Chapter 23: Fractal Snowflake (Patreon)

“I care nothing for the declarations of your ‘gods’!” Vex crowed up at the towering creature. “Disease-riddled addicts on life support!” He made a rude gesture, his body unaffected by the searing light emanating from the creature’s eyes.

The strange giant of scroll and stone took offense to this, slamming a hand overtop the wizard, crushing him into the floor of the dungeon.

At that moment, Jeb’s breath hitched. The restraints are gone! Glancing around confirmed the other enforcers were freed from the invisible bands, rolling their wrists and drawing themselves to their feet.

Well, that was anticlimactic, Jeb thought for a naïve moment as the giant drew its palm up. The sindio’s empty robes rested on the floor, with no sign of the ancient wizard.

Between one moment and the next, the wizard appeared, filling his robe back in and shoving his hand up in a gnarled claw.

A torrent of Myst emerged and caught the giant’s palm, creating a bizarre echo of the creature’s previous movements.

The giant slammed the ground again as Vex rolled aside, then it did it again and again, slamming the ground over and over in a forced loop. All the while, its eyes tracked the wizard’s progress across the room despite its body being out of control.

After three of the loops, the giant tore itself away from the tiny knot of spacetime, breaking a direction that Jeb’s eyes couldn’t fully perceive.

A direction that doesn’t exist.

“Desist,” the creature rumbled, sending a ripple of nearly invisible Myst out into the world. To Jeb’s mind’s eye, it looked something like Emperor Pikaku’s summoning ability, albeit slightly different. It seemed to permeate reality and alter it to the creature’s whim.

This is way above my pay grade, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Vex sent a storm of moths at the giant’s arms. They seemed to try and eat away the creature’s arms, and wear away at the ink dotting its surface, but they were shrugged off a moment before the giant returned fire with a literal wall of text that slammed into the sindio’s position. Most of the black-inked words hanging in midair were in languages Jeb couldn’t read, but he did spot an English word peeking out of the middle of the wall. ‘Revoke’.

“Gah!” Vex stumbled backward and fished an ampoule out of his robe, breaking the cap off with his thumb and downing the contents in haste.

I’m not even sure what’s going on here, but I do know one thing… Vex is distracted.

“Casey!” Jeb flagged down the teen. “Help me get the bomb back!” He pointed past the giant doing battle with the skeletal spellcaster.

“Get it back!? That’s a thing you can do?” Casey demanded, frowning.

“We’re all still alive, so it has to be undetonated, sitting on the other side of that portal. It stands to reason that all we gotta do is pull it back.”

Jeb felt a tap on his shoulder, and spotted Vresh watching him with a glimmer of approval in her eyes.

“That sounds like as good a course of action as any,” Kor said, nodding in agreement. The melas enforcer turned to the bison-looking man.

“The rope, Bruga,” he said, pointing at the thick coil of rope on the oversized enforcer’s waist. The wooly, horned northerner nodded and unclipped the rough rope from his belt.

“How are we supposed to get past that!?” Feej demanded, jabbing a skeletal finger at the Law Giant. The fifth-dimensional enforcer was currently beating the black-robed wizard across the laboratory, but due to its long reach, it didn’t need to move too far away from the tear in reality it had crawled out of.

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” the towering melas said with a wry grin.

“Gah!” Feej unslung her oversized blade and stalked toward the giant.

“Kol, stop them!” Vex shouted between warding off the monster’s blows. “Kol? Kol! Veek!”

The keegan who’d been quietly leaning against the wall had chosen the ideal moment to fuck off. At some point during the distraction of the giant emerging from the portal, the sword-toting keegan had disappeared.

I wonder who that guy was, anyway? Jeb shrugged. If he chose to get lost, it’s not really my problem.

Feej the slender swordswoman joined the battle as a third party, woefully underequipped to deal with either of the other two combatants. Rather than make herself the sole target, she nipped at the giant’s heels, annoying it until it shifted its stance to get away from the tiny cuts she was making.

Each time, it shifted a little further away from the portal.

“Let’s go!” Jeb shouted, and broke for the portal.

Holy shit, they’re fast! Unable to keep up with the enforcers on his pegleg, Jeb was forced to pick himself up and fly alongside them.

“Flight is a rare gift,” Kor Tekalis said, glancing over at Jeb.

“He can even travel in space for a time,” Vresh said like a proud pet-owner.

“Who told her that!?” Jeb asked. His vision finally landed on Casey, who had the decency to blush. “Operational security, Casey!”

They arrived at the portal a moment later and Bruga the Brovis created a lasso with an experienced hand, making it extra wide to accommodate one of the nuke’s tail fins.

God I hope this works, Jeb thought. A lasso was less than ideal for every application, regardless of what a Texan might say.

The bison threw the lasso through the portal, then yanked on it. To Jeb and everyone else’s surprise, the thick rope went taught.

“I…think I did it!” Bruga said, his voice rumbling through the air.

“Excellent, let’s—” Mr. Tekalis’s voice was cut off when the rope began to thrash in Bruga’s hand, dragging the quarter-ton hunk of beef halfway towards the portal.

The enforcers leapt forward as one, grabbing the rope and pulling with their substantial might. Jeb took a spot near the front alongside Vresh, and infused the rope with telekinesis, reinforcing it even as he added more to the strain by pulling.

“Is it supposed to be doing that!?” Casey asked above the sounds of combat.

“Perhaps we’ve snagged something else on the other side!” one of the other enforcers shouted, his brows furrowed in concern.

“We’ve got the bomb!” Jeb shouted back at them. “In my experience, inanimate objects can be alive on the other side of the portal! And nothing else I’ve ever pulled through struggled like this! I’m pretty sure we’ve got the nuke by the tail! Keep pulling!”

Kor frowned. “In your experience? Tell me, how often do you move things between dimensions?”

“Man, this thing’s really struggling!” Jeb shouted, changing the subject as they collectively hauled it another half-step back. “I think we’re getting it, though!” Jeb imagined this must be what it would be like for a bunch of sailors to fish for a megalodon from the side of an aircraft carrier.

If they hooked it by the tail.

“Heave!” Kor Tekalis’s voice rose above the chaos.

The nuke wriggled and squirmed on the other end of the rope, slamming the heavy line violently against the sides of the portal, and causing all but the heaviest of them to get dragged around. Jeb was not the heaviest or the strongest, so he got flopped around like an ant on a windsock.

“Heave!”

Jeb regained his footing in time to join them in another heave, dragging the bomb back another two or three feet. If my therapist had told me I’d be fishing for nukes through a dimensional portal, I’d have walked out on him, Jeb thought, as they gave another heave, pulling with every muscle fiber he could bring to bear.

“Heave!”

Another haul, and Jeb saw a steel grey fin emerge from the portal, with the distinctive markings of the bomb they’d watched go in.

Holy crap, we’ve actually got it! Despite Jeb’s confidence earlier, he hadn’t been one hundred percent certain they really were bringing the nuke back over to their dimension.

“Just a bit more! Once we’ve got the fins in, it’ll have a harder time fighting us!” Jeb shouted, joining in on another rousing ‘Heave!’.

Almost there! Jeb thought, his mind already making plans for what to do with the nuke once they’d gotten it through.

If anybody’s got that metal-to-water wand, now would be a good time to limber it up, Jeb thought, teeth gritting as he pulled on the rope, exposing a bit more of the bomb’s tail fins. After that, we just gotta bail before either one of those monsters wins.

Jeb glanced over at Vex, who was compressing a beach-ball-sized sphere of force between his hands. The giant looked like a shrunken figurine of itself, trapped inside a tiny terrarium between the wizard’s fingers, except for its wickedly sharp steel quill fingers, which had already begun piercing the magical confinement.

Jeb shook his head and refocused on pulling the line.

“Let me help,” a voice came from beside Jeb.

Jeb glanced over just in time to spot Vex’s stooge standing beside Jeb with a sword. Time froze for an instant as Jeb reflexively set up a telekinetic barrier between them.

Rather than attack Jeb, the assassin swung his blade down, severing the rope right behind Jeb’s hands.

“Mother—” Jeb stifled a potentially untrue curse, lunged forward and grabbed the assassin’s collar.

The skeletal keegan’s eyes widened as Jeb dragged him off-balance.

The nuke, seemingly noticing the sudden slack on the rope, immediately began to pull away.

Before Jeb could think to let go, he was already hurtling toward the swirling grey portal, Vresh hauled along for the ride in front of him.

“Oh, Fu-—”

Jeb closed his eyes as he hit the barrier.

***

Jeb became a spherical fractal snowflake.

There wasn’t really any better way to describe it. Every possible action he could take ballooned outward into a separate Jeb, fully aware of their situation. At the center of this new Jeb-ball was his current position in spacetime, the ‘Seed-Jeb’, frozen into paralysis by the sheer unbridled information overload.

Jeb wasn’t sure how long it took, but he gradually came to terms with his Jeb-ball, understanding that he had become something of a semi-spherical lump of possibility.

He was bumping up against another couple semi-spherical lumps of possibility of a roughly similar size. Where they touched wasn’t exactly physical contact; it was more like possibilities that involved both of them. Every way Jeb and Vresh Tekalis could interact.

And I do mean every way, Jeb thought as the brows of his seed-body twitched upward.

The other lump of possibilities was the keegan assassin Jeb had dragged into the fifth dimension, and Jeb was less pleased to note that their potential interaction also included every possible interaction, albeit there was a drastically lower percentage of that. Most of it was just them killing each other.

Everywhere the assassin killed him, Jeb-ball shriveled away a little, and everywhere Jeb killed the assassin, the assassin’s sphere shriveled away a little, casting off the dead body. They maintained a healthy give and take, although Jeb was fairly sure he was winning, roughly 60/40.

Vresh and Jeb’s possibilities killed each other, too. Once again, in much lower percentages, but the results of the contests usually ended in Vresh winning.

Take the good with the bad, I guess, Jeb thought before directing his attention back to the task at hand. Jeb’s seed-body, the origin of his Jeb-ball, turned its head, making the entire Jeb-ball shift slightly to the left.

What even is left? Jeb thought. As far as he could tell, there was no up or down, left or right. There was only possibility and he could only define the limits of his being based on where they collided against others. He was bigger than the assassin, a little smaller than Vresh, and…

What’s this? Jeb thought, finding a little fractal…thing, buried near the center of his fractal ball. It was what appeared to be a rather tough spine that seemed to weave itself through his fractal, seemingly inseparable. Lightning coursed along the spine, going here and there, wherever it was needed.

Jeb paid close attention to it, and spotted several spots where it was stitched to his Jeb-ball, using odd black thread that seemed to maintain an eerie level of normalcy in this strange land.

The fact that the thread isn’t weird and gross should actually be a warning sign, Jeb thought, inspecting the spine. A moment later, he realized what it was.

This must be the Krusker’s Brawn Accolade that I got when I killed that lightning pygmy-rhino! Jeb thought. It was definitely interesting to see what it looked like in the fifth dimension.

Now if I could just figure out how to move… Or do I even need to?

Whoosh.

Something moved past the three of them, something much bigger and more powerful, instantly withering large sections of their fifth-dimensional form like a hot knife through styrofoam.

Jeb suddenly felt like a sailor lost at sea, fins circling around him. Jeb’s possibilities retracted, like a sea anemone pulling in its thousands of tendrils.

Huh, fear really is limiting, Jeb thought as Kol’s possibilities experienced a minor uptick in victories as a result.

Jeb’s over-consciousness ignored the various battles between him and the assassin, directing his attention to what the heck had taken a swipe out of them.

It took him a while, until he unfocused his meta-eyes.

Oh, shit.

The three of them were perched on top of a monster the size of a planet: a ball of dense, immoveable Impact covered in a hardened shell, with a corona of black energy that whipped around the outside of it, cleaning itself off and scouring bits of dirt like Jeb and Vresh off.

I don’t think we want to stay here very long, Jeb thought. Millions of possibilities informed millions of Vresh’s and her Vresh-seed nodded, before her possibilities shot back the obvious question.

‘How do we move?’

Jeb’s many possibilities shook their heads, shrugged, or said ‘I don’t know.’

Jeb didn’t even know which direction was which. Again, not having any kind of direction was a huge pain in the ass. How do you get away from somewhere when there is no ‘away’?

Several of his possibilities diverted their attention to Kol, delivering the ‘we can’t stay here’ speech. The percentage of them fighting Jeb dwindled somewhat, demonstrating that Seed-Kol was considering that information.

It was right around this time that Jeb noticed the nuke. It was lazily swimming around them, a blackened thing with cracks that ran the whole of its being. Jeb didn’t bother to try and think about the fact that the thing was moving without distance, and was seemingly alive; instead, he was compelled to study its form. The cracks let out scouring radioactive light that hurt Jeb’s eyes to look at. As if there was enough power to destroy the world just barely contained inside that blackened steel.

Actually, I think it’s exactly like that.

The nuke was trailing thousands of those black strings, seemingly stitched into the steel. It was trailing a rope from its lazily waving fins.

Seed-Jeb frowned. They needed to get their hands on that nuke and get out, or they’d simply wasted their time.

‘I figured out how to move!’ myriad Vresh informed him and Kol. A moment later, Vresh’s Vresh-ball moved up and away from the harsh planet. It seemed like she was moving by following the thread of a single possibility that moved up and away from the dangerous planet.

Jeb concentrated, focusing on a single him that launched up and flew away from the planet, experiencing it down to the smallest detail.

His Seed-Jeb became the possibility, taking all the other offshoots of his Jeb-ball along for the ride.

‘This is really weird!” thousands of Jeb’s possibilities shouted as they flew away from the hostile planet.

Kol was close behind, having a look of supreme concentration on his face. Jeb spotted a lodestone on a chain seemingly wrapped around the assassin’s many heads.

Interesting.

Jeb-ball turned to look at the planet they’d just left, his jaw dropping.

The apparent planet they’d departed was shaped like Vex’s skull, and sported a large ‘no solicitors’ sign the size of a mountain range.

I’m really starting to get the feeling that I’m not the biggest fish in the pond, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Now, the nuke.

So many of Jeb’s possibilities that intertwined with the nuke as it came close involved him dying. It was a problem.

Extrapolating from how he’d achieved movement, Jeb figured he could scour his millions of possibilities for one where he’d managed to subdue the shark-like object of mass destruction. Or at least one where he was well on the way.

All he needed to do was follow that thread of possibility without getting his Seed killed. As far as he knew, his Seed was his real body, and while the countless possibilities were no less real or cognizant, the Seed was the origin. Without it, Jeb was sure his possibilities would cease to flow.

Alright, let’s do this, Jeb thought, focusing on where his sphere interacted with the nuke.

One of Jeb’s possibilities that interacted with the nuke grabbed onto one of the fins, and merrily waved back to him, as if to say ‘come here! I’ve got this under control!’ The Jeb was riding the nuke like a cowboy,  shooting Jeb a wide grin.

Jeb was right about to commit to that possibility when a beam of light flared from one of the cracks in the nuke and vaporized that possibility, withering it away.

Well. Jeb thought. That’s going to make things more difficult.

Jeb watched and waited, carefully studying his possibilities as they interacted with the nuke one after another. Some of them held on for a while, some of them tried to disarm it, and quite a few of them wound up getting bisected by the deadly beams of light that rippled across the fragmented surface of the mind-bogglingly powerful weapon.

Jeb started to put together a pattern. Every version of him that tackled the underside of the nuke lived for at least five seconds, and after they were killed, the ripple of searing light from the cracks in the nuke’s steel coating always rippled in the same direction.

I’ll bet we could time this…

Just as he thought of it, Jeb-possibilities began trying to rodeo the nuke long enough to get it under control, starting with the underside.

Each and every one of them failed.

Why can’t they figure this out? From where Jeb was watching there had been a pattern, but the possibilities seemed to lose it as soon as they made contact with the nuke.

Unless, the nuke is changing it’s pattern in response.

One of Jeb’s possibilities looked back toward the seed and made an expanding motion with his hands, moment before he was vaporized.

What did he learn in that instant before he ceased to exist? Jeb watched the nuke as it circled closer, shearing off more and more of his possibilities. Jeb hadn’t noticed it before but his total number of possibilities were diminishing.

They were still infinite, of course, but a higher and higher percentage of them were withering as the possibilities died.

If that reaches 100% then I’m dead, aren’t I? Sure Jeb could let his seed sit in place for ever looking at the infinite ways he could move forward and die, but that wasn’t much better.

Jeb looked back at the slowly closing beast with a belly full of atomic fire. The nuke almost seemed…smug.

Alright, you son of a bitch, I’ve tried to kill myself for worse things. Let’s see what you got.

Jeb followed the thread of a possibility, bringing his seed up to grab the underside of the nuke.

As soon as he touched the nuke, Jeb’s fractal of infinite possibilities were dominated by the nuke. It was now present in every single possibility in Jeb’s Jeb-ball.

That’s what he meant! Jeb thought. His possibilities didn’t have acess to the ability to choose their next possibility, they were limited to what a human could perceive.

I don’t have a hell of a lot of time, Jeb thought. He had five seconds to follow the thread of another possibility and crawl up the side of the nuke.

That was when the atomic beast really started to buck, and Jeb found his seed travelling down a different path that led to him being cut in half by a plume of white fire.

What the hell was that!? Jeb thought, his skin like ice, adrenaline flaring through every possibility as he hopped between strands of fate, taking the path of a Jeb who dodged to the side moments before he was killed outright.

The nuke is making choices too!

Jeb suddenly understood. To put it very simplistically, it was like playing speed checkers. He would pick a move that would put him on the path to winning, while the nuke would pick a path that led to it remaining unbound. If speed checkers didn’t need you to wait for the other person to take a turn.

If I had some kind of symbolic control over the nuke, like the launch briefcase or something, this would be a hell of a lot easier, Jeb thought, dodging another spurt of nuclear fire.

But he didn’t, all he had were…

Jeb glanced down at the black strands that were stitched into the very metal of the angry bomb.

That’ll do.

Jeb followed a possibility down toward the bomb’s front, his heart hammering in his chest as he bailed on branch after branch, destroyed seconds before he became them.  He finally landed on one of the thick points in the creature’s plating, where there weren’t any cracks, Jeb reached down and snagged the black strings and hauled up on them viciously.

The bomb bucked again under Jeb’s feet, trying to toss him off, but the percentage of times it was successful was far to low to be of any harm to Jeb’s seed.

Alright, you fucker, Jeb thought, winding the string around his arm and hands so he couldn’t possibly let go. Let’s go for a ride.

And ride he did. Jeb rode the creature using the black strings as reins until he almost forgot when he started.

The atomic creature had an inhuman amount of stamina, it thrashed about nonstop, untiring and unbreaking. Jeb didn’t know if he’d been struggling with the creature for hours or days. Neither would have surprised him. He had inhuman endurance himself, but it wasn’t limitless.

Jeb could feel his seed running out of energy, represented by a higher and higher ratio of his possibilities losing their grip on the struggling creature and getting kicked off and incinerated.

A jump from three up to five percent doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that it was nearly double the original percentage, and represented a Jebediah mortality rate of one in twenty.

And growing. Nearly seven percent now, Jeb observed, his blood cold despite the exhaustion. Jeb’s muscles burned, his eyes watered, mouth tasted like blood, and lungs felt as though they were about to eject themselves in protest.

He could already see the end coming. As his seed tired, his possibilities would begin more and more disadvantaged, and he would see them begin dying off at an exponential rate, until there were no surviving ones left, and he was forced to become one of the possibilities by the ongoing contest between his will and the bomb’s.

Then death.

If this goddamn thing would just give up! Jeb thought, gritting his teeth. Humans had always been endurance hunters, tiring out their prey through long chases before killing them.

It sucked to be on the other end of that equation.

Sadly, owing to it’s atomic nature, Jeb could tell the bomb hadn’t even expended a fraction of a fraction of it’s total energy. Even if it wasn’t about to throw him off, it could keep fighting until he died of old age, then keep going for a few more lifetimes.

Fucker. Now Jeb had to consider taking his chances jumping off, or find a way to put a huge immortal monster…to…sleep.

Wait a second, this sounds familiar! When Jeb had been in the Impossible tutorial he’d killed an enormous leech who had done exactly that.

Jeb began frantically searching himself for the Lagross’s Power Accolade.

Let’s see, the kursker’s spine is going through my arm, which means…

Jeb’s seed body shifted like play-doh as he dug into his own ribcage and grasped the slimy eel under the surface. Jeb didn’t have time to ask why he didn’t feel any pain, or why his body didn’t seem to follow the rules for living things. He was too busy.

His divided attention made the number of Jeb’s who were thrown off and incinerated skyrocket drastically for a moment, and Jeb was barely able to avoid getting tossed by the skin of his teeth.

Meanwhile, Lagross’s power rested in his hand. The accolade was slimy and covered by some kind of thick film.

Is that the System blacklist? Jeb thought, cutting through the thick membrane with his thumb.

Skeee!

The tiny eel-like creature let out a faint shriek as it exposed a lamprey-like mouth filled with black, razor-sharp teeth, meant to bleed it’s prey. Jeb jerked the creature away from his face as it lunged for him, an almost gravity-like force trying to suck him in.

“Jesus!” Jeb eyeballed the tiny parasitic vacuum that had already latched on to the faces of several of his possibilities and drained them dry. The creature got a little bigger in his hand. Jeb shuddered to think this thing had been inside him all along.

Well, it’s this or dying.

How about some dinner?” Jeb said, turning the eel in his hand upside down and pressing its mouth against the bomb.

Jeb half expected the parasite to be immediately vaporized by atomic fire, but instead, the magical parasite started growing. A lot.

This could be a problem, Jeb thought, shifting his stance as the flopping end of the eel grew as thick as his leg and began writhing wildly around on the surface of the bomb.

Still, the nuke seemed to be slowing down, lulled into dormancy by whatever ability the strange fifth-dimensional representation of Lagross’s energy-draining.

Jeb’s percentages were starting to improve. If all he had to do was tolerate another passenger as he tried to wrangle the bomb, then that was no problem.

Then the eel’s tail reared up in front of Jeb, revealing another mouth.

“Oh, fuck,” was all Jeb was able to say before 100% of his possibilities got slammed in the chest by a grasping, circular jaw.