Exalt 001: Eternal Tension

Darkness had overtaken the colony of Luna. Not the darkness that fell roughly every 1.5 Terra-days, and lasted the same time. Literal darkness, brought to the world by the Icarus, the finest failing of the human race: The Yutero. It wasn't clear how the sample had found its way to the colony. Perhaps it had blown down on some wind from the Moon proper, carried by the ever-swirling, ever-boiling winds of the terraforming in progress. Perhaps somebody had dropped a canister outside of a quarantine zone. Maybe someone had released it intentionally. It doesn't matter, really.

Luna had been built to study the Unidentified Machines. That's what they still called them back in those days, before they understood what they were, what they meant. A tenuous label for a tenuous understanding. Great hulks of light and color and metal found in a place beyond understanding, a place so easy to tear a hole into and yet so difficult to find unless you knew how to look. Nobody had known how to look for a long time- the machines that HAD been brought back were little more than flukes.

But now, tendrils of black and daggers of dusky enamel tore the planet apart. Spores flickered through the life support of the station, blowing into throats and lungs, infecting, consuming, growing. Knives did nothing- fire barely stopped them.

Junior Researcher Marine Jerenko had locked herself into the nearest Unidentified Machine just as the bulkheads failed, and a tide of oily black flooded the room. She stood now in what she assumed was the cockpit, watching a wall of black flesh climb the side of what they had assumed was a cockpit canopy. The horror of it all hadn't quite struck her yet. She even laughed, behind her respirator. The pained, manic laugh of someone who was in a very bad situation.

A door opened behind her.

This was terrifying, because that door had never opened before. It had stayed sealed firmly, ignoring all thermal lances, all attempts to interface wirelessly, everything. And yet, it had slid open easily in the face of this overwhelming disaster. Marine was terrified. Had the Y-Substrate outside penetrated a system they had missed? Forced the door open after all this time? Her thoughts raced. Curiosity got the better of her, and she proceeded down the hallway.

The walls of the Machine here pulsed with pearlescent energy along invisible pathways, that were somehow angular and curved- artificial and organic. Junior Researcher Marine couldn't help but trace her fingers along them, wondering at them. Here, a bridge between two systems, perhaps? This energy- information, or lifeblood? Perhaps both? Every reading she had ever helped take had contradicted the previous. A mystery. As Marine contemplated, the energy only pulsed faster. She wondered why.

Junior Researcher Jerenko had no idea that she was about to change the world. People who are about to change the world rarely do.

Her walking brought her deeper. Paths converged, diverged. She wondered at which might be the right path. Several opened, and yet she walked straight ahead, following the quickening pulse of energy. She wanted to know where it terminated. Perhaps she could still get an e-mail out before she died, let the world know what she had found at the core of the machine. Pose a dozen more questions to the world. The best researchers could only ever hope to provoke questions with their work, ones that would be chipped away at for centuries before they crumbled. Marine swelled with pride as she considered it. The energy stopped pulsing, and solidified. She wondered at what it meant.

She found herself in a bare chamber. In the exact center was a slab. It was golden, in contrast with the white of the rest of the Machine, covered in the same pearlescent lines as the walls. Each terminated at the slab, simply fading out of existence as they climbed the sides of the block of metal. Just a slab- no visible buttons, depressions, or interface. The big secret in the depths of the ship- an inert, unimpressive rectangle.

Another researcher would have simply given up, and slumped against a wall to die. Another researcher would not have made it this far. The fact of the matter was that exploratory researchers were getting harder and harder to retain by the day. It was simply too bland of a job to continue for most. Examining a machine that you didn't understand, that didn't respond to any of your standard tests, and ever so rarely to your non-standard tests. But Junior Researcher Marine Jerenko had worked tirelessly, every day. The Unidentified Machines were simply a problem to be solved, like any other. Questions upon questions, a ball of hard twine that simply needed coaxing until it surrendered its secrets.

Rather than slump against a wall to die, Junior Researcher Marine Jerenko stepped forward, and placed her hand onto the slab.



Her mind was consumed in a white hot storm of nothingness. Points of data so loud and so numerous that they blended together into a stew, and that stew poured out and solidified into more points of data. It was like being electrocuted, it was like being dead, it was like being alive for the first time ever. She wanted to remove her hand, she wanted to drive it deeper into the metal, she wanted everything and nothing.

Symbols carved themselves into Jerenko's retinas, foreign and yet entirely parsable, on some core level. Intent communicated without form.


It asked her why she was here. She responded with the same raw intent, grunting wordlessly. She was here because she was curious. Curious enough to spend her last seconds alive plumbing some unknowable mystery? Scratching in vain at a wall she could not hope to crack? To even inflict the tiniest damage on?

Of course.

The Machine grinned with its whole being, metal creaking and sparking and flickering, energy shooting through it like blood through a long dried circulatory system. The heart had begun to beat again, and it was all thanks to First Exalt Marine Jerenko.

Light poured into the sea of roiling black and enamel from the Unidentified Machine- no, it wasn't Unidentified anymore. It was not willing to solve all of her problems for her- to do such would be self defeating. There would be mysteries, and she would chase them, and the eternal tension of the chase would pull them both along into whatever future humanity had in a world broken by faster than light travel and poor decisions. The name of the machine was long, communicated in symbols that the finest cryptographers and symbolic specialists could pick at for years, and never squeeze a single ounce of meaning out of.

But First Exalt Marine Jerenko knew what they meant, instinctively. They were the only easy answer she would ever find at the helm of this machine- four jagged symbols that communicated something she could only barely put words to:

"Exalted Machine: The Eternal Tension of Knowing Chasing Unknowing."

The Exalted Machine willed First Exalt Jerenko stand, and she stood. No, the other way around. So hard to tell now. They were the same, until First Exalt Jerenko decided to step away, to experience the world as herself once more. Until she was safe. She was her tiny, fragile self, and she was the impenetrable shell of Eternal Tension, and she was the first of humanity to seize the future.

Thirty six hours after First Exalt Jerenko stood, Luna was scrubbed clean of the grasping darkness that threatened to swallow it whole.

Thirty six hours and a twenty minute nap after First Exalt Jerenko stood, she found herself with a pen and pad in hand, studying the walls. The Exalted Machine muttered wordlessly at her futile task, and she grinned to spite it.

Neither would have it any other way.