Content Warnings
None this chapter.
“Central, huh?” Howl sneered. “You ain’t even the top of the hierarchy? Central’s bitch, stewing in your own piss, cowering the dark? Alright, graveworm. How do we—”
“Your next words, I know them by heart,” said the graveworm’s avatar. Her hidden lips were pressed tight against the membrane of shadow which separated her from Elpida and Howl, but her voice still crept from the outer darkness of the infinite chamber, an omnidirectional whisper from raw and ragged vocal chords. “Central is all my shame, all my hate, curdled into all the rotten despair of every generation before we completed ourselves. But you are going to ask anyway. You are going to ask the one question I cannot answer, because there is no answer. Spare me, zombies. Spare me the trillionth repetition of the same question I have asked myself over and over and over again, without hope of—”
“Do you ever fucking stop!?” Howl snapped. “Fucking right I’m gonna ask you! Central, your fucked up hate-baby, whatever it is. How do we kill it?”
“Howl,” Elpida murmured. But her voice seemed so thin and weak.
Elpida felt as if the ground had shifted beneath her feet. For the first time in her life, mortal or revenant, she could not regain her balance.
Telokopolis was once a starship, launched from a dying Earth, and had eventually returned; that alone was enough to upend all of Telokopolan culture. All the most basic assumptions of the Telokopolan relationship to the green, to the actual human beings who lived within her, even to the planet itself, were called into question by this change of perspective. But that should not have plunged Elpida’s emotional equilibrium into this abyss of vertigo. She had dealt with far worse extremes without going to pieces, even her own death and resurrection. She was a Telokopolan pilot, engineered for absolute resilience; she could endure almost any surprise, any revelation, any tragedy, and always keep fighting, no matter what happened.
But if the graveworm was telling the truth, if this was not a trick to undermine Elpida’s determination and faith, then Telokopolis had not merely been a starship.
Telokopolis had fled Earth, abandoned the remnants of humankind, left them to the mercy of an apocalypse Elpida could scarcely imagine.
“Central,” the graveworm’s avatar was saying, “cannot be overcome.”
“Ahhhh, fuck that!” Howl spat. “Anything can be beat!”
“Keep in mind, daughters of Telokopolis,” the graveworm replied, “who is saying this. I, who overcame the whole weight of our shared biological history and the totality of the old biosphere. I, who overcame the boundary between ‘me’ and ‘you’. I, who overcame the aftermath of a collapse beyond your imagination, and then the vultures and scavengers who hoped to pick over Earth’s corpse. I, who overcame time itself.” The avatar drew herself up as she spoke, rising out of her sagging slump. She struggled to her knees, chin angled high, long stringy hair hanging down, a glimmer of old pride in her withered frame, visible even through the membrane of shadow. “I am the pinnacle of everything we worked towards. I am the completion and conclusion of every homo sapiens, back to the first apes squatting in the first caves. I am, bar one, the most total entity to ever walk Earth’s cradle. And I tell you, Central cannot be overcome.”
Howl snorted. “Says the bitch bottling her own piss. Have you even tried? You done anything but pine for our mum?”
Elpida looked down at her own left hand. It was shaking, the same way as after she had lost her right arm to the Death-Head’s forced suicide bomb.
Telokopolis had abandoned the graveworm — the gestalt remnants of humanity, if Elpida had understood correctly. Telokopolis had sent messages back, messages of unconditional love and support and forgiveness. But she had still left.
What did that make Elpida? What did that make all the eventual inhabitants of Telokopolis? Were they the descendants of those who had fled, who had split humankind in half? Or had Telokopolis carried human genetic material in her womb, encoded on silicon or held in ice, waiting in uterine replicators? Had she birthed humanity anew, somewhere out in the empty void between the stars?
Was Elpida born from a legacy of cowardice and betrayal?
The graveworm managed a tiny laugh, a bare puff of air. “I have done more than you can imagine, zombie. When my own hate took life and murdered my one true love, I fought a war that would have murdered this planet ten times over if it had still lived. I burned my own beauty to cinders, chasing Central from the bottom of ocean trenches to the tallest treetops. I choked the sky, choked myself in the process, just to snatch one breath from Central’s lungs. I flooded the air, the water, the soil, with me, me, me, all to outpace Central! And I failed! Failed!” The graveworm sagged, old rage collapsing into ragged sobs. “That’s why it’s so cruel. So cruel that you’re here.”
“You’re the one who keeps resurrecting us, you—”
“Not zombies,” the graveworm murmured. “You. Her daughters. She has been here all along, and yet the world is still a cauldron of hate and despair. My despair, my hate! Still ash and blood and ruin!” The avatar’s voice broke and cracked as she spoke. “And she has been watching all this time, and we never knew. And now her children are here, and she must watch you die and wither and lose your minds, like all the others. So tell me, zombies, what can you possibly do? What can you hope to do, that I have not already tried?”
“We can keep fucking fighting!” Howl shouted. “Unlike you!”
Howl grabbed Elpida’s hand and held it up, a brief pose of improvised triumph. But Elpida’s arm felt limp, as if all her energy and self-assurance had drained away. Howl looked up at her in surprise. Elpida looked back, and didn’t know how to compose her face.
Howl’s eyes went wide. “Elps?”
The graveworm carried right on. “The only reason you are still alive is because Central hasn’t paid you enough attention yet.”
Howl’s head snapped back around. “Yeah, a civil war, war in heaven, we know! We can take advantage of that!”
The avatar shook her head. “If you threaten Central’s power, it will pull itself together, for as long as it takes to crush you utterly. At the moment you haven’t done more than attract a fraction of that potential.”
“We’ve got seven Necromancers on our arses!” said Howl. “And if you don’t help—”
“Seven Necromancers pursue you.” Another sad laugh, barely a puff of breath. “You think seven Necromancers is a significant force? Why do you think I have my guardians, my ‘worm-guard’? Why do you think I need such an inexhaustible supply? Try a thousand Necromancers, or a million, or a billion. Try the ‘physical assets’, not in their ones or twos that have crept up to my borders in the last few months, but in their hundreds. Try direct network control, fighting your body itself from the inside. You will be put down. Both of you, and all those you have gathered about you. Because Central cannot abide a challenge, it cannot allow another locus of power to form. It will rouse itself to remove any alternative to its own hate and despair. It will not tolerate organisation among the dead. You are a gnat, and a giant requires only a moment of attention to remove you.”
“Coward shit,” Howl snapped, then looked up at Elpida. “Elps? Hey, hey! Elps! What’s wrong, hey?”
“Central is everywhere,” the graveworm’s shivering whisper ground on from the shadows; Elpida felt the darkness closing as the whisper crept over her. “In everything, in everyone. The air, the soil, your bodies. How can you hope to ‘win’ against such a total system of control? It is more total than the worst examples in all our long, sordid history. There has never been a tyrant more terrible, a perpetrator more cruel and capricious, a dictator more absolute than this. There are no mountains or forests to which you can flee, no alternative poles of power to stand in opposition, no hidden corners in which to hide. Your participation is not merely mandatory, it is pre-determined. You cannot even step outside it, let alone turn and fight. If you tried, one of its billion, billion, billion appendages would simply freeze you where you stand and turn you to slurry.”
“Shut up!” Howl screamed. “Shut up for one fucking second!” She whipped back to Elpida. “Elps? Elps, look at me! What’s wrong—”
Elpida couldn’t stop shaking; the quiver from her hand had spread into her chest. Her breath came too quick, she couldn’t slow down. Her extremities felt cold and numb, her core too hot, her stomach too tight. She felt dizzy and light and heavy all at once.
Her body should not be capable of experiencing this kind of breakdown. Was this a panic attack? Was this what baseline humans felt like, all the time? Was this the state of terrible anxiety and fear and churning horror that they held back every hour of every day? Was this what Telokopolis had been protecting her against? How could she crumble, at such a tiny revelation? She knew she should be able to pull herself together, but she could not.
“Even if you were to guide Telokopolis back into her body,” said the graveworm, “she would be destroyed again.”
“Shut up!” Howl shouted. “Shut up!”
Elpida made her lips move. “Telokopolis is … ”
Forever?
“You cannot prevail,” said the graveworm’s avatar. “I am sorry. I am so sorry, because it is all my fault. How can you hope to ‘win’, against something so—”
“Because!” Howl roared. “We! Do! It! Together!”
The avatar recoiled a few inches; the shadowy membrane lost her shape, her body sinking back into the darkness. She shook her head. “Together means nothing. We are as together as humanity could ever be, and yet we have tasted nothing but defeat and failure and—”
“No!” Howl shouted. “You didn’t stay together, did you?! Her and you, you and Telokopolis, you split! Me and Elps, all the rest of us, our sisters, Pheiri, fucking all of us! We do it together! Not like you, not hiding in the dark, not giving up when you can still fight!”
“You cannot ‘beat’ despair.”
“Despair ends!”
“In death,” said the graveworm. “Which is where we are.”
“Fuck that!” Howl screamed. “Fuck you!” She whipped back to Elpida. “Elps? Elps, fucking— fucking look at me!” Howl reached up with both hands, grabbed Elpida by the cheeks, and forced her to focus on Howl’s shining purple eyes.
“I’m … ” Elpida had to blink several times to clear her vision; her eyes were full of tears. “I’m … crying? Why am I … ”
Howl smiled; Elpida’s heart leapt so hard she felt it might break upon the inside of her own ribcage.
“Because you’ve just found out mum wasn’t perfect,” Howl whispered in clade-cant.
“But … but you’re not … you’re fine, you … ”
Howl shook her head, but never once broke eye contact. Howl’s eyes and Howl’s hands slowly stilled Elpida’s shaking. “Nah, I’m just handling it a touch better, that’s all. You always idolised Telokopolis the most. But she was never just an ideal, right? She’s real. And nobody’s perfect.”
“She … she abandoned Earth? I can’t … Howl, I can’t … ”
Howl nodded slowly. “Mum made mistakes, yeah. Then she came back and tried to fix them, by the sounds of it. But she failed. That’s why we’re here, Elps. To fix what she couldn’t.”
Elpida felt her tears trickle to a stop, not bottled back down, but soaked up by Howl’s hands.
“To go further than she could,” Elpida said. Her voice felt raw, but firm.
Howl cracked a grin. “Everyone out there still needs us, Elps. Needs you. Pheiri and the others. We gotta come through for our little brother, yeah?”
Elpida reached up and took Howl’s right hand. She forced down a deep breath, let it out slowly. Howl went up on tiptoes and kissed her, soft and deep, then let her go.
Elpida raised her chin. She could deal with this now. She would compartmentalise, and decompress later. Right now, her comrades, her cadre, her sisters, they all needed her.
“I offer you sanctuary,” said the graveworm’s avatar.
“Huh?” Howl turned back to her. “What?”
“Sanctuary.” The avatar was wreathed in shadows. The membrane of darkness was no longer just a thin barrier between her and the daughters of Telokopolis; it had thickened into a wall of cloying mist, her outline barely visible. “Here. With me. Where you would be safe, for as long as you desire. Forever. It is the only thing I can do, the only help I have to offer. And I would, I promise. I would not refuse sanctuary to her children, no matter what horrors Central looses in retribution for my rule-breaking. I will shelter you.”
Howl sneered. “What, in here, with your shit-stained undies and your piss bottles?” She gestured at the debris, the food wrappers and bottles full of human urine. “I’d rather sleep in the ruins. In a hole. In the rain.”
Elpida straightened up. “Could you shelter everyone?”
Howl blinked at her. “Elps?”
The avatar nodded; the shadows around her face darkened further, her hazy outline sinking into a pit of tar. “Both of you, all your companions, even your tank, this ‘Pheiri’. I can do the same I have done to you, bring you within my protected software space, where Central cannot breach. I would shelter you all within me. It is the least I can do! The only thing I can do for her children!”
Darkness pressed inward toward Elpida and Howl. The tiny patch of light in the centre of the room dwindled and dimmed. The vast hemisphere of screens hanging above them began to fade into the shadows as well, the blue-grey-black eye turning hazy with interference. Howl gritted her teeth and turned on the spot, a cornered animal by Elpida’s side.
“No,” Elpida said. “That’s not everyone. That’s not what I asked.”
“Ahhh?”
The dimming stopped.
“I told you already, graveworm.” Elpida said the words, fought back her own doubt and fear; whatever her mother had done in the past, this was the present. “Telokopolis is forever, and Telokopolis is for all. Every zombie, every person, with none left behind, none left outside in the green. Can you do that? Can you shelter everyone?”
The lights brightened again, blue illumination pushing back the shadows, the gigantic eye flickering back to life. The avatar emerged as a rough outline in the gloom, still crouched on the floor.
“No,” the graveworm said. “No, Central would never allow … I could never get away with it, and … and there is simply not enough room inside me, not for all the teeming masses of the undead, I could never … ”
“Then we do not have a deal,” Elpida said. “But we need your help.”
“I am offering you a way out of the cycle, a place of rest, a place of—”
“Fuck giving up!” Howl spat. “Fuck that!”
“We need your help,” Elpida said. “Right now, with those seven Necromancers out there, and in the future. We need your help, graveworm, because we are Telokopolis now. We are hope. And Telokopolis needs your help.”
A single dry sob boiled from the shadows. “You cannot ask that! Did you not hear a single thing I said? You cannot begin to fight Central. It is control itself. It is this system, the medium in which you swim, the flesh of your bodies, the ground on which you walk. It is the air, the water, the soil! It has become Earth itself!”
“Then we die fighting,” Elpida said. “On our feet.”
“You will be resurrected!” wailed the worm. “Back into this! Again and again and again!”
“As many times as it takes,” Elpida said. “As many lives as it takes. Maybe I won’t win. Maybe those who come after me won’t win. But no system can endure forever. Central is not immortal, whatever else it is.”
“I cannot consign her children to this.” A dry sob, hard and rough, tearing her throat. “Please, please let me shelter you, for her, for her, for—”
“Answer me this,” Elpida said. “Why does Central allow the nanomachine ecosystem to continue?”
The avatar sagged heavily, curled up on herself, head hanging low. “Because it cannot let go. That is Central’s nature, the nature of my despair, a total refusal and inability to let go. Because that is what despair is, a mirror image of hope.”
“Thank you,” said Elpida. “We still need your help, graveworm.”
A dry sob became a low, pained wail. “Please, please, don’t you think I’ve tried? Don’t do this to me, I can’t … I can’t watch her children die too … ”
“Open the forges!” said Howl.
“Ah?” The avatar’s head rose. Elpida waited to see where Howl was going with this.
“The nanomachine forges!” Howl said. “The raw blue, there’s so fucking much of it, all inside you! Why not open it up to the zombies? To everyone! It would change fucking everything out there. Everything! Let the undead drink! We’ll tear Central apart!”
The graveworm sighed. “Because Central would wipe you clean. You refuse to comprehend. Do you not think I’ve tried that before? Central will not permit mass uplift of the dead. You will not be permitted freedom. We have the forges, the keepers peer into the past, and the zombies must scrape for survival on each other’s flesh. That is the way Central desires it.”
“Keepers?” Elpida asked.
“Gravekeepers. Other parts of me. It’s all parts of me. All me, us, I, we. All of us.”
“Central’s at fucking war with itself!” Howl spat. “You tried it in the past, but maybe this time is different. Anything else is just giving up, bitch!”
The avatar shook her head. “Central has always been at war with itself, that’s its nature. Hate and despair. It is divided against itself, in the same way I was once divided against myself. Hate and despair are fractal experiences, they birth more of themselves, infinitely. Central and I are locked in a mutual war, but it is kept in check by both our natures. I am yoked, but Central is divided. As we are, neither of us can fully destroy the other.”
“What about the green?” Elpida asked. “We know it’s still out there, beyond the edge of the continent, drowned in black gunk.”
“Central and I, expressed in other forms. Nothing more.”
“And the Silico? Are they just you?”
The avatar hesitated.
“Graveworm?”
Even through the thickened shadows, the outline of her face seemed suddenly surprised. “No, I … no. The Silico, that is what you called them, what she called them, but they are not mere imitative machines. They are the best of what I learned, though expressed from such deep confusion. They are … in a way, I suppose they are … or were, my children. As you are hers.” A deep, defeated sigh. “Another failure, another loss, more corpses in the eternal grave.”
Elpida was struck by a sudden surge of anger; all those people, all those Legionnaires, all that suffering and death and destruction, the long war with the Silico, and here was the ultimate culprit — another branch of humanity. The obscenity of it almost overwhelmed her, but she quashed the anger as best she could. The war which had defined her whole life was ancient history, and she needed the graveworm’s help. She would accept even the Silico’s help, if she could get it.
“I met a Silico,” Elpida said. “In the network.”
“ … what?” the graveworm breathed, voice a bare whisper. “Impossible. No, they’re all gone, melted away by my own hate. Central took them all, I lost track, I failed, I—”
“I met a Silico, in the network,” Elpida repeated. “Telokopolis called it from somewhere. It helped defend me. It defended Telokopolis.”
The avatar said nothing; the vast dark room filled with the sound of slow, steady, rough breathing.
“Yeah, bitch,” Howl snorted. “Your kids are alive too. You still gonna sit here soaking in your own piss? Or are you gonna fucking help us?”
The breathing roughened, deepened, squeezed through a slowly constricting throat.
“My … my own … children … ”
“We’re not going to accept your offer of sanctuary,” Elpida said. “Not unless it includes everyone, everybody, with nobody left outside. We’re going to go back anyway, don’t even think of trying to keep us here. You can help us or not, it’s your choice, but I ask you, in her name, to render us all the aid you can.”
“I can’t … ” came the broken reply. “Central would sweep you all aside.”
“It’ll do that anyway,” Elpida said. “So I would rather die fighting. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a way. And if we’re gonna find it, we’ll have a better chance with your help than without.”
A long moment of silence. Howl opened her mouth, but Elpida grabbed Howl’s wrist and shook her head.
“Graveworm?” Elpida said. “What are you afraid of? If you won’t risk yourself for this, then for what? Are you going to ruminate on her memory forever, or are you going to act?”
A laugh, sharp and soft. “I thought like that once, soldier. It was so long ago now, and I fear to go back, back to the rage and the pain, but … ahhhhh.” A sigh, long and low, as if finally letting go of a terrible weight. “Do you want to see what I really am? What I have turned myself into? I suppose I have no choice. I cannot just let you die. Not … not when she is watching, wherever she is.”
The light began to brighten, peeling away the shadows.
The graveworm’s secret avatar rose from her curled-up crouch and crawled away from the expanding circle of blue-tinted light, toward the initial screen before which she had been hunched. Illumination followed as if dragged by her heels, revealing mounds of stained clothing, drifts of mouldy food wrappers, cliffs of discarded computer parts. Light poured from above, falling from the hemisphere of screens; the gigantic eye of blue and grey and black was slowly blotted out by the truth shining through from behind — the vast matrix of irregular hexahedrons which Elpida had glimpsed earlier, filled with a web of organs and flesh and brain matter, studded by trillions of human hearts, thudding away to themselves in a sea of raw blue. The overhead vista stretched away into a murky sapphire infinity, a window into the truth of the graveworm.
The avatar crawled to a stop before the initial screen, still glowing faintly blue in the shadows. Widening light passed over her in an echo of dawn.
She whimpered as illumination touched her, hunched tight with her knees to her chest, eyes scrunched shut.
An emaciated figure emerged, wrapped in a ragged black t-shirt, greasy and stained, holes worn in the ends of the long sleeves, hem falling past her hips. Her skin was a light brown, perhaps coppery once, turned pale from too long in the dark, like a living mushroom. Her hair was reduced to a series of grey-white rat-tails hanging down her back, matted together with grease and time, her bare scalp showing through. Purple eyes blinked open, peering out from sunken sockets, rheumy and cloudy, ringed with dark circles engraved into her flesh. Her hands shook, fingers long and bony, nails bitten, flesh scabbed in a thousand tiny wounds. She could have been sixteen or sixty, withered before her time, or preserved in salt.
A horizontal bruise stood out on her throat, purple and livid, from Howl’s makeshift garotte. A matching bruise shone on her jaw, where Howl had hit her, an explosion of broken capillaries spider-webbing up her cheek.
Elpida clamped down on surprise. She smiled, because that was what the graveworm needed. She stepped forward, but Howl stuck out a hand.
“Elps,” she whispered. “Let me.”
“Howl? Be gentle, be—”
But Howl was too fast. She darted forward, past Elpida, down the canyon of debris and junk. The graveworm’s avatar recoiled, eyes going wide with alarm, trying to scramble to her feet.
Howl caught her — in a hug.
Together they sank back to the floor, framed by the soft blue glow of the single monitor. The avatar’s wide-eyed surprise collapsed into narrow slits filled with tears, soaking into Howl’s shoulder, her body shaking with fragile little sobs. She clung to Howl, hands hooked like claws. She whined into Howl’s collarbone.
“You did good,” Howl murmured. “You did good.”
Elpida walked forward to join them, waiting for the hug to end. After a few moments the graveworm’s avatar sniffed and stirred. Howl let her go, but stayed close, easing back and scooting away, cross-legged on the floor.
The graveworm wiped her eyes on her filthy sleeves.
“You look … ” Elpida hesitated. The graveworm glanced up, purple eyes clouded and milky with age and damage. “You look like us. Like a pilot. You’ve got the pilot phenotype. Did you choose that on purpose?”
The graveworm looked at her own hands with dull surprise.
“No,” she said; her voice still came from everywhere and nowhere, an echoed whisper from the darkness and a cracked croak creeping up her dry throat. “This face, this body, it belonged to one of her early engineers, one of the tissue donors for her parthenogenesis. I don’t recall the name.”
Elpida clamped down on a shiver. “Telokopolis was made from human tissue?”
“Among others,” the avatar murmured.
Elpida filed that away for later, she could only take so many world-upending revelations in one conversation. “Graveworm. We can’t keep calling you that. Are there any names you remember?”
The graveworm’s avatar managed a sadly ironic smile, nothing more than a twitch of her lips. “Every name. Every one. To call me a specific name would do injustice to all who made us up. I am, we are, homo vermis.”
“Hey,” Howl said, soft now. “Graveworm. Humanity. Mum’s side-piece. Heh, nah, mum’s main squeeze, am I right? Vermis. We still need your help.”
The graveworm’s avatar — homo vermis? — nodded to herself. She turned away from Howl and Elpida, to face the blue glow of the initial screen, the true interface for her private software space. Thick shadow still wrapped the edges of the screen, as if it was extruded from the underlying substrate of the graveworm’s mind. It showed nothing but a steady, featureless blue, the same shade as raw nanomachines.
The avatar reached forward, hands vanishing into the shadow, then withdrew holding a battered black keyboard. Half the letters were worn away, the plastic gone shiny from decades of use and skin oil, the space beneath the keys packed with a thick mat of dust and hairs and crumbs.
“Hmm.” The graveworm held the keyboard up as if sighting down a rifle scope. “Won’t do.”
She took a breath, filling her lungs so deep that Elpida was afraid she might break a simulated rib. When she blew on the keyboard, the air quivered with the force of a split-second hurricane. Elpida staggered; Howl ducked, then laughed.
But then the breath was over. The keyboard in the avatar’s hands was still old and battered, but now it was clean.
“Apologies,” the graveworm’s avatar muttered.
She settled the keyboard in her lap and hunched forward, bony hands alighting on the keys. But then she paused, hesitated, staring at her fingers, as if she couldn’t remember what to do next.
“You can do it,” said Elpida. “You’re not alone anymore. You will never be alone again. Telokopolis is for all, and that includes you.”
The avatar swallowed, nodded, and tapped a key.
Blue light flared and flickered inside the screen, cycling through a million shades in a split-second; the display exploded with dozens of separate windows and readouts, flowering in a fractal tree, tiles spilling from each other, lines of machine-code whipping past too fast for even Elpida’s eyes to catch a single scrolling word. The keyboard in the avatar’s lap lit up in sequence, blue light blossoming behind the keys as her fingers flew over the board, a silent raindrop chorus in her lap as the keys clicked and clacked.
Vermis let out a deep sigh, eyes flickering shut, as if sinking into a hot bath.
Suddenly the single screen seemed bigger, but paradoxically the same size, as if the shadows had bent space to show as much as the graveworm required. The optical illusion almost made Elpida blink and look away.
But then the edges of the screen filled with fresh windows, showing exterior displays of a familiar black-and-grey landscape.
Pheiri — a mobile fortress of Telokopolan bone-armour, bristling with weapons, framed against the storm-ruined concrete of the city, bracketed by the stalks of black mold, frozen in the first second of a sideways skid, trying to turn aside from the onrushing tide of worm-guard.
Crouched above Pheiri was the worm-guard which had grabbed Elpida. With the sensory interference stripped away, the worm-guard was a writhing mass of thick black tentacles, each one filled with glistening muscle the colour of tar, armoured in semi-transparent artificial diamond. It was roughly hexapedal, standing on six massive clusters of armoured tentacle, but with additional clusters paused in the act of stretching toward the ground. There was no face, no head, no fixed sensory organs, just tiny points of pure black extended from the tips of a hundred tendrils. Similar tendrils held weaponry — solid-slug matter accelerators, gigantic rotary cannons, plasma weapons so large they should have required entire structures for cooling, and more besides, things Elpida did not recognise. The main body looked as if it could flow in any direction without the need to turn, made from an omnidirectional ovoid core of tightly wound tentacles, braided together like black steel, covered over with undulating liquid diamond.
“Silico?” Elpida whispered. The resemblance could not be a coincidence.
Elpida’s physical body hung from the worm-guard’s grip.
More windows blossomed, more exterior views, further out from Pheiri. There was the wall of onrushing worm-guard, a tidal wave of black tentacles and light-drinking armour, flowing over the landscape. And there were the Necromancers — the Iron Raven caught in the act of picking herself up from where Pheiri had hammered her to the ground, the five others as they skidded to a halt or aborted their leaping progress, trying to turn away from the tsunami of worm-flesh. There was Perpetua, still lingering in the rear, her face a grimace of pain and humiliation.
“Is this live?” Elpida asked.
“Real time,” said Vermis. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, painting each view with a thousand overlays and additional readouts. Pheiri was highlighted in green, the Necromancers in red, the worm-guard in gold.
“Relative to our simulated clock speed, yes?” Elpida asked. “That’s why nothing’s moving?”
“Mmhmm.” Vermis craned forward, cloudy eyes flickering from window to window.
Howl leaned against her side, uncaring of the grease and the unclean flesh. Elpida stepped forward and took her opposite shoulder in one hand, squeezing gently.
“So,” Elpida said. “Do you have a plan?”
Vermis — the graveworm, the gestalt mind, all that was truly left of pre-Telokopolan humanity — smiled.
She smiled at the screen, brimming with predatory pleasure.
Wormy wormy worms, worming through the soil, breaking free from the earth, into the upper air. Worms away! It’s worming time!
Ahem. Anyway! So here we are, dear readers, with so much of the setting finally tied together, the grave-dirt swept aside, the coffin lid cracked open, to reveal the writhing humanity within. There she is. There we are. And here we go. On a totally different note, Howl kinda surprised me here, even though I had this planned all along; she’s got a softer side, when she really needs it, and right here somebody really needed that hug.
And this is the end of arc 16! I actually wasn’t expecting this; I intended to get this entire extended sequence into a single arc, but then things got longer. I tried to write the next chapter as an interlude, but it’s really not, it’s the start of arc 17. So! Next up, a new movement. Of worms.
Also! Once again, we have yet more fanart, from over on the Discord server! This week we have something quite special: Telokopolis herself, as seen during Elpida’s dip into the network, titled As She Steps Forward Onto The Stage (by Melsa Hvarei). I love this! Seeing Telokopolis herself interpreted in art is really, really fun.
Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:
Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!
There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!
And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and enjoying my little story about zombie girls and giant machine-worm gestalt-minds and hidden star-god ladies hiding inside planet-spanning computer networks. I know I say this every chapter, but I really couldn’t do any of this without all of you. Thank you! I’ll see you all next chapter!
Necroepilogos 
