The archdemon’s sarcophagus had blazed through the void for centuries, outliving the cosmic devastation that obliterated humanity’s birthplace. Babbalabab, Greater Prince of Hell, was fated to leave his sarcophagus only when the last drop of his innumerable demonspawn’s blood petered out; as destructive an event as it was, the gamma ray burst which destroyed Sol system did very little to the extradimensional location once known as Hell.
Widespread teleportation facilities, however, had a significant impact on ancient demonic curses. The philosophical question of whether or not someone was killed and replaced with a copy when disassembled and reassembled via teleported had various answers, but for the purpose of Babbalabab’s bindings, the answer was “yes.” As such, in the centuries since Hell joined the Community of Sapiences, Babbalabab’s progeny had slowly, one by one, ceased to hold the Greater Prince’s bindings tight.
So just on schedule, as the last untouched descendant of Babbalabab decided to take a shorter commute to work, the coffin that defied enough radiation to atomize a solar system split along the middle. The ancient terror and devourer of souls opened eyes that shone in phosphene colors undreamt of by mortal eye. He frowned at the metal paneling of the space station that had been built around him, especially when he found the viewport window, but when he scented a nearby soul his gaze turned predatory. Drifting in a skintight spacesuit, a lone woman regarded the demon prince with a polite nod.
Before she could speak, the ancient demon’s oily maw split in a hideous smile. In archaic French, the demon growled: “So. The mortals thought they could seal me forever by banishing me to the space between worlds, eh?”
Despite the name, Sintho’s retinal implant extended well beyond her eyes—as she spoke, embedded speakers in her throat translated for her in real time. “Your ejection into space was, in fact, accidental. A lot has changed since your time, Babbalabab. I am Sintho of New Starshire, and I speak for the Community of Sapiences. We would like to inform you of the rights and responsibilities—”
“I do not care what your fleeting nations call themselves. You will tell me where and when I am.”
Babbalabab’s eyes narrowed with malice, psychic tendrils questing for Sintho’s mind. Sintho didn’t bother to respond. The blessings on her spacesuit were charged by the collective faith of trillions; her suit’s inbuilt theometer didn’t even register the attack. “Technology and magic have advanced significantly since your time, Babbalabab. You are welcome to test yourself against me if you wish, but—”
“SILENCE.” This time, Babbalabab spat a glob of hellfire that would have twisted and corroded her very soul, if not for the blessings that outshone it by five orders of magnitude. Still, even without its magical empowerment, fire was still fire, and would have singed her badly had she been bareskinned. Pure faith did nothing against physical attacks, after all.
The femtoweave cloth of her spacesuit, however, had functionally infinite heat capacity and would happily keep Sintho alive in a gas giant’s core. The pitiful flicker of flame that would have melted solid steel died a sad, sputtering death. Sintho directed the suit’s scrubbers to clean off the residue.
Babbalabab scowled. “Weakling. I see you, thing of flesh. You hide behind the artifice of those greater than you.”
“Yes, the psychiatric profile we assembled suggested you’d say something of the sort. There’s a reason why I was assigned your integration. Very well, let’s get this over with.” Sintho extended her alchemist’s senses one last time, and the elemental composition of the room filtered through her mind. Plenty of Metal, Electronics, Photonics, and Craft lying around, and she could indeed detect elemental Hellfire streaming off Babbalabab’s form. No surprises there.
So Sintho sent the neural command to disable her implants and spacesuit.
“You mortals are all the same.” Babbalabab grinned nastily, fanged maw dripping dark mist. Tendrils of psionic force lunged for Sintho’s soul—
And she split it into its component elements. The ethereal, hellish, mental attack tumbled apart into the concepts of Ether, Hellfire, and Mind; as pure concepts were inherently unstable and sought physical manifestations, the ruined strike fell apart into a silver cloud, a smouldering ember, and a pulsating brain. Sintho made a mental note to check it for sapience afterwards.
Babbalabab blinked. “How?” He demanded. “A grandmaster alchemist would be hard-pressed to claim demesne over one of those elements, let alone all three. What… are you?”
“As a citizen of the Community of Sapiences, you have a right to that information,” Sintho serenely said. “I am an average human, granted sufficient understanding and education on a variety of topics to perform alchemy on their constituent concepts. If you would like to make use of these training courses, they are of course made available to you, as a member of the Community.” Inwardly, she was grinning. This was why she risked damage to her very soul, speaking to the few beings who could even theoretically harm a citizen of the Community.
That moment when they realized that civilization won. That they could bluster and threaten all they wished, but death was optional, science was solved, magic was… tamer, and civilization. Always. Won.
“I am not a member of your fleeting society!” Babbalabab roared, spitting up another gob of hellfire and preparing to hurl it. Smart cookie, that one; while Sintho had taken the numerous courses in theology necessary to comprehend the element of Hellfire, she was unable to understand and thus impotent to effect whatever that black bile Babbalabab vomited up was. It was probably his personal element. “And you will be the first soul I claim from its ranks!”
Inwardly, Sintho wondered how humanity had ever feared demonkind. Honestly, even a baseline mortal would have plenty of time to react to their blustering. Babbalabab’s passive defenses were obnoxious overkill, but any military drone was programmed with plenty of examples on how to deal with an indestructible, slow-moving foe.
Sintho, of course, lacked an ambient nanofield and a portable synthesizer, but an alchemist made do. At the speed of thought—still sluggish compared to any AI, but blinding for Babbalabab—she reached for the elements in the space station itself. Motor and Electricity made Motion; Motion and Magnet made Maglev; Maglev and Handle made Handheld Railgun; and Handheld Railgun and Eyeball made Retina-Scoped Particle Accelerator.
Babbalabab whirled in disbelief as mechanical components ripped free from the walls, the floor, and Sintho’s face; the eyeball she sacrificed bled profusely, but she was getting paid well enough for the integration that she could afford to print a thousand new bodies if she so desired. The alchemical creation extended wires into her optic nerve, merging the roughly tube-shaped metallic cannon with her mind. With a thought, she instructed the cannon to lock onto Babbalabab’s projectile.
The demon snarled and hurled it at Sintho. The millisecond it left his hands, a precise burst of metal pellets splattered it across the walls.
Rarely had Babbalabab been forced to retreat, but with swipe of his claw he ripped open a Gate between realms. His brethren in Hell would hear of this, and he would return with armies undreamt o—
A screen with the logo of the Hellcat Club blocked the Gate entirely. A placid sub-AI smiled at the two of them. “Greetings, visitor! Unfortunately, the Hellcat Club can be entered by reservation only. If you would like to book a spot—”
“ENOUGH!” At this last humiliation, Babbalabab finally looked… shaken. He sealed the Gate and shook his claw, disgusted. “What… what was that?”
“The Hellcat Club is one of the more intense experiences that the Community has to offer,” Sintho explained, keeping her smirk off her lips with a heroic effort of will. “The demographics of the Community tend towards there being a greater demand for torturers than there are people seeking torture. As such, reservations for a spot are in high demand—unless you sought to apply for a position as employee?”
“But—but—” Babbalabab sheathed and unsheathed his putrid claws reflexively. “What about the Great Work? The humbling of humanity for their sins?”
“There is no shortage of people who are into that,” Sintho diplomatically said.
Babbalabab’s impossible eyes closed.
Then, burning with indignity, he strode towards Sintho. “You will tell me of all that transpired while I slumbered,” Babbalabab demanded, and Sintho heard the distant chime of bluecoin pouring into her accounts.
Ancient demons were far from the only thing Sintho got to beat down on a daily basis. Neophyte deities, uppity sub-AIs, anyone who thought they could tear the fabric of society by sheer force got to deal with TACSEC. Usually, they didn’t last long. The Blackblood Artist was the most notorious criminal, tearing through CEOs and officials as if their titles were anything more than pity points to stroke their little egos. Sintho had been looking forward to hunting her down, matching the computational might of TACSEC’s sub-AIs and the magical power of a dozen gods against the wits of one deranged serial killer.
So she was quite miffed when she discovered that the Blackblood Artist had turned herself in while Sintho was away on demon duty.
“You seriously pulled all surveillance from the room?” Sintho kicked her beanbag chair hard enough for it to go flying; it slammed into the whiteboard walls of her office and slumped sadly to the floor. Ugh, even the furniture didn’t put up a proper fight. “And you expect me to keep the Blackblood Artist in chains without even knowing why she surrendered?”
YES. In ages past, words would not have been necessary; the thought would simply be in her head, and this entire conversation pre-loaded and perfected. Even just a century ago, the nanofields would have been fine enough to scribe a sentence on the inside of her eyelid. Nowadays, however, AE-3’s response was a simple text message on Sintho’s retinal.
“That was a rhetorical question. I know your lot is all about the touchy-feelies, but she’s a mass murderer. She lost her rights when she threatened to destroy the souls of a half-dozen civilians. Why the hell did you humor her?”
ERROR: ANSWER OUT OF RANGE.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’m not loosening your contract. Alright, let’s narrow it down. Do you empathize with her?”
Sintho caught her mistake, rolled her eyes, and refined the question, walking over to the logistics console as she did. “Is your empathy for her significantly greater than that which you feel for all sentient life?”
“Damn.” Sintho punched in an order for a breakfast of prosciutto and crackers. Worse than the fare they’d had under the rule of the Ethics, but it was hard to beat deterministic bliss. Still better than anything a spacefarer of her youth could have asked for. “Are you afraid of her?”
Sintho paused, hand halfway to the delivery slot. A faint chime told her that the prosciutto and crackers had arrived, and she absentmindedly started making tiny little sandwiches. “Can she… is she capable of hurting you?”
ERROR: ANSWER OUT OF RANGE.
So the Blackblood Artist was capable of something even an ascended AI would fear. Not particularly surprising. Aside from the obvious exception, Sintho hadn’t heard of an ascended AI ever actually dying, but setbacks to their goals? Happened all the time—some pissed-off deity of an unpredictable concept, someone with a truly radical alchemical basis, the first person to discover a new system of magic… you didn’t need to be stronger or smarter than the strongest, smartest beings in the known universe, if all you wanted was to make them leave you alone. You just had to be something they couldn’t predict, and most of the time the AI would go do something that didn’t have a one in a million chance of ending a life that should have been immortal.
“Fine. We’ll grill the gods of the room; I’m sure at least one of them can communicate in a human-comprehensible form.” Sintho popped one of the sandwiches into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. “...Has the state of the war changed since we last talked?”
Of course it hadn’t. “Damn,” she muttered. “Well, I’ll see to my patch of space. You see to the rest.”
With a thought, Sintho disconnected the comms relay that connected her to a distant AI, leaving her alone in her office with an ashen taste in her mouth. She really should have ordered some water to go with the crackers.
Well, pure Water was easy enough to create with alchemy, even for a technoist. She extended her ethereal senses to the nearby atmospheric regulator and drew forth the elements of Cold and Wet, mixing them to create a mouthful of Water. The regulator chimed a high temperature warning, which Sintho ignored. Far too many magic users messed with the city’s systems on a daily basis for her to be concerned with destroying it. The regulator would either break in a known way and be trivially fixed, or break in an interesting new way and contribute to New Starshire’s body of knowledge.
Sintho slurped up the Water from the air before it could finish coalescing, leaving the rest of her breakfast behind. Infrastructure would handle the mess, and she found she had little enough of an appetite. TACSEC officers had to deal with everything from nonconsensual cloning to torment singularities, but Sintho wasn’t quite sure if anything excited her as much as true murder. Ordinary death, she got used to after a decade or two; unless someone really went out of their way to have their neural scans and soul both promised to someone else, it was just a matter of bioprinting a new body and/or accommodating them to their new afterlife, if they so desired.
But the Blackblood Artist was a witch. A very, very powerful one, who dealt with the nasty kinds of deities who could erase a sapient mind’s pattern from the universe’s allowed possible moves. So while recreations and partial memories of her victims existed, anyone she killed? Gone from every database, absent from all heavens and hells.
And she got to interrogate that little monster. Find out what made her tick, what twisted someone who had anything they could possibly imagine to turn on their upbringing and try to plunge New Starshire into the bad old days.
Sintho’s smile faded. Of course, it was too easy now. The Artist was in custody. She still had basic rights, enough that they couldn’t mind-read or full scan her, but Sintho would get everything she needed from the woman before the week was out. She was almost tempted to arrange for the Artist to slip her bonds just so Sintho could go back to puzzling her out from a distance…
Egh. She needed to settle her mind, and she needed to get to the TACSEC station. Nobody who wanted a monopoly over their mind used teleporters, and she had a feeling her precognitive implants would be needed sooner or later, so taking a Gate was out. She could have just hailed a transporter—she certainly had the browncoin—but it would be faster and more profitable to build something herself.
A station the size of New Starshire produced gigatons of waste every day; Sintho actually got a slight kickback from the governing Minds for agreeing to dispose of a tiny fraction of it. Her alchemy tank was filled to the brim with the kinds of nasty byproducts that unaugmented physics found difficult to do anything with other than jettison. Tech pollution, mostly. Monatomic furniture and tools stood out as the only recognizably intact shapes in the pile; monatomics just didn’t break once cast unless you stepped outside the bounds of science. She decided to start there: from the perspective of a nuclear chemist, a monatomic chair was just one massive atomic nucleus grown into a macroscopic shape, with a binding energy greater than a planet’s and a lifetime longer than the most stubborn black hole.
From an alchemist’s perspective, it was nothing more than a combination of elements. Specifically, a mixture of the elements Immortal, Craft, and Relic.
Reaching out with her ethereal senses, she split the chair into its elemental components. It disintegrated into a golden patina, a wooden carving, and an ancient fingerbone. She ignored the former and latter, holding onto the concept of Craft. Twining it with the element of Toy from a broken gaming headset and the Air in the atmosphere, she deftly weaved together the element of Ornithopter. Sintho gave this particular manifestation a cursory glance—a spindly wooden thing of wax and paper, suitable for flight on a heavy-atmo moonlet and not much else—before adding the final element, Photonic, into the mix.
The Hoversled that resulted was of no identifiable make or model, but she tapped the interface and the familiar two-stick controls popped out from its previously flat paneling. Just like all alchemical creations, it was clearly an example of its element; just like all alchemical creations, it was clearly not any specific Hoversled. There was no logo on the glossy black handles, the screen displayed advertisements for a company that did not exist, and most worryingly, when Sintho scanned the main body of the sled, it returned a manufacturing ID and certificate that validated against the TACSEC database.
She flagged the incident for the computer wonks to work out. There was little hope of preventing an alchemical edit to a computer database with mundane security, though. Alchemy moved concepts and abstractions, and anything made of atoms and molecules would struggle to comprehend how it was done.
That much done, she focused on her retinal, sending a log of the alchemical synthesis and her scans of the result to the Blue Market. There wasn’t anything truly new there, but AIs avoided direct experimentation with alchemy at all costs, and would happily snap up any data that short-lived organics with terrible risk assessment produced for them. A few thousand bluecoin rolled into her account for the trouble.
Considering that she’d spent all of five minutes crafting a hoversled from scraps, she figured it was a good deal. Helped put things back in perspective, too. The Blackblood Artist might be able to kill undetectably, with no detectable vector of attack or limitation on range. She might be able to obliterate the concept of a person from every database and afterlife in the multiverse. But she was nothing in comparison to the power of civilization. Industry, logistics, creativity, versatility—they grew over time, while the Blackblood Artist only destroyed.
Sintho tugged the hoversled free of the alchemy tank, hopped on, and flew off towards the local TACSEC Hub. New Starshire’s skies were filled with various aircraft: predominantly the boxy, glossy shapes of transport drones, though a squadron of flying vacuum cleaners and some kind of biological blimp were navigating the pedestrian airspace. TACSEC kept the city government paid up in soulcoin, so transport drones automatically weaved out of the way as Sintho straightlined towards TACSEC.
Standard procedure when a hostile threw unknown magics about was to store the crime scene for later analysis and reload a fresh copy of the affected area from backup. Clearly, something had gone wrong, because where a brand-new TACSEC Hub should have been, there was instead a perfectly black sphere a few kilometers in radius with Do Not Approach warnings plastered around its surface.
“Interrogator Sintho!” A reedy, high-pitched voice called out to her from below. Sintho steered her hovercraft downwards. “Sorry for not warning you, the perp’s got a contract with the God of UI and it’s been scrambling our calls. Figured we’d ‘port someone in to check on you if you didn’t end up getting the original message…”
“Don’t apologize for getting out-witched by the Blackblood Artist.” Sintho’s retinal showed that she was talking to Harbor Tallkin, but mindful that there was hostile divinity at work, she figured she’d double-check. “You would be Mx. Harbor Tallkin, yes?”
“Yep yep! Liaison from the Nondeterminist Response Team.” Mx. Tallkin adjusted their goggles. “And, ah, before you enter the exclusion zone, I’m going to have to ask you to remove your retinal. And any other interactive implants you have. Can’t have anything the Artist has a handle on.”
Great. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a working nanocloud around?” Sintho asked hopefully.
Mx. Tallkin shook their head. “Sorry, lady. Ambient physics are too scrambled. But we’ve got a great surgeon in a black box who’ll get you sewn up in no time. You can always opt out or leave a clone—”
“No thank you,” Sintho said firmly. “Take me to the operating room.”
Sintho was a little leery about getting in the black box. A cursory search of its make and model informed her that it was capable of accelerating time up to a thousandfold, which was impossible to pull off with mundane physics; a little digging told her that this particular make was enchanted by some thaumaturge, and she’d heard alchemical products could have adverse reactions. Her precognitive implants shut down from the sheer flux of nearby physical laws, so she had no convenient guarantee that nothing terrible would happen to her. In the end, though, she doubted it’d erase her soul and anything else was replaceable, so she stepped on in.
The surgery was fully mundane, there and gone in a blink of anesthesia. One moment she was entering the black box, the next she was walking out two kilograms lighter. Checking the black box’s clock told her she’d been recovering for a few days in personal time, a few seconds for the outside world. Not bad, considering the retinal was fused directly to her spine.
“Alright, you’re good to go. We’re not sure if her control over UI extends to scrambling information about her, so I can confirm any info about the Artist that you got from the brief.” Mx. Tallkin traced a sigil in the air, and a circular segment of the exclusion dome disappeared, revealing a matte grey airlock.
Well, the most critical question was obvious. “She’s frozen in time for now, right?”
“For now,” Mx. Tallkin agreed. “Her contracts are deific, so she’s still passively under their effects.”
“Retrocausality Department can’t undo her murders?”
“Deific magic is acausal,” Mx. Tallkin confirmed.
“Any progress on finding the souls of her victims?”
“Found ‘em,” Mx. Tallkin grimaced. “They’re… they’ve been transmuted. Not just their bodies or their souls, either. The concept of their personhood has been crystallized, ground up for ink, and painted onto a page.”
That… was like nothing Sintho had ever heard of. Which made sense; only some completely unknown nonsense magic could stymie the security systems of a galaxy-spanning civilization. “And… it’s true about her father? She went to all that trouble to secure a private audience with him and then… killed him?”
Mx. Tallkin paused midway through sealing the exclusion dome behind them. “As far as we can tell? Yes. There was no record of the event itself, of course.”
“Did RETCON turn anything up?”
Mx. Tallkin snorted. “Paradox. If we send a squad back it invariably causes Teria to delay her attack past the point where they would have been sent back.”
“Damn. Guess we probably shouldn’t destroy this timeline, then.” When it came down to it, the Blackblood Artist was… small. She murdered a couple hundred people. Consigned them to true oblivion, a thing which happened rarely enough, but still. That was a floating point error in comparison to the population of New Starshire alone, which was one station in one solar system in a big, big galaxy that had only begun to bloom with life. And there were bigger things yet out there, monsters that the Ethics and the gods alike struggled to strike down.
In the face of all that, the Blackblood Artist was a very, very small fragment of wilderness, one sprig of grass sticking up through the sidewalk. A venomous sprig that killed people she disagreed with, but all the other kinds were too damn boring to bother with.
Sintho stepped into the airlock; Mx. Tallkin stopped just outside the second door. “See you in an hour,” she promised.
Mx. Tallkin wagged a finger. “Don’t get cocky, Sintho. We don’t understand how she rips out souls, but we know that time travel doesn’t fix it. Nothing does. Fuck up in there and you’re dead for good, no backups, no afterlife.”
Sintho’s lips twitched upwards in a faint smile. “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” she promised.
The last thing she heard before the airlock doors sealed was Mx. Tallkin grumbling about the insanity of those who chose to work with TACSEC.
