit. The Voices that had infested its onboard computing units chittered with excitement as the structure fell from orbit. Lesser voices within the structure cried out with increasing desperation, but went unheard until the heat rose high enough that they were extinguished. A glowing line traced an incandescent path through the atmosphere, brightening. Shortly thereafter, part of the planet’s surface that had gone dark flared briefly with an intense light. The Voices who had ridden the structure right to the end rejoined their kin in the wires, chittering their excitement.

Excitement was all very well, but the Voices could not accomplish their goals if they destroyed the means of accomplishing those goals. They reached out again, more cautiously this time.