An Excerpt from World Walkers by Neal Asher (Pyr; September 2024)
The Fenris – Past
The Fenris awoke with a surge of excitement. Curled up in gel, with pipes and data feeds entering his body at numerous points, he opened violet eyes and gained only a blurred impression of his surroundings. But then, engaging other receptors in his long skull, he found himself in a maternal cyst, in one of the long halls that must be a birthing facility – according to the knowledge already loading to his brain. This knowledge, a dry factual cataloguing of reality, swiftly laid down strata of scientific understanding and told him of his race and something of their history. Birth, millennia ago, had been an organic matter of gestation inside a female fenris. But nowadays, with their science so advanced, the optimization of a new addition to their race could be much better controlled outside the womb.
His skull continued to fill. Data was laid down in semi-organic substrates, of which so much of his body consisted, added throughout a million years of biotechnology and controlled evolution. But the data was just a lens through which he looked at the world, with the excitement of a child. Grasping his power and huge breadth of understanding, he became eager to take his place in the world. The loading continued to fill in detail about his kind, finishing with the Great Project. The audacity and high aims of this astounded him. Only on his world could something so ambitious have been attempted. Then, on checking timescales and his inception date, he realized that the experiment must have already concluded. He waited, anxious to be born into his new life to see the results.
Nothing happened.
Hours and hours passed, during which he kept pushing his concentration back to the feed to learn more, and it became clear he should not have been conscious for so long inside the cyst. Using his enhanced senses, he gazed beyond the birthing cyst as far as possible, but could detect no movement. Something was wrong. He began to squirm in the gel, to flex his limbs and stretch out one arm to the wall of the cyst, but still nothing out there responded. Finally, examining himself through the lens of that knowledge, he saw that he was way beyond the point when all his tubes and wires should have automatically disconnected. He had to do something more. Now knowing the extreme durability of his body, he began pulling out tubes. The sudden pain had him frantically searching internal control until he could shut it down and concentrate on healing processes that for him could be conscious. The gel darkened with a network of his black blood. He closed off broken capillaries, sealed entry points to his gut and other organs, closed up splits through dense muscle, and then switched over the detail to autonomics. Soon he had freed himself of all but the data and neurochem feeds into his skull. As yet, he didn’t feel confident enough to remove them, but the pipes and wires had plenty of slack, so he could free himself further in another way.
He reached out with one long arm – still far from attaining its full growth – and prodded the cyst wall again. It was tough stuff but not resistant to the sharpness of the claw he extruded from the end of his finger. With a jerk, he stabbed through it, feeling guilty about damaging the cyst. He then drew the claw down, slicing through the membrane. The gel bulged out, and the whole bubble of it, with him at the centre, slid out of the cyst, as he would have done in a natural birth. He hit the floor in a squat, the gel splashing around him then blobbing up with the pseudo-life of a Newtonian fluid. He squeezed out tears, blinked, and cleared the stuff from his eyes, then looked up at the flaccid cyst above, with the connections to his skull running up into it. He next snorted gel from his nostrils and, in a series of convulsions, expelled it from his lungs. He took his first breath. The air had a strange taint and seemed overly warm, but how could he be sure of what it should be, with these being his first breaths? Looking along the row of cysts, his among them, he saw that all the others hung like figs dried out on their tree, yet with angular structures caught inside. Much of their gel contents had pooled on the floor below and dried out to turn crusty like scabs. Amid these lay thousands of small objects of a regular shape. Focusing his superb vision on the nearest, he recognized red insect chrysalises. Now he realized that something was very wrong. He sniffed, raised analysis through his implanted database and attached the chemical signatures to a word: putrefaction. Then he heard a droning sound. A black mist arose at the far end of the birthing chamber, and he felt the first flies landing on his skin and biting.
The Fenris brushed them away. He understood their biotech purpose was to update the biology of his kind, to inoculate him against new threats, but the dry factuality of his upload told him he couldn’t trust them to be functioning correctly. He came unsteadily to his feet, seeing the larger cloud of flies boiling towards him, and he feared how their programming might be defective. They might all want to impart their information, and thousands upon thousands of bites and the ensuing updates could very well kill him. With little choice now, he reached up and pulled the connections out of his skull. Intense pain hit. He closed this off, and then the blood vessels spilled their contents down his face. Leaving the wounds to autonomics again, he headed away from the swarm towards the clean lock door at the other end of the chamber. A touch to the central pad opened it for him – like all the devices of his world, it responded to his DNA – and he entered the lock. As the first door closed behind him, he belligerently crushed every fly he could find before opening the next door. Stepping out, his foot crunched on something and he moved aside, peering down. It was a skeleton.
He recognized the bone structure of a female of his kind. As an adult, she had of course been three times his height and her bones had a bluish cast, glinting with the nacre of inlaid bio-electrics. The oddity of her presence here was no more baffling than finding that the inocular flies had managed to penetrate the layers of security into the birthing chamber. He recognized other oddities too. Nothing remained of her but bones. Besides the death of a fenris being an improbability, the decay of a fenris body would take an age due to all the protective biotech. That the body had remained here indicated no one else had been around to clear it up either. And now he looked more closely, he could see that some of the bone had turned to powder. Horrifying speculations arose about what he might find beyond this place, and then a flash of anger. He kicked a bone, skittering it across the floor. How unfair to be faced with this as a newborn!
The dry factual drone of his knowledge, stifling his youthful mind, did not allow the anger to last. He scanned around him. This circular room had semi-organic ducts, for data and materials, growing up the walls as well as branching across the domed ceiling. The trunks and branches were dull and flaking in places, and the technology here appeared to be dead. Yet the clean lock behind had worked smoothly. Fenris technology rarely broke down; when it did, other tech swiftly repaired it – it wasn’t often that a fenris had to intervene. Returning his attention to the skeleton, he now understood the breakdown here was the reason it had been left, since cleaning biomechs should have removed it, for submission to the requisite authorities or disposal. But why was this corpse so decayed, while the decay in the birthing chamber had been more recent? Just a moment’s thought rendered the answer. Fenris were not born regularly. He’d mistakenly applied the label of ‘birthing chamber’ to the hall beyond that lock, when it was in fact a storage chamber for prebirth fenris. The place should have been kept at absolute zero, with the likes of himself removed to another place for defrosting and birth. The system had obviously failed a long time after the death of the fenris here, letting in the flies and allowing the temperature to rise. He had survived the thawing process, while thousands of others had not. The fact the system had retained enough integrity to provide his mental loading must have been a matter of luck. His whole existence was.
The Fenris abruptly headed for the next door and found it did not react to him. Undoing its manual lock helped, but the door was stuck to its seal, so he dug his claws into the edge of that and heaved. The thing resisted until his arms were burning, then it finally opened with a tearing sound. Had he been an adult, it wouldn’t have challenged him at all. He stepped out into a long tube curling up to his left and right, oblate and twisted, with the walls lichen patterned. A map of his world arose for his inspection and, with his other senses also giving him the shape of his surroundings in a sphere a kilometre across, he perfectly located himself.
He turned right and began walking, carefully studying his immediate surroundings. There was no sign of any other dead but, a few hundred metres along, blue beetle cleaner bots crawled along the walls. If there had been remains here, they’d long since been removed. He needed to know what had happened, and that need boiled up into a surge of energy. He broke into a run and felt the joy of that movement, with the map and dry knowledge providing a destination where he might find answers. After branching numerous times, the tube eventually came out onto the surface of his world, and there opened a transparent band, with a view of the outside. He slowed to a walk, annoyed by the childish exuberance that had driven him to run, and annoyed by the adult knowledge implanted in his mind. The tube ran across a metallic landscape, seemingly assembled out of numerous blocks. This was what he had expected to see, but not the great scar of wreckage before him, with collapsed structures and skeletal frameworks slewing in from the right and converging ahead.
He kept walking, until he came to a safety door and looked through its window. The tube had been severed and more tangled wreckage lay beyond. Scanning further ahead with his inner senses, he saw the continuation of the tube after a hundred metres and pressed a hand against the opening pad. He received a warning straight into his biotech, though, and quickly withdrew it. The mix of air out there was lacking in oxygen, and he didn’t know why. Another thing he really needed to find out. He hyperventilated, understanding this would be all he’d need, since the distance wasn’t too far; he had no reason to switch his body over to hypoxic. He opened the door. A blast of equalizing air pressure hit him and it was freezing cold. Breath held, he walked along the bonelike beams and slabs that were like dragon scales. A building had fallen here, collapsing the tube, while deep pits delved down into a mass of fenris structure. It had the appearance of some titanic creature twisted through hard technological wreckage, and long decayed. He paused and scanned around, lost in the intensity of this new input.
Cirrus clouds frosted the deep blue sky – white above, then darkened to yellows and browns over the sunset. He walked out to the edge of a slab and leapt onto another, peering ahead to his destination. There he saw the five-kilometre black thorn of a tower rising from a spread of giant, nodular, fungal masses. At least that still stood. Just like the tube he’d walked along, and everything that lay below, the thing had grown, guided by harder technologies. Similar biotechnology covered the entire surface of the world – an ecosystem turned to fenris utility, and only scraps of old evolved biology left. But now he had no idea how much of it remained intact.
Finally, reaching the continuation of the tube and a second safety door, he entered and breathed again. Dry knowledge raised a wave of dread, for the lack of oxygen out there seemed unlikely to be a local phenomenon. The child walked on, absorbing the wonder of a world that was new to him.
The tube finally turned up into the tower, acquiring slab steps suitable for the long stride of his kind. The Fenris climbed them, made aware again of his diminutive size, but also of the growing hunger that would feed his growth. On the way up, he passed entrances into globular chambers whose outer faces were transparent to the sky, almost like eyeballs. A few of these were shattered and closed off by doors, while others somewhere in the tower lay open, with frequent frigid breezes blowing through. He found himself panting at the lack of oxygen as the biotech in the building struggled to keep it to the optimum. The chambers grew smaller as he climbed higher, and the circumference of the tower tightened. Finally he came out into the data transmission peak.
The tall room, with its ceiling closing to a vanishing point, seemed wholly occupied by standing sheets of glass and filmier substances too, all bound together with hard, fleshy biotech. The transparent walls gave him a view across his world, where the scars of wreckage formed curious, regular curves. Here and there he saw the glint of powered lights, but also fires that must be fed by biotech-generated oxygen. Up above, stars speckled the now night-time sky, a backdrop to the giant orbital structures also hanging there. One, like an ancient combustion engine a hundred kilometres across, he recognized. It was one of the engines that had driven the Great Project. The moon rose like a city dome on the horizon, with its ring system hooked up above it.
He walked through the room, the glass sheets sliding out of his path, until he reached a console. This doughnut of material held a pseudo-matter interface at its centre, which seemed to shimmer in and out of reality, but the hand-shaped imprint in the middle of it remained perfectly stable. The Fenris reached down, painfully aware of how his small hand wouldn’t fit it. Now he’d find out what had happened to his world, and to his people. And about the Great Project.
In the far past, his kind had gone to their moon and explored it thoroughly. They went on to explore their solar system and took their shots at the stars. Interstellar exploration continued, but their race then divided into two factions: those who had their eyes on the stars, and those who began to examine, and gain access to, the seeming infinitude of worlds parallel to their own. They discovered the multiverse. The latter remained in the vicinity of their world and retained much of their biological and mental history, in their forms and their technology. The former changed beyond easy conception, adapting to vacuum and the vast reaches of time that interstellar travel involved. The Fenris was of the multiverse kind.
In the multiverse, the fenris explored worlds that seemed to be shadows of theirs – or reflections in mirrors, facing in towards their own world. These stretched into infinity, with infinitesimal differences between each accumulating, until they became utterly alien places, occupied by alien cultures or no cultures at all. Oddly, those on the nearest reflections had also discovered the multiverse, but no effort had been made to explore it beyond that. His kind made contact with their mirrored kind on those closest worlds and began technological and material exchanges. Some conflicts ensued too, but his kind always seemed to come out on top. Their shadows appeared to lack substance, will and energy.
So they held dominion over many worlds and discovered flaws in the reflecting, shadow world model too. Drastic changes, or twists, in their laws of physics became apparent, and the symmetry of it all seemed to have broken. Overall it was as if, stretching out from their world, reality steadily degraded. Dirty mirrors, one researcher called it. Their growing understanding of the multiverse and these worlds then raised something concerning, and ultimately depressing: reality returned to its original form.
If they made changes in closer worlds, over periods of months and years those changes dissolved, swept away. The world concerned would return to being a weak reflection of their own. The theoreticians got to work on this, while the mathematicians and other scientists shaped and proved their model. Their own world they described as nodal; it was the only one on which drastic changes could be enacted, then these would be reflected. Any drastic changes on shadow worlds eventually came to nothing. Their ‘nodal’ world was, in essence, the only one where true free will existed. Why? There was no ‘why’, just the reality. To test this, they caused an atomic blast on a shadow world, destroying an island. Much was the furore on that world about the incident. Then the fenris tracked the changes over the ensuing months: the disappearance of information about it, the rapid drop of radioactivity on the island, and the return of its life and shape. Five years later, no one on that world had any memory of the incident. During this time the nodal fenris also brought shadow fenris to their world and it soon became evident they were sickening, growing increasingly confused and thin, until they started dying and fading completely. It seemed at first that they couldn’t exist in the harsh clarity of the nodal world. Only later did the nodal fenris discover these individuals alive again, back on their shadow worlds, some with vague memories of travelling and others with none at all.
The shadow worlds weren’t real and nobody there had any choices or ability to decide their future. The nodal world stood as the central model they followed poorly. This stabbed at something deep within the fenris concerning free will. It had arisen a million years in their past, during tens of thousands of years of authoritarian rule, when they’d lived under regimes with every thought and action monitored and controlled. Hideous wars and slaughter, and the adaptation of their own biology, had arisen to release them from that. Now it seemed they were the unwilling autocrats, and their every action dictated those of an infinitude of shadows. And so, because they were the ones who could bring about change, the Great Project was conceived, becoming the focus of their race.
What if the shadow, reflected worlds could be unlinked from their nodal world? What if they could be freed to navigate their own course? The fenris turned their powerful science to the task of severing these chains. Making engines that would feed off the power of their sun, and a million other suns, they aimed to dice up the parallels in their multiverse network. They would fold reality around those other worlds and free their brethren from this unintentional dominion. Some raised concerns and pointed to those places in the multiverse where parallel worlds ceased to be reflections, and where the laws of physics appeared broken. Could these be the detritus of previous attempts to do the same? Their concerns were ignored by the bulk of the race, though, and the objectors took what they needed and headed out to their interstellar kin. The great engines were rigged for this task, while a particular fenris was gestated in a womb cyst, and grew to the point where he could be stored. This was where he’d been just before the engines were turned on. And now he was born.
I am the Fenris.
The truth of that statement tore at his insides, while his secondhand knowledge didn’t give him the experience to know how to grieve, as he watched the rest of the history play out. The engines came on, and he saw their sun, as well as the many others, wink out of their existence. The sky turned black but the fenris survived with their technology intact. They found themselves caught in their own cyst of reality, much like the cyst he’d been frozen inside, even as their atmosphere itself froze and snowed down over them. Survival for perhaps millions of years remained assured, for they could burn the matter of their world to that end. But what then? With an expiration point to their existence in sight, and their world closed off from the greater multiverse, they fell into despair. Many began to die – mostly through choice and deliberate neglect. However, a small clique of scientists worked on something radical that would require sacrificing a massive amount of energy to entropy. They began to alter the engines in orbit to create a pseudo-matter tool that would be able to penetrate their enclosed reality.
Fenris continued to die, with many now sacrificing their resources to this new project. Four thousand years passed, while much of the life, biotech and even atmosphere of their world expired, and the race diminished. Finally, the engines were ready for the next step. But remaining fenris, clinging to life, baulked at turning the things on again. Autocracy arrived in the form of a science council, an echo of their despised history of societal repression. War ensued in an agreed form but, as the council began to lose, it acted independently and turned the engines on anyway. It was sacrificial and suicidal, because the plan had been to put the remaining population into hibernation. The Fenris observed the engines reach out a claw to penetrate the reality cyst around his world, and he shuddered at how this reflected his own birth. The massive drain sucked life and energy out of the world, freezing fenris where they stood, or fought, and dropped them to the ground dead. Massive feedback loops wrought destruction, as did the fall of some of the engines, with world technology failing. Then, like a wonder, the sun rose, but it was over the death of a race. Remaining technology, and the world, absorbed energy from this new continuum and began to rebuild, with many failures along the way. It was one of those failures that had allowed him to be born.
‘I am Fenris,’ he said out loud. And this was indeed the case. He could find no trace of any other living member of his kind on his world. He was now the entirety of his race.
***
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World Walkers. Published in 2024 in the United States by Pyr®, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 221 River Street, Ninth Floor, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030. Copyright © 2024 by Neal Asher. First published 2024 by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.