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Original Article: http://scp-wiki-de.wikidot.com/nexus-20-2
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Last time on Nexus:
Last Will, Part 1
The Heimdall System is an array of satellites that allows the SKP to spot strong reality alterations on the planet. If they occurred in space or in the upper layers of the atmosphere, they could even react to such events and counteract them with built-in reality stabilizers.
One of the satellites, Heimdal-7 to be exact, now registered such a change. A sudden, very sharp drop in reality. It took only nanoseconds for him to alert the other satellites in the vicinity and together they tried to restore normality.
The whole thing worked only to a limited extent. The satellites therefore decided to sound the alarm.
The soldiers around Colonel Wolf and also the troops on the surface of the Earth copy looked with open mouths to the sky, where a gigantic, twitching portal began to form. Shortly thereafter, all of the SKP's units fell through portals at their feet and landed as large piles of bodies at various points in Sondereinrichtung-12, and a flurry of activity ensued as the soldiers tried to break free. Wolf, who had landed at the bottom of one such pile, looked catatonically into space.
All hell had broken loose in Sondereinrichtung-1. People were talking franticly while K5-1 , in a bad mood, was on a video call with a professor of applied ontokinetics. Superimposed on the screen were numerous real-time data that the SKP was collecting on the phenomenon. One of them was a recording of the portal forming in the atmosphere over Lower Saxony.
"So, Professor Ulbricht, what do we have here?" asked K5-1.
The bald scholar adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses as he stared at the readings.
"Well, I've never seen anything like this before…" he muttered.
"Do you know what it is?" urged K5-1. "That thing's been up there for ten minutes and it keeps growing despite the Heimdall system and the efforts of dozens of reality benders. What can we do?"
"Well," the professor began. "Something like this existed only in theory until now, but it seems to be a portal to a universe that has a reality several orders of magnitude denser than ours. The edge is in a very thin area like a normal portal, low Hume count and all. That's so it can expand. The rest, however, anchors itself in our existence through the higher reality, that's why your reality benders can't do anything about it. On the contrary, they only accelerate it. And in terms of what we are supposed to do… This construct is the first of its kind that this world has ever seen. So in short, I don't know. When the Heimdal system fails, and it will, by the looks of it, then this portal will open wider and wider and its reality, so incredibly dense, will engulf us until the other reality swallows us like a black hole. And then we can only hope we don't get hit by some aimless planet or star."
"So we are…," concluded K5-with a slight tremor in his voice.
"Yeah," the professor confirmed dryly. "We're screwed."
Chloe looked around in panic. She was no longer in the hospital room, but in Ku's realm within her mind. But it seemed to be in the process of disintegrating. Furniture and masonry had begun to disintegrate upward away into their component parts, disappearing into a completely white sky. The process happened eerily slowly, but after looking for a while, one noticed that the objects were all moving.
Ku looked at them with a sad smile.
"Well. Here we are. At the end of everything."
"What's happening?" asked Chloe. "Am I dreaming?"
"No," replied the ex-god. "My power was sucked into this infernal machine. In the process, your soul was apparently taken with it. Then, due to the shock, your weakened heart must have finally stopped as well. Your body is dead, and once we're done refining, you will be too, and I will become nothing more than a potentially universe-destroying amount of divine power. All because your friends didn't switch gears fast enough. Would you like one last look at the world?"
Chloe didn't have to think twice. Ku's visage was certainly not what she wanted to see last in her life.
"Yes."
The big screen popped on, revealing an obviously catatonic Elli cradling Chloe's lifeless body in her hands. Dean stood some distance away, holding Lawrence by the throat.
The ground shook.
"What's going on?" asked Chloe.
In response, the image changed to reveal a sky almost completely obscured by a Nexus portal.
"The Nexus has begun to engulf this reality," Ku revealed to her. "Soon Elli will be able to wield her omnipotence anywhere on the planet. And who knows what she will do in her anger and grief… It won't be done with a meteor shower. Not to mention that this universe has connections to hundreds of other realities that will also be swept away, your home included…"
Chloe's heart sank.
And if I773 does destroy her, I'm sure it will break her. An empty shell, locked away forever in her own world, beyond the end of time.
Lawrence's words were definitely not allowed to come true. Elli didn't deserve that, no matter what she had done.
"Ku?" she asked, "I know what my wish for you is now."
"HA!" the god's body laughed. "After your body is already dead. What a sly one you are. But I think we can still work that out, as long as you haven't been completely put through the blender. Say it."
Chloe took a deep breath.
"I want to find a way to pay back what she gave me. I want to save Elli, and Dean, by any means possible."
Ku grinned.
"Elli is lucky to have you," Ku laughed. "The best friends are still the almighty ones. So, shake on it."
He held out his hand. Chloe grabbed it.
And before her mind, the universe spread out.
Elli was completely on autopilot. What made her human had retreated deep inside her to make way for the part of her that could better handle what was about to happen in a few minutes.
The room they were in was ceaselessly swarmed by SKP troops, but a containment field of her armor was active, sealing off the interior of this room and making it untouchable by any weapons or supernatural phenomena.
She would wait in this room here until this reality was destroyed. That was as far as she thought. Chloe had been stolen from her by Lawrence, she didn't care about anything else.
Wait a minute, an analytical part inside her, which had cautiously peeked outside, remarked, did Chloe glow?
Before she could continue to focus her attention, the corpse was ripped from her hands by a shockwave. Elli was hurled several meters away.
While an unholy transformation took place, the Heimdall satellites failed one by one and shut down. The portal, which until then had only been twitching, finally broke free and began to spread throughout space at faster-than-light speeds, searching for the boundaries of the universe.
In Special Facility-1, everyone started screaming and grabbing their heads with pain-distorted faces. K5-1 tried to make sense of it, but he too was shaken by convulsions as he fell to the floor. Hundreds of miles to the south, Chloe Winter was screaming as was everyone else in her classroom as her body fought tooth and nail against being taken over by something so much bigger than herself.
Chloe saw everything. The deepest secrets of all people, the thoughts of the highest beings of the cosmos. All the knowledge that any intelligent being in the universe possessed was spread out before her. She saw through the eyes of inconceivable entities how the portal of the Nexus only took minutes to reach a size, next to which the Milky Way and other galaxies appeared like small white stars in the night sky.
Chloe, in herself, did not have to think long. When all the boundaries of the Nexus portal touched solid matter, it would stop expanding. Only she didn't know how to do that in the remaining minutes reality had.
She felt Ku grasp her mental hands.
"Don't think, just do it. You have all the power in this universe!"
Under Ku's gentle guidance, Chloe began to create. It would become a gigantic ring of stone that would stop the portal.
The first attempts were too hasty. The light-year-diameter ring crumbled, again and again, because Chloe had to think in astronomical terms. The portal, of course, was not impressed by this. But then, with a cosmic rumble, it docked into a perfect ring.
Chloe exhaled in relief.
And realized with rising panic that she had more than one mouth…
Elli opened her eyes in a daze. She felt that the Nexus was stuck in some sort of frame. The destruction of reality had been stopped…
She realized with distress what she had almost done.
Elli decided to close the portal again while she threw up in a sudden fit of nausea. The planets she had taken with her in the process would have to be released later… Meanwhile, a confused-looking Dean rushed to her side.
"You okay?"
Elli looked down at herself as she had nothing left to leave her stomach. Everything hurt from the impact, but other than her nausea, she was otherwise fine. Unfortunately, her adrenaline started to wear off, causing her hypoglycemia to kick in again. And the sedative was wearing off…
"Been better…" she rasped as she tried to block out a tinnitus of screams. "What happened to Chloe?"
Dean gave her a blank expression.
"You should ask her yourself," he said with a nod to the right.
Elli frowned and looked in the direction indicated. And immediately had to start thinking six-dimensionally…
Chloe was alive again, but she had changed. She now seemed to exist on a higher plane, because as a normal human one could neither make out how tall she actually was, whether she had turned towards you, or where and when exactly she was actually standing. Elli had no problems with this thanks to her training in Logos.
Chloe wore a black, loose robe that billowed in a non-existent breeze along with her now waist-length hair. Her skin seemed to glow white from the inside out.
And she had a third eye on her forehead, it was perpendicular to the other two and shared its color with them.
Silver, silver as if she had three metal balls in her skull.
Elli sat up and ran to her. All screams and scenes of destruction disappeared from her mind. Coming closer, she saw deep fear in her gaze.
"Chloe," she blurted out. "You're alive! And you're a… a god?"
Chloe tried not to look at Elli at first, before finally forcing herself to say something.
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
"ELLI. HELP ME!"
The phrase came muffled from ten directions at once, one of them containing Lawrence lying on the floor, who had the exact same panicked expression on his face as Chloe. The rest had come from the surrounding walls. It had come from other people…
"Uh, wait a minute," Elli asked. "You're controlling these people?"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
"I AM THESE PEOPLE! I AM EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! PLEASE HELP ME! I CAN'T- I DON'T WANT TO HURT ANYONE!"
There were few moments that had left Elli as absolutely speechless as she was now. Like a fish, she opened and closed her mouth a few times before finding her voice again.
"Uh, well, uh, come with me, I - I need my instruments. Let everybody do what they were doing before until then. And if you're birthing someone right now, push!"
Ellis's bag had fortunately remained untouched in Germania. In the same breath, she had incarcerated Lawrence in a time bubble in the Nexus, drunk about three liters of booze, consumed an entire pack of sugar cubes and a bucket of Cookie Dough, and then parked several worms in the databases of the SKP and other institutions to erase all info on her Nexus, Lawrence, her home, and the achievements Lawrence had brought to the world.
Interestingly, he had limited himself to assisting in most cases, probably so as not to risk splitting universes and instability. The rest, which she was concerned about, was stored on top secret servers, which Ellis' much more advanced software easily broke into, despite several AIs objecting. Lawrence's historical mentions were erased by the use of the world's reality benders under Chloe's watch. His face and name disappeared completely from that time.
Chloe, after some persuasion, had also agreed to seize any prototypes, artifacts from Logos and other similar civilizations, and other records and transport them to the Nexus. However, she herself Elli did not let in until she knew what would then happen to all the minds whose place she was taking at the moment.
Indeed, the investigations had revealed that Chloe had apparently not simply taken over each mind, but had copied her own in with an omipresent psionic pulse and removed the others. The memories of all the victims were still present and were causing the girl visible discomfort. Elli had nevertheless had to ask her to do to the brains of all the living beings, metaphysical entities, and in some cases even machines, what she had done to the databases. Lawrence had to be erased as best he could. Since Chloe even had access to cosmic gods, she even temporally sealed the last few weeks under Ellis' guidance so that no one could ever stalk her here again by seeing or even traveling into the past.
"How did you do that?" asked Elli as she climbed a ladder to examine the machine that had killed Chloe earlier. "You were dead."
"IT WAS KU," Chloe thundered in her voice larger than life itself. "OR AT LEAST WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIM. HIS POWER TOOK ON A NEW IDENTITY IN ME THROUGH MY PERCEPTION. I WAS ABLE TO FULFILL A WISH LIKE THAT. I DID THAT AFTER I WAS SUCKED INTO THAT MACHINE."
"I see," Elli nodded. "There was enough of your mind left to direct its power."
Then her face fell asleep as she suddenly noticed a change running through the newly minted goddess.
"Uh, Chloe, your arm…"
At this moment, Chloe's right arm detached and simply fell onto the floor.
It grew back immediately.
She jumped backwards, startled. A short, synchronized stomping could be heard in the surrounding rooms.
"Ku's existence has not enough space inside you, but now that you're beginning to break, it's trying everything to prevent you from doing just that," Elli concluded. "In fact, it should have torn you apart right away. Chloe, what did you wish for?"
"I WANTED-I WANTED TO SAVE YOU. SOMEHOW."
Chloe looked sad.
"I see. Since Ku's remains knew no solution, it unceremoniously made you a divine hive mind. Probably using your body as an anchor point, because you're the only one who transformed. And your power comes from being inside other gods too, is that right?"
Chloe nodded. And appeared disgusted.
"PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DO. THERE ARE SOME REALLY NASTY ALIENS OUT THERE…"
"Hmm, you may have saved me from myself by stopping the portal, but Ku won't let you go. Why?"
"Maybe he interprets 'saving' a little more broadly," Dean speculated.
"Probably," Elli agreed.
"BUT I CAN'T FOR THE LIVE OF ME FIND ANYTHING MORE I CAN DO FOR YOU," Chloe interjected. "THEN WHY DO ICHECH-"
Her lower jaw was ejected. It was replaced immediately, but the process was not pretty to look at.
"My problem is probably some punishment or something, a thing imposed on me by something not confined to a single universe. How else would we keep getting into such hair-raising situations? In any case, it's something that Ku's power can't reach. So you're stuck in an infinite loop."
All three of Chloe's eyes fell out of her skull. Literally.
Elli couldn't let this go. She couldn't let Chloe vegetate as a regenerating zombie forever. She would have gladly taken that burden off her shoulders, but… Wait, take it off?
Elli looked thoughtfully at Lawrence's machine. The decision she was making would have severe consequences for all three of them. And yet it was so easy for her…
Next time on Nexus:
Last Will, Part 3