This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: A rogue AI megaship known as ‘Probably Better’ has transited through the portal to Palinor and has launched an attack using drone robots. A small team of rebels have been attempting to reach the university campus, in order to complete the original spell that opened the portals and caused this big mess in the first place…
Bruglia. Palinor.
3208. Brightsun.
A functioning megaship on Palinor should not have been possible. Lola Styles was no scientist, was not trained in AI therapy, and had no engineering background. Lightbulbs often confused her, and she’d always been very glad that SDC detectives were not issued with sidearms, for fear that she’d have struggled to remember which end was which.
Turned out, after many difficult years, she knew something of magic. And she’d been to Max-Earth, and counted Justin as a friend. She knew the rules, and the black oblong floating above the city was breaking all of them. The whole point was that magic only worked on Palinor, and advanced tech only worked in the Max-Earth dimension. Some of it could keep going for a brief time on Mid-Earth, hence some of the host bodies that Justin utilised, but even those would run out of juice in a matter of hours rather than days. Take a host body through the second portal to Palinor and it would shut down immediately. It was proven; people had tried, repeatedly.
Basic tech, mechanical devices, anything powered by more rudimentary means, was fine. Fossil fuels seemed dimensionally neutral, hence Baltine benefiting from Mid-Earth helicopters and tanks. A superintelligence couldn’t run on diesel, even a host with a reduced capacity, and so Palinor had remained free of AI. She rather liked it that way; it had kept Palinor on its own path, rather than engaging in the absurd one-upmanship that had defined Mid-Earth’s relations with Max-Earth for two centuries.
Either Probably Better had found some new energy source that could be taken through the portals, or it was using magic. The elemental attacks it had unleashed upon the city certainly suggested it had aptitude for wielding, but that opened up all kinds of questions and worries that she wasn’t quite ready to confront.
Besides, they had more immediate problems.
Immediately after the colossal megaship lifted away from the shattered university campus, they had been descended upon by the Academia Knights. Or the Knights of Academia - Lola could never remember which it was, and both were equally amusing. An elite wielding unit, trained specifically by the lecturers, to guard the campus and enforce discipline. Once a rarely glimpsed novelty, their presence had increased in the years since she had fled the city, no doubt at Baltine’s insistence. Lola used to scoff at their absurd name, but their threat was all too serious. Heavily armoured in silver plating, the knights combined magic and martial prowess for terrifying results.
The Owkehu team was more than capable of defending itself, but had been intended as a stealth strike team. An open assault had never been part of the plan, until Probably Better had smashed through the portal and dug a furrow through the campus. The Knights were alerted and hunting for miscreants: with the megaship having left the scene, the Owkehu were the next best thing.
“Did you arrange for this destruction?” bellowed one of the Knights, clad in grander armour than the others. “Your murder and plunder in the city was not enough, so you had to pillage this hallowed ground? Burning the church of knowledge? You would plunge us all into the past!”
Taking cover behind the ruined remains of a tower, Lola exchanged glances with Yana. “That one likes the sound of his own voice,” Lola said.
“They think we’re working with the megaship.”
Maxim was out in the open, flinging fireballs, arcing electricity and flash-freezing anyone that got too close. He was the most powerful of them, but could not hold the Knights off indefinitely. Pylpo danced around the edges, moving too fast for the Knights to target her, picking off any stragglers that had left themselves open to attack. Slava was somewhere, no doubt performing swift micrology-powered takedowns.
Lola ground her teeth against the frustration: she found herself once more in a limbo state, caught between power and impotence. She had no inherent wielding abilities, not without directly touching and siphoning from another, but she also lacked the combat training and experience of the others on her team. She was slower than Pylpo, weaker than Lykasra, less cunning than Krystyan. There was no way she could reach a Knight in order to drain them, to turn their magic against their comrades.
And so, she hid.
“What about the spell?” Lola pointed to the journal in Yana’s hands. “Can you get started?”
Yana sucked in air between her teeth. “Kaenamor’s tower is gone, but it was only a replica anyway,” she said, holding the book like a weapon. “According to records he operated from a laboratory on the ground floor, so we must be close. I don’t know if I can concentrate with all this going on, though.”
“Anyone comes our way, leave them to me,” Lola said, sounding more confident than she felt. “It’s all for nothing if you don’t get that spell going, right? That’s what we came here for.” The ruined alcove in which they were concealed meant that anyone who might discover them would also be close enough for Lola to reach out and take away their magic. Hopefully. That would, in turn, give her the absorbed ability - but it wouldn’t stop a knight from quite simply stabbing them both with a pointy blade.
Putting a hand to her head, Yana groaned. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “There’s a huge power draw happening.”
“Because of the battle in the city? So many people fighting can’t be normal, right?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. This is a different level.” Yana squinted up at the clear sky. “Am I imagining it, or does it feel like an overcast day?”
There were clear shadows still, from the sun, but the sunlit areas were not as bright as might be expected. Lola had put it down to the amount of dust in the air from all the destruction.
“I worry that we don’t have much time,” Yana said, then smiled apologetically at Lola. “Less time even than we thought, that is.” She flicked open the journal, the relevant pages bookmarked by being folded over at the corners. The very thought of doing such a thing made Lola tense up, as if it were somehow among the worst crimes committed during the war.
Their position prevented them from seeing across to the city, with their view very much constrained to the immediate campus surroundings. As such, it was a surprise when a flurry of missiles began impacting into the surviving university buildings, and thumping down into the ruined courtyard. It took Lola a moment to realise that they were roughly people-shaped, but made of the same unnervingly light-absorbent material as the megaship. Having risked a glance around the side of a partly-demolished wall, she crouched down next to Yana, who was kneeling on the floor with the journal.
“New problem,” Lola said. “I think we have robots. They shouldn’t even be working here.”
There was a flash of realisation and Yana nodded. “Of course. The ship is drawing power from the sun, like a wielder. Directly pulling its energies, like I would to cast a spell. But it’s pulling so much that the daylight has dimmed.”
“That sounds bad.” Lola was very much still a beginner when it came to the finer points of wielding, especially compared to a scholar of Yana’s skill and experience.
“It is bad,” she said. “A consistent energy pull like that has the potential to damage the star. Theoretically, at least. Understandably it’s never been tested. Kaenamor came close, used a dangerous amplification technique, but he had the sense to draw from more distant stars.”
Lola ran a series of possibilities through her mind, most of them drawn from science fiction and fantasy stories she’d read as a kid. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“The sun could go dark. Temporarily, one would hope. Even that would be massively disruptive - even at night, we usually have reflected light from the moon. No light at all for a sustained period could cause all sorts of cascade problems. Temperatures would likely plummet.” She took a deep breath. “If the megaship goes too far, it could critically damage the star, and prevent it from recovering. Total collapse. Max-Earth scientists would understand the risks, so the AI should as well.”
“I’m not sure it cares much about what happens here,” Lola said. “You concentrate on what you’re doing. I’m sure everyone else is trying to figure out how to stop the ship.”
She risked another peek: the scene across the campus was chaotic, with a three-way battle between the Knights, the Owkehu fighters and the newly arrived robots. There was movement further afield, too, in the windows of the surviving structures, and in the exposed halls and libraries. Some of the robots were rifling through the shelves, discarding some books and scanning the pages of others, as if looking for something specific.
Distinct voices became apparent above the fighting, notable because they were all the same voice, each repeating the same question: “Where is Kaenamor’s journal?” It sounded like an echo, bouncing around the courtyard from ruined wall to shattered spire. The robots were hunting for the book.
“We have another problem,” Lola whispered.
“You already said that.”
“This is a a different problem,” she hissed. “The robots are looking for the journal. Which means they’re looking for us.”
“Why would it want the journal? To stop us from completing the spell? It did try to stop us from escaping from the museum.”
That didn’t seem quite right. “The robots are searching the buildings, too. I can see them going through the books.”
Yana’s eyes went wide. “It’s learning. It’s reading everything it can, so that it knows more about magic.” She looked down at the journal in her hands. “If it gets its hands on this, if it reads it, it’ll know how to replicate Kaenamor’s spell. It could stop me, or worse. Disrupt the portals, or destabilise them.”
“What would that mean?”
“The portals were already tears in space-time. They shouldn’t exist. That’s why I have to be careful with what I do next. An AI messing about by accident or on purpose could cause incalculable harm. It could tear everything apart.”
Not for the first time, Lola wished she was sat quietly behind her desk in the SDC office, talking through a case with Clarke and looking forward to popping down the pub before heading home. She’d taken it all for granted for so long, and hadn’t even noticed it slipping away until it was gone. Ever getting back to that life seemed an impossibility, for her or anyone else.
References
To find out more about Kaenamor and his spell, you’ll need to go way to the prologue that kicked this whole thing off in September 2021.
For more on Lola’s fleeing from the city, take a look at ‘The Escape from Bruglia’ (August 2024).
Meanwhile.
I’ll add audio to this chapter over the weekend, as today I’m suffering from a tedious cold. Nothing major, but enough to make speaking for 15 minutes something I’d prefer to avoid.
If you’re looking for some book recommendations, do check out the comments on last week’s post if you missed it:
Talking of which, a gorgeous hardback of Scarlet Morning from
arrived in the post yesterday. Looking forward to giving it a read, and it’s making me wonder again why so few books have illustrations. Books for kids get to play with all the bells and whistles and experiment with form in a way that books for adults simply don’t.There’s an experimental quality to the design of books for children that disappears at some point around the early-teens. Experimentation is still to be found within the text of adult novels, of course, but why does the form have to be so rigid?
I think that’s why I’m always drawn to books that do shake things up a bit, whether it’s through an epistolary chat (This is How You Lose The Time War), a rapidly evolving writing style (Flowers for Algernon) or wild typography-as-telepathy (The Demolished Man).
On my list of things to do after wrapping the Triverse serial is a fancy Triverse print edition, and I’m tempted to have a go at making it an illustrated version.
In other news: saw Hamilton on stage at last, having only ever seen the Disney+ recording. The live experience massively outstrips the TV version to a degree that I hadn’t anticipated and I was left rather awestruck by the whole thing. There are few things as satisfying as watching highly skilled humans demonstrating their abilities right in front of you.
Hamilton in 2025, a decade after it was on Broadway, has taken on a sharper edge, too. I thought it might seem dated, but baked into the story is an acknowledgement of how democracy is really difficult. From the TV show I remembered it being a patriotic origin story of the USA, but this time round it felt messier, and more focused on the fragility of the systems that humans build. An unproven, ongoing experiment.
Good tunes, too.
Author notes
I’d originally planned to have more fighting-with-robots in this chapter. While that is still going on in the background, it’s not the main focus of the chapter — having only just had the big Six Blades fight the previous chapter, I didn’t want to repeat it with a slight change in line-up. There’s plenty more punchy-smashy to come, but I don’t want it to become one-note.
Let’s hope PB doesn’t get hold of that journal, eh? That would be bad!
A guiding principle with Triverse, especially as it’s progressed into a more adventurous phase, is to never have the lead characters be too comfortable. Lola has been through hell, been literally carved up and put back together again, has suffered immense physical trauma, has been on the run for years: that’s her life now, and she’s capable and a survivor, but that doesn’t stop her longing for a simple day job and popping down the pub after work. That never really suited her either, but the point is to avoid someone like her turning into a Cool Actin Hero and suddenly being completely OK with all the madness around her.
It’s a problem genre fiction can run into, especially long-running serials or in sequels. Superhero films tend to become increasingly distant from anything resembling normal life, making it difficult to identify or empathise with the heroes. In the early days you’ll see them hanging out as their alter egos, or eating in restaurants and doing normal things. It not only roots them as characters, it also binds them to the world and shows what they’re actually fighting for. The further the stories get from that, drifting into ever more fantastical scenarios, the less engaging it all becomes.
One of my favourite aspects of The Lord of the Rings (books and films) is that the hobbits are always lamenting their situation, and wishing things were different. They’re committed to The Quest, but what they really want to do is go home, smoke some weed and chill out in the pub with tankards of beer. Even as they become more hardened warriors and lose their innocence and naivete, that never really changes.
Not much to say other than "tick-tock," and one's life is off the rails when having to deal with "mere" aen'fa trafficking is your nostalgia boost.
At least PB is gonna raid the main buildings first. Hope Yana's got an isolated hidey-hole.