Chapter 155: Salvation

“Jelly?”

The Anima Sola hovered before them, his golden-Gloria infused frame dripping starlight, bobbing up and down slowly as he gazed at the trio with his blank eyes.

“James! Why am I not surprised! And holy shit, you killed a Seraph?”

James took a step forward. “Jelly, how - what are you doing here?”

“Hmm?” The Anima floated over the dead spider, examining it. “This is most unexpected. This should have been way, way, way above your pay grade.” Then he revolved. “Looks like you guys paid the price, though. Ouch.”

James felt like the floor was slipping out from under him. He closed his eyes, sought stillness, self-mastery, then opened them again. “Jelly. You’re with them. You were sent here to see what happened.”

“You were always fast on the uptake, capitano.” The Anima bobbed a little closer. “But you got one little detail wrong.”

“What the fuck?” Serenity raised her palm, hesitated. “Should I blast him?”

“Ouch, Serenity.” His voice did all the emoting, as Jelly’s face remained as still as ever. “After all we’ve been through?”

James studied the Anima. “You weren’t sent here.”

“No, I came of my own volition. Nobody sends an Eluthaarii. We just kind of send ourselves. Or, well. It’s complicated.”

James’s head rocked back as if he’d been kicked in the chin. “You’re…”

“I am now. I was before? But not really. Before I was about a trillionth of a percentage of an Eluthaarii. Even that might be overstating it. All Anima’s function as, well, spies, to be put it bluntly. Monitors? But that has nasty overtones these days. A means of keeping tabs on promising recruits. Especially one that’s imbued with Gloria. Hoowee. Now that’ll make us sit up and take notice. Metaphorically speaking.”

James dry swallowed. “Bastard.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Jelly floated around the geodome, pausing over Yadriel to consider the fallen teenager. “It’s all fun and games till the gloves come off. Though, to be honest, I thought you should have figured it out way earlier. Still, kudos on eventually getting there.”

James’s mind reeled. The geodome’s walls seemed to be breathing, flexing in and then pushing back out. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it. This wasn’t Jelly. This was an Eluthaarii. The closest he’d ever come to a living god.

“What now?” he asked.

“Now? Well, we get to horse trading.” Jelly turned back to them. “Hmm, interesting. You’ve hacked your sheet. Will you look at that. Arete of 3,412, James? Yikes. And look at that optimized attack. Death Attack! I love it. Not quite accurate, though, is it?”

James clenched his jaw.

“So that means you’ve been visiting with the Zorathians. Cunning, they are. Very promising. One of the best reapings we’ve had in ages. I’m surprised they helped you.”

“If you’re so powerful,” growled Serenity, “how come you didn’t know all this already?”

“It’s a question of bothering to keep track, Serenity. All this is very interesting, but there is a lot going on out there in the universe that you don’t know about. Couldn’t possibly understand, even, though that’s not your fault, so don’t feel bad. We like to implement the System, let it run, and then check in when needed. We’ve found, actually, that not micromanaging allows different species to surprise us. The Zorathian with their hacking, you humans with your theft of the portal key. That was a high point, by they way, James, when you interfaced your demiplane with the Angelic Host’s portal. Innovative, risky, but what a reward. I can’t tell you how secretly pleased that massively reduced version of myself was.”

“Fuck you,” said James.

“Quite. Well. You’re upset. Makes sense, given what you’ve been through. You’ll be loath to talk while surrounded by the corpses of your friends. So let’s clean this up first, shall we?”

Golden light swirled over the corpses. Blood flowed back into the wounds, which sealed over, and then Kimmie, Denzel, Olaf, Kerim, and Yadriel gasped as one and stirred, eyelids fluttering.

James didn’t want to reveal anything, but he couldn’t control the pang of relief that near doubled him over. His eyes blurred with tears as his friends sat up, expressions confused, eyes wide as they looked at each, at James, then Jelly.

“And now let’s put a temporal stop on them.” Jelly didn’t overtly display any power, but all five of his revived friends simply froze in place. “There. Doesn’t that feel better?”

James fought for calm. “You’re just playing with me. None of this means anything to you.”

“Au contraire, mon ami. I’m quite interested in you. Possibly Serenity, but she’s got some deep rooted flaws that disqualify her from serious consideration.”

“Fuck you,” spat Serenity.

“Quite. Let’s put them on pause too.”

Serenity’s eyes flared open wide as she went to protest, but both she and Jason froze in place.

James controlled the urge to startle. He fought to keep his expression a mask. To not even clench his hands.

“There. Now it’s just the two of us, James. Cozy, even. Where were we? Oh yes. You were accusing me of being insensible to your pain and loss. Which… fine. Is fair. I am. But can you blame me? Rhetorical question. Let me ask you a real one: have you ever, over the course of your entire life, stepped on an ant’s nest?”

“We’re not ants.”

“But you are, relative to us. Like ants you are utterly oblivious to what’s happening in the larger picture. All you care about - as a species - is expansion, harvesting resources, and propagation. A rare few are more altruistic or scientifically oriented, but on the whole, pretty ant-like. You humans are so utterly at the mercy of your reproductive instincts and neurochemicals that you are incapable of safeguarding your own planet while having no means to functionally escape it. Remarkable. But honestly, there’s no point in indicting your species as a whole, because we’re not interested in the aggregate. We’re interested in the exceptions. Such as yourself.”

“That’s your mistake.” James wished his voice wasn’t shaking. “I’m nothing special. I just got a series of lucky breaks. Could have been anyone.”

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“But luck is a valuable commodity, James. Much of what transpires in the universe is so close to being arbitrary that we value those who seem to bend fortune in their favor. It’s not superstition on our part. Luck is quantifiable on a sufficiently large scale. And you are indeed incredibly lucky, on top of your other many talents. Talents that our System is designed to reward and promote.”

James swallowed down a host of insults. There was no point in venting his fury, the deep rooted horror and disgust that he wanted to fling in Jelly’s metallic face.

“Now, tamper down that pride,” chided Jelly. “You’re not the only one we’re considering elevating. There’s an incredible young woman who has made her way to China from Japan that has proven particularly noteworthy, a young man in Brazil who has accomplished truly remarkable results with so little, and - surprisingly - an old lady in Nigeria whose tale is incredibly inspiring. But none of them are standing here, now, over the corpse of a Seraph. You are.”

“You have no right,” rasped James. “To kill so many. To ruin so much. To judge us.”

“I disagree. Again, this might sound harsh, but your species is too primitive to be considered in our system of morality. You’re barely… self aware.” Jelly made a sighing noise. “Honestly. Ants, remember? There’s perhaps a slim chance that in five or six millennia you’d achieve something noteworthy, but honestly, all probabilities point to your species extinguishing itself within the next couple of centuries. That’s what triggered our noting you all, by the way. Oh - have you figured that out? Why the System came to Earth when it did?”

James blinked. “Belanger received the Light Eternal in the 80’s or something. No. I don’t know.”

“Disappointing. So many clues. The Light Eternal was brought to Earth on August 6th, 1945. Does that help?”

“1945?” James frowned. “World War Two?”

“Closer.”

“The end of the war.” James tried to think. What could have happened that would attract the attention of the Eluthaarii…? “We killed enough of ourselves?”

“Close, but no. On that date we noted an energy signature of sufficient magnitude to indicate that your species had developed the capacity to extinguish itself. You deployed your first nuclear weapon. It’s honestly a miracle that you’ve survived this long.”

James tried to parse this. “You gave us the Light Eternal because we developed nuclear bombs?”

“Do you recall your very first message from the System, James?” Jelly floated a little closer. “60,000 year countdown has ended, remember? That was triggered by Belanger’s cowardly but utterly predictable capitulation, which was in turn triggered by his inheriting the Light Eternal, which was brought to Earth when humanity developed the ability to eradicate itself. But what happened sixty millenia ago?”

James felt dizzy. He wanted savage emotional resolution, not this clinical discussion. “Someone said that humanity emerged from Africa, or something.”

“Your species has been biologically consistent for over 300,000 years. As mentally advanced as yourself. If you had brought a newborn from that ancient world and raised it in New York today, it would have blended in seamlessly with the rest of your kind. Yet for 240,000 years you humans were little more than persecuted hunter gatherer bands. You lived in fear of predators, could not outcompete the other homo species, or even the Neanderthals. There was nothing special about you. Until we Eluthaarii came and changed everything.

“Everything that you have accomplished, from the wheel to learning to sow seeds of wheat to erecting skyscrapers and splitting the atom is due to our gift. An ability we bestowed that exceeds any power that the System has granted you. We took a primitive hunter in what is now called Ethiopia and granted her the power of willful delusion.”

James frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Of course not. At that time, James, every other being on the planet, including the other homo species was limited by what was. They could only gather in small groups. They could only operate around what was tangible, what they could see, what they could remember. But that first woman was given the ability to conceptualize that which did not exist, and, like a virus, spread that delusion to others. Oh, it began slowly enough, with the creation of primitive gods, men with the heads of lions, but you see, nothing else could conceptualize such a thing. Men did not have the heads of lions. But your ancestors were suddenly able to believe in such lies, and from there, human culture flourished. Your bands began to form identities, to become clans. This allowed them to create self-sustaining structure that in turn allowed them to form groups hundreds strong. The poor Neanderthals. They could drive off your small tribes of twenty or thirty, but when you started showing up in their valleys by the hundreds, they were done for.”

“Self delusion?” James tried to wrap his mind around this. “You mean…?”

“Stories, James. Lies. Fictions. Different ways to view reality. It has resulted in everything today from the concept of France to the accepted rules of soccer. Islam and Mercedes Benz. The Iliad and the guiding principles of the US Marine Corps. Foxes and cyanobacteria can’t do this. Chimpanzees and octopuses can’t fathom gods or reasons to set food aside for a lean year. Iguanas have no ability to agree on the value of fiat currency, and not even Neanderthals could make the mental leap to agriculture. But you did. Because of us. We seeded you, James. And this System is our reaping.”

James took a step back. “Bullshit.”

“Yeah, no. Emotional denial based on a desperate need to maintain some semblance of autonomy and pride is no basis for a coherent rebuttal. I’m not saying homo sapiens couldn’t have eventually hit upon this ability, but to be honest, you hadn’t in over two hundred millennia, and neither had homo habilis, homo erectus, Cro-Magnon, or home neanderthalensis. You were all promising, but… there was no spark. Not till we came along and blew the fires of creation into your primitive minds. That done, we left a monitor and moved on. And only sixty millennia later, well, here we are. New York City, Tokyo, Paris, Cape Town. Your scientists and physicists peeling back the mysteries of the universe, from your crude approximation of the theory of general relativity to your blind fumblings toward fusion and time crystals. Do you really think you would have accomplished so much, so suddenly, so quickly ,without somebody lending you a helping hand? After so much time hooting in the savannah at the approach of a lion?”

James clenched his fists. “If what you’re saying is true, it still doesn’t change anything. We didn’t ask for you to intervene, and your doing so doesn’t give you ownership over you. We also came up with the bill of human rights because even we primitive monkeys recognize that we have inalienable rights as thinking, conscious living beings. You don’t get to just step on us as if we were ants.”

“Wrong.” Jelly sounded bored. “There is no such thing as inalienable rights. Only what rights you can carve out for yourself. And honestly, your hypocrisy is breathtaking. Or would be, if I breathed. There have been five mass extinctions in this world’s history, but the one that is taking place now due to your species promises to be both the fastest and the most devastating. Your species cares nothing for thinking, conscious creatures. Your one guiding philosophy since you first started worshipping lion-headed monkeys has been ‘might makes right’. Well, James. Your species has been the mightiest on Earth for sixty millenia. But that’s no longer the case.”

James felt tired. Felt worn out. Numb. Overwhelmed. He wasn’t a philosopher. He’d never enjoyed debate. His whole life he’d made his statements and demonstrated his beliefs through action.

That, and he knew how shitty humans could be. History was littered with Hitler’s, Genghis Khan’s, genocides, and worse.

“I don’t care,” he said at last, voice low. “I don’t agree with you, but I’m too dog-gone tired to sit here debating. You’re wrong. You’re vicious, cowardly predators who’ve killed almost all of my species in a sadistic game. If you’re the pinnacle of power in this universe, then I say fuck you, fuck power, and fuck everything that allowed you to become what you are.”

“Hmm.” Jelly bobbed back and forth. “Very emotional. I understand. But I was seeking to merely explain, not convince. I don’t need you to agree with me. Not yet. When you ascend, your horizons will explode outward and then you will see. Because I can tell you this: every candidate for Eluthaarii felt much the same as you do now. Well, some are more bloodthirsty and ambitious than others. But nobody enjoys undergoing the System. But. Once they elevate, they all, every single one of them, change. They come to understand. They see the true stakes that are in play, they realize the sheer complexity and scale of the universe, and oh, how they mature very quickly.”

“Fuck you.”

“Did you know that there are 197 billion galaxies in the universe, James?” Jelly’s tone turned belligerent, cruel. “And that each has on average of 200 billion suns? Do you know how many have orbiting planets? How many of those planets have given life? How many times, how many countless, endless times life has emerged from chaos, life in all its seemingly random, endless forms? From mud, from water, from chemical fusion taking place in seams of magma, from endless matrixes? Life, over and over again, on planet after planet, blinking into existence and rapidly mutating, evolving, rising, striving, seeking understanding, dominance, mastery of all around it? Do you know how many civilizations exist out there in the deepest black, how many sentient lifeforms dare escape their cradles only to run into others and engage in their first, their truest instinct, the universal constant in all life forms: war?”

James stared mutely at Jelly.

“Most life forms eventually fall back in disarray and perish. The universe is littered with trash planets, the fragments of worlds, ashen moons and shattered stars. But not all fail in their bid for godhood. Some have risen and expanded past your ability to comprehend, only to run into each other and there engage in existential conflict. James, you stand there sulking over a few billion monkeys that have died unjustly in your primitive cities of metal and stone and wood. But out there are entities that see all other lifeforms as possible philosophical infections and wish not to seed them with future greatness but eradicate them before they can even lift their eyes to the stars.”

Jelly floated closer, his voice growing deeper, reverberating with conviction and power. “James, you should be on your knees praising the Eluthaarii and giving abject thanks that we found you first. You should be mewling with happiness over being given this chance. Though us, through our System, you may rise to contest other philosophies across the stars, defending countless alien lifeforms even as your patronize your own species, guiding and shepherding it toward greatness.

“We are not your enemies, James. We are not mercurial and sadistic practitioners of casual extinction. We are your species' sole hope for longevity. Through us your kind may one day travel to the stars, perfect your material bodies and connect with the substrate, enjoying an era of peace unending founded on the divine guidance of one of your own kind.

“We are not your enemy, James. We are your salvation.”

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