Thresholder

It was the long, slow, end of the world. Humanity was huddled around dying stars, trying to make the most of the waning light, knowing that unless something changed, every day was going to be dimmer than the last.

The stellar government, Rampart, zeroed in on me right away, because my arrival had broken entropy. There was apparently a signal from nowhere that preceded my arrival by a few days, which in and of itself had their scientists shouting for joy. When a full-on person came through, they thought it was basically the most important thing ever to have happened. I wasn’t super pleased to be getting all that attention, especially because I thought there was probably someone else out there who was hopping worlds too. My previous two encounters had let me know what was up, more or less. There was nothing for it though.

I became a minimum-security prisoner on a jungle planet that was apparently one of the last nice places to live in the entire known universe. The star was dim, a red dwarf, barely able to sustain fusion, and let me tell you, I learned more about stellar processes than I had ever wanted to during my time in that world. The planet was well within the star’s habitable zone, but that meant that we were closer to it, and it was huge in the sky, like an unblinking red eyeball: unblinking because the planet was tidally locked, meaning that it was always daylight, the sun never moving from its spot. The plants were mostly black, not green, something to do with how they captured light.

I was a prisoner, but also a VIP, and they slapped the nanites on me almost from the moment I came through. It rankled, especially given the very special boy I had just killed, who seemed like he’d have been happiest if he could trap me in a bell jar. Their goals were different, more level-headed, but the more I saw of their world and their way of doing things, the more I wanted out. It didn’t seem like there was an ‘out’ available to me, not unless I could somehow get hold of a spaceship, and Rampart, their all-encompassing government, didn’t seem like they were keen on providing one.

Everyone I met would either talk me to death about my ‘entropy violating’ appearance in their world, or they would yammer on about the dwindling resources of their universe and their duty in the face of seemingly inevitable heat death. I wasn’t sure which conversation annoyed me more.

The funny thing was, the end of the universe wasn’t really that close. There were still stars shining away, even if most of them were very far apart and exceedingly dim. They talked about limits and deadlines that were millions or billions of years in the future, and it seemed like for them, it was just around the corner. I met a lot of scientists on the jungle planet, went through a lot of tests with them, and maybe that was part of it, that they were the people focused on solutions to far-off problems. Still, it felt weird for them to be moping about their ‘horizons’. Like, they would say ‘the Stellar Horizon is coming, the day at which human eyes see a star for the last time’ or they’d say ‘the Shuttle Horizon is coming, the day at which it becomes impossible to muster the energy for interstellar flight’. They were very serious about this stuff, and it felt like it seeped into everything.

I had fucking superpowers though, which was objectively awesome, and also promised to bring an end to the end of all things, if only they could figure it out. I bounced around a lot for them, trained with my sword, and got them excited. They had all kinds of arguments in front of me about the fundamental constraints of physics, invoking maxims and laws that very much appeared to have been broken. They wanted me to open a portal, but of course I couldn’t do that. Bouncing off surfaces that weren’t bouncy was neat, but a portal to a new, young universe was something else entirely. One would allow humanity to survive after the embers had burned out, while the other would put them squarely back in the golden era of human existence.

They were the ones who confirmed the needle sword actually was magical, which took a lot of doing. It was much less the solution to all their problems, but it still broke their understanding of the world, and I was happy to get some practice in. The solar system we were in had eight hundred million people, about half of which lived on the jungle planet, but there was only a single swordsman, and they brought him in to spar with me. He was kind of weird, and a bit of a dick, but he was also the single greatest swordsman I have ever seen, though maybe there are some on the Big Old Arc who could give him a run for his money. He had trained himself against robots that he’d programmed, and did basically nothing but that all day, every day. I learned a lot from him, and I’m mentioning it mostly so you don’t think I got this good from the rat-rider girl giving me a few pointers.

I had mentioned that they found me by following a signal that preceded my arrival, and when the second signal came through, I had arranged for me to be there. This took some lies about the nature of my walking through worlds, and I’m not entirely sure they believed me, but they thought I might be the key to their salvation, and they brought me anyway. You’d said that your scientist in the first world did something similar, tracking signals, but I’ve got to believe this was a more sophisticated operation, done with a small fleet of spaceships.

My first time seeing the night sky freaked me the fuck out. If there hadn’t been any stars, I don’t think it would have gotten to me, it would just be a void, but there were stars, just so few of them, so far, so dim, little pin pricks around us instead of what should have been a splash of glitter across the cosmos. The constant daylight and blackout shutters of the planet had made me feel complacent, but everything they had said about a dying universe really hit home once I saw the stars, or rather, the lack thereof. Maybe the long view made more sense, given that context. The fire was going out, and there was no wood left to put on it. It was going to be very cold and very dark.

I was nervous about who would come through the portal. Third time’s the charm, as they say, but I was worried he’d be some asshole, like the first two. I wasn’t in a position to fight him. I had the jet-black carbon collar around my wrist, ready to spring to my defense at a moment’s notice but also a convenient prison to hold me in place.

It turns out that I didn’t need to be worried, because it had all been a trap. The planet I had been on was locked down, homogenous in thought and culture, but there were dissidents elsewhere in the solar system, rebels and rogues who went against the prevailing dogmas. They had set up a transmitter that mimicked the signal well enough to provoke a response, and when the fleet came in, the rebels were ready. Despite having much smaller numbers, the ambush went well for them, and they were able to get their prize: me.

I think at first I was just supposed to be some leverage or something, a piece of meat to be ransomed back to the government, but they took a liking to me. They had a sophisticated ship with all the bells and whistles, but only around twenty people, and I took to my captivity like a bear takes to shitting in the woods.

The pirates had their own answer to the heat death of the universe, which was to digitize themselves, become computers, and ride everything out for as long as the last star was burning, then run on battery for as long as possible after that, passively harvesting hydrogen left in the stellar expanse. They were techno as hell, implants in their skulls, prosthetics to replace their limbs, things that the home culture disdained enough to make illegal. The ship’s captain, Clarke, liked to say that their twenty people were equivalent to about a thousand normal people, and the fact that they’d been able to capture me was proof of that.

It wasn’t just me that they wanted, it was the armguard too, but it stymied their efforts to break me out of the jail, and killed one of them in the process.

Honestly, I felt at home among the pirates, particularly because they were so political. I wasn’t sure whether I really bought into the whole ‘turn ourselves into computers’ thing, but it wasn’t like they tried to force it on me. They’d suggested some upgrades to my biology, some integration with technology, but after the incident with the doctor there was a lot less of that. The armguard wouldn’t have allowed it. I had my own healthy skepticism about going techno.

I know you said you were a knight some worlds back, but for me, it’s always been easier to fall in with the outcasts. I spent about a month with those guys, eventually becoming one of the crew after I used my sword to fight off a government boarding party. I got a tattoo on my back, which I might show you some day — it caused a stir in the bathhouse a few days ago. I was wincing in anticipation and everyone on the crew laughed when it was painless, done by a robot arm in about two seconds flat. I guess the armor probably wouldn’t have allowed anything too bad.

I’ve got a fun fact about this space-faring civilization at the end of the world, a fact which I learned during my time with the rebel pirates. You might have been thinking of Rampart as heirs to a trillion year empire, an ancient civilization that had survived through unimaginable spans of time only to end up the last one in the house after the party was over. Nope! They had existed in this state for about five hundred years, and all that talk about looking millions of years into the future and being the last light of life in the universe was really hopeful on their part. They’d been part of a colony ship that had been trying to launch themselves to the end of the universe, and through some time dilation black hole physics stuff I didn’t really understand, had ended up skipping past most of the good bits, stranding their descendants there.

I think the only reason we really stood a chance was because all the pirates were augmented to hell and back, using tools that the people they were running against didn’t want to. The space police were tied up in red tape, basically, which meant that the pirates could act with impunity so long as they never did anything too far beyond the pale.

All that changed when the other thresholder showed up. I only met him in person once, and we were fighting full-force by then. We talked a lot over comms though, not that it was very productive, especially given that we had to assume everyone else was listening in on what we were saying.

Morton was on his third world, same as me, and he was pretty upfront with everyone about wanting to put an end to me. He had been a scientist in his world, I guess, working in biotech, though he was the boring sort of scientist who mostly writes grant proposals and formats papers for publication. He had gotten into the field because of a television show he’d seen when he was young, and then one thing had led to another, and he had gobs of higher education and was working on some super boring research.

It was good that all the stars had mostly died out, because it made room for Morton’s enormous ego. He saw himself as some kind of Chosen One, the guy who was going to bring salvation to not just this world, but all others.

He learned about my powers from the goons at Rampart, and I learned about one of his powers because he wouldn’t shut up about it. One of them was a plant power, and it was, in his words ‘contagious’, capable of spreading from person to person. He could cause a burst of vines from any nearby plant, including the vines themselves, and while there was a bit of refractory period, he had apparently used it in all kinds of ways he wanted me to know about, vines as armor, vines to set traps, vines for camo, construction, healing, you name it. He’d gotten the power and then spent seventeen months mapping it out and pushing it to its limits before taking on the other thresholder. That’s a long time for us.

The vines were the solution to all of Rampart’s speculation on the end of the universe, and since they sprouted up from nothing, creating mass in the process, since they could be eaten, it was thought that humanity could survive indefinitely. They drew up all kinds of plans for how this would happen, vines to protect against the vacuum of space, vines to burn for heat, vines for oxygen, for food, for air, all kinds of things. We watched some of the science casts, where they talked about this particular form of entropy defying magic, a much more impressive thing than was available to me, and we laughed about it a little bit, but I could tell the crew were having their own thoughts. They wanted to live forever, as computer programs, but they’d always thought that eventually they would run down and die, all the power having been sucked from the world’s last battery. Now, someone was saying that didn’t have to be the case. It had been different with me, since it wasn’t clear I’d have my powers if I were a computer program, and I didn’t really want to be a computer program anyway, but with him, the calculus was different.

All he was asking for was my head on a pike, so to speak.

What followed were a series of plays and counterplays. He had the weight of Rampart behind him, and some control over them, since he had something that they wanted — namely, the vines. I didn’t come from a place with space combat, but we had a lot of it in our movies, and it was a bit of a shock how different it was. I was no help at all, but Clarke, the captain, gave me some pointers. Battles took place at extreme distances, beyond your ability to see the enemy, and it was all about heat signatures, decoys, and firing first. If that wasn’t enough, you loudly shouted about your deadman’s switches. The pirates had done a lot in order to not be brought to justice, but now we were being actively hunted, and I guess Rampart had picked a side, because they were going in with full force.

We did a heist to get the keys to unlock the nanites, and I guess you already know that only partially worked. The rebels had been pushing hard for digitization, in the hopes that they could become far more difficult to kill by having backup copies of themselves, and the nanites were seen as one of the keys to doing that. Fully self-replicating nanomachines were possible, they were just constrained, and no one had seen them, but if we had even a gram, then we’d have a million grams.

After five of these sorties, jetting around the solar system and seeing the sights while trying to steal what we could, I ran right into the biggest snag imaginable: the pirates turned on me.

Morton had been doing some politicking in the background, not with the pirates, but with Rampart. Apparently he had some anecdote about how his people dealt with dissidents, which was not through suppression, but by giving them somewhere to go. This resulted in a proliferation of sects, but he likened that to biodiversity, I guess, a less fragile system. It was a good pitch. I wish I remembered more of it. In short, the government bought it, then they made an offer, which the pirate rebels couldn’t refuse. There were conditions attached, above and beyond bringing me in, conditions like being shot off toward a far-distant star, staying quiet about the offer, leaving without a fuss, all that kind of stuff, but they’d get what they wanted.

I fought like a cat trying to be put in a bath, but I wasn’t strong enough. Maybe I could have done it now, with the current suite of powers, killed Clarke and his goons. I wasn’t at full strength though, not physically, and not mentally. They’d been friends, companions, and I hadn’t thought that the combination of carrots and sticks could get them to budge. Lesson learned, I thought.

Morton’s plan was to stick me in a chamber and kill me with lasers. Honestly, it felt like supervillain shit, but there was a reason, which was mostly to gather information about how and when the portals opened. He saw the high-tech civilization as an opportunity, I guess, a way to engage in some fact-finding about the thresholders. He wanted to cross the multiverse at will and had this hugely egotistical dream of changing every world he came across. He wanted to be god, basically, and killing me while a bunch of monitoring equipment looked on was step one.

Of course, Clarke came through in the end. He scuttled the deal at the last moment and put me within spitting distance of Morton, and from there, it was a long, drawn-out battle that took us through a high-orbit space station. He was a clever guy, very inventive with his powers, but that didn’t actually help him all that much. I think one of things he was missing was that it wasn’t about having a good idea, it was about execution in the heat of the moment, moving fast, having your blade be an extension of yourself. He was like a guy who thinks up the perfect comeback in the shower days later and thinks that makes him a good conversationalist.

He had the same nanites that I had, and the heist had been such a success that they hadn’t even known that it happened. I had the keys to the kingdom, and disabled his armor, which meant that he was mostly using vines for defense, and they were no match for my needle. His go-to move was trying to slam me against the walls, but I bounced off, and he just wasn’t thinking fast enough to make new plans on the fly, not when his bag of tricks was running dry.

This was his third world, and the vines had been front and center, but I’d figured he was keeping one in reserve, and when he was bloodied, he brought out what he’d been holding back, a dark power that twisted the metal around us and formed it into two-foot tall golems. It took a clear toll on him, but it saved him, and I was on the back foot. Unfortunately, we were on a space station, and there’s only so much metal that you can remove from one of those before you cause some serious problems. The hull blew out, and we were twirling in space together.

The nanites covered me head to toe, but they couldn’t clean the air I was breathing, meaning I had minutes at most. Morton was a bit worse off than I was though. As he was trying to use his dark power to warp the metal and cover himself up, I launched myself at him, needle-first.

I’d meant to stick around after he was dead, but you can’t always get what you want, and I left without saying any goodbyes. Clarke had saved me, and I wished that I could have said thank you, even if the thing he saved me from was his own betrayal.

I came through the portal with nothing more than the nanoarmor and my needle, on solid ground a short walk from a fishing village. It took my eyes some time to adjust. You probably know how jarring it can be, moving from one world to another, leaving everything behind. One minute you’re in the black void of space with a red sun and dying stars, fighting hard against some dick who’s blown you out into the vacuum, the next you’re watching thick-armed women repairing rope fishing nets in the baking midday sun.

Honestly, the dying lights of the last world had been getting to me, and it felt good to be in a simpler place. I had my armor, my sword, and was feeling pretty good about myself. There was no way to pass for a local for long, since they weren’t quite human, but they were friendly enough, and I spent the night with the smell of the sea air in my nose and got a surprisingly good sleep.

Almost all the people were godtouched in some way or another, imbued with the power of … whatever. Some of them could transform into animals, others could control the elements, and most had some kind of distinctness to them, little flairs. Most of the men and women in that early village were associated with the gods of fish, seaweed, or water, so they had gills, seaweed growing from their hair, scales, things like that. There was a lot of variety and style to it all, and that was one of the highlights of the world for me. The clothes people wore were bespoke, with cut-outs to show the places where the gods had marked them.

The other thresholder had arrived some three months before me, which I found out about soon enough, because he’d been busy. He was spreading malicious slander about me while getting up to his own adventures, most of which involved being ridiculously good at combat. He had powers that had mine beat hands down, especially because they all worked together. His arms and legs could stretch and bend, giving him mobility and reach, as well as letting him launch his lunatic spear off over the mountains. He could teleport to the spear, which I think was a part of the spear’s power, but he wasn’t kind enough to give me the low down on it. The last of his set of three was a bow that got more powerful and more accurate the further away he took the shot. So his usual way of doing things was to use his bendy arms to launch his spear way, way up into the air, teleport up to it, then shoot arrows on the way down, which would arrive at their targets with all the force and precision of a laser-guided missile.

He was another guy with an ego problem, though Morton had all the charisma of a wet rag, and Spence oozed charm. He also showboated a lot. In a just world that would have been his downfall, but alas, he got the better of me in the end.

Spence had won the favor of the God of Wine in a tournament, and had gone from favored to avatar in short order. That came with a lot of power, and he was using it with impunity, mostly to throw huge parties. I got blindsided by it the first time we met, the way that lips became loose around him, inhibitions dropped, that sort of thing. I was lucky that he didn’t cotton on to who I was, but maybe it wasn’t ‘luck’, because he’d been thinking that I would be a man. I guess all his other opponents had been men, but also, he was a misogynist. All the shit he’d been talking about the forthcoming thresholder had been under the assumption that it would be a dude, which worked in my favor.

Once he knew I was there — my fault, honestly — I survived mostly by letting my armor tank the hits and hiding away from eyes in the sky. Eventually I got in touch with the God of Water, who grudgingly gave me his patronage. He was a relative to Spence’s patron, and though the family tree was pretty twisted, the God of Water was an elder and the God of Wine an upstart, something like grandfather and grandnephew, or something like that.

Being an avatar came with powers, and I spent a lot of time in the sea, not just to swim as fast as lightning, but because I could duck beneath the waves at a moment’s notice. I didn’t even need to be that far beneath the surface to stop the arrows from doing much more than pushing me around.

I was, however, constantly wet, always feeling like I’d just stepped out of a shower, fingers always a bit pruny, even when I’d been out of the water for days. I complained about it to the God of Water, but he didn’t seem to care that it was annoying, and never fixed the problem. I never found out whether that was a ‘won’t’ or ‘can’t’ kind of thing.

I was in that world for a pretty long time, some of which was spent being a gopher for the God of Water, unrelated to the central conflict. I think maybe me and Spence both realized that we had it pretty good, so didn’t go after each other as hard as maybe we could have. He had his parties, which he wasn’t even paying for, and I was mostly living on different islands, always with lodging available, free of charge, for the avatar of an esteemed god. The weather was nice and mild, I swam with the fishes and visited the reefs, and Spence had his parties.

Problem was, Spence was a little fuzzy on the concept of consent, and pretty soon he got a reputation that made women stop showing up to his parties so much. When word got to me, I was furious, and every day after that felt a little sour, knowing that he was living the same life of luxury I was. I’d killed three thresholders by that point, and a few other people besides, and I was getting the sense that I was the only one who would put an end to him. The gods were also terrible, don’t get me wrong, and some of the stories people told were horrifying, but they were untouchable, and Spence was just someone like me. Or, like me, but an asshole.

So, look, I’d love to tell you that I brought him to justice, but like I’ve already said, it didn’t pan out. I called him out, we had a formal fight before the gods, and he beat me. I’m still pissed about it, frankly. I hope someone rips his spine apart. I hope he lands in a world that’s nothing but scorpions. I hope his mom gets cancer. I want someone to plaster his brains against asphalt. I had never seen the appeal of crucifixion before meeting him, but now, oh boy.

Whatever. If I think about it I’m just going to get mad.

He could easily have killed me, but he was a cocky son of a bitch, so when I was laying on the ground, trying to struggle to my feet for the fifth time, instead of going in for the killing blow, he grinned at me and said ‘I would end it here, but I’ve always thought it uncouth to hit a woman’. This was after I was nearly pulp inside my armor. And then, to add insult to injury, the portal opened. He gave it a mild look and stepped on through, as though on a whim, and I was left there in the arena, broken, muscles not strong enough to actually get me to a standing position. I didn’t know you could do that whole thing without killing the other person, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.

The God of Water stripped me of my rank, and I was persona non grata for the deific set, which meant that I was also shunned by the common people, the time of free food and a place to lay my head having come to an end. Losing a skirmish was one thing, but losing a formal duel in front of everything was quite another. Still, when the portal opened up two days later, I spent some time staring at it, deciding whether or not I was going to go through. I did eventually, obviously. I kept thinking about Spence, and a rematch, and if there wasn’t a rematch in my future, then I was thinking about the cast of characters thus far.

It was a bunch of stupid assholes, in case you hadn’t been paying attention.

So I went through, sword in hand, armguard at the ready, having a good idea of the caliber of opponent I would find.