Submitted for the November 2023 prompt: Feasts with the Beasts

Eithin scanned the valley dotted with small clusters of wattle and daub structures. In the distance, a larger grouping nestled protectively beneath a castle.

 

“Faux or regression?”

 

“Reading no artificial electro-magnetic sources, so regression,” Samson, currently ATV configured, replied through their neurolink.

 

“You’ll have to change—”

 

Eithin suddenly found himself astride an armored destrier. He groaned. “Please tell me you can adjust the force-field projections, so I won’t get saddle sore.”

 

“As long as you don’t hum incessantly,” Samson said, trotting downhill.

 

* * *

 

Eithin did not hum. So Samson kept his upper half lullingly steady, while his legs pumped faster than any flesh and blood horse. Eithin’s mind drifted, idly wondering, given the Terra Dyson Sphere’s surface area of 566 million Earths, the chances Xavier Xi would’ve fled to a medieval-regression zone.

 

Approaching a farming hamlet, Samson slowed to normal horse speed and motion. The farmers had vacated their fields. Sealed doors and shuttered windows suggested the duo were responsible, not the approaching night.

 

Outside one hut, a girl, no older than ten, ignored her mother’s desperate pleas to come inside. She brazenly scowled at Eithin and Samson trotting slowly past.

 

“Are you another wizard?” she demanded.

 

“No, merely a messenger for wizards,” Eithin lied. “Do you know where one is?”

 

She pointed toward the castle. “He’s mean! He hurt my brothers. If you’re a messenger, tell him to just leave us alone.”

 

Maybe there’s a chance Xi’s here after all, Eithin thought.

 

* * *

 

Night’s shadow quickly overtook them. A huge latticed solar-panel sphere, Night rotated around the sun inside Mercury’s old orbit. Sparkling lights, power transmission beacons on Night’s exterior, filled the sky. Mirroring the pinpricks above, torches began flickering ahead in both town and castle.

 

“I am detecting a heat-signature void beneath the castle,” Samson said.

 

“Scan shielding that’s blocking too much?”

 

“Indeed,” Samson replied.

 

“Infiltration options—”

 

A green light cone suddenly enveloped them, aetheric probes dismantling both their security protocols . Eithin reinforced nano-shields, but the attack easily sliced through, burrowing into his neural implants. Consciousness slipping, Eithin sent a desperate neurolink command to Samson: “Initiate the Matryoshka Doll.” He hoped enough of Samson was left to execute it.

 

* * *

 

Eithin woke to a pulsing neurolink headache. He tried moving, but plasma manacles pinioned his ankles and wrists to the ceiling. Below, sitting at a worktable, Xi, clad in black robes, dissected Samson in his true form, an iridescent cube bereft of force-field projections.

 

Without pausing his probing, Xi spoke through the supposedly unhackable neurolink, “A single bounty hunter? The Council should have sent a whole reclamation team.”

 

He had no idea who the Council was. Unbidden, the memory of three ethereal androids hiring them surfaced. Xi flicked a finger, freezing the memory. Slowly circling his hand, Xi made the image rotate in Eithin’s mind. “Not the lickspittle Council at all. Proxies for an Old One AI. Fifty thousand years and I finally rattled one.”

 

Eithin trembled. Xi was not a wizard, but a god — one wanted dead or alive by a master of the universe.

 

“You’re from Terra Prime?” Eithin asked, mouth dry.

 

“We are all of Earth, boy. But yes, I walked once upon the origin world. I remember when a moon graced the night’s sky. The old AIs are thieves, not masters — the stars were meant to be ours. Instead, they remade Earth into this prison.”

 

An absurdly large ‘prison’, Eithin thought, and such hubris to claim the stars for humanity. We tried, but traveling FTL was impossible, cryostasis caused irreparable brain damage, and generation ships all arrived as floating coffins. So the AIs colonized the galaxy alone. Finding no other sapients, they brought the worlds to us to expand our living space. Building first a ring, then a lattice, until finally a full sphere—

 

“Lies! Humans can reach the stars. I will find a solution,” Xi interjected.

 

“Your experiments tortured entire populations, killed billions of people.”

 

“Hundreds of trillions live within a million-mile radius, boy. Hunter-gatherers next to medieval empires. Mutated humans eking out pitiful lives in radioactive wastelands below your own floating cities. What’s a few billion souls against the multitudes trapped here? I am trying to set us free.”

 

“Losing your humanity along the way,” Eithin whispered.

 

Eithin felt another layer of defenses peel open, Xi’s technology surpassing theirs as much as theirs outstripped the plows and swords outside.

 

“What are you hiding, little AI?” Xi muttered.

 

Another memory surfaced in Eithin’s mind: the androids placing the Matryoshka Doll, a pea-sized glowing lattice of infinitely interlocking triangles, inside Samson. Xi froze, suddenly realizing the trap. He’d burrowed beyond Samson into the Doll. He tried withdrawing his consciousness from its nesting cryptographic fractals. But by entering Xi had accepted the Doll’s protocols — exiting required a key. Bypassing merely caused a hydra-like expansion of exit paths, each demanding the same passcode.

 

“What’s the key?” Xi demanded. “Or else you’re trapped here too.”

 

“Trapped? I’m home here — a psychological duplicate of Eithin downloaded into the Doll. Regardless, a simple key really — a complete list of all prime numbers.”

 

Xi’s consciousness howled in impotent rage.

 

* * *

 

The flesh and blood Eithin awoke, Samson standing over him protectively, projecting as an avenging angel. Xi’s comatose body slumped across the worktable, no longer a god or even a wizard, but just the shell of a mouse-like man who had existed far too long.

 

Suddenly, Samson sighed with electronic ecstacy. Eithin also gasped, feeling upgrades cascade through his neural implants and nano-stores. Apparently the Old One was satisfied. Payment had been made.

 

The glimmering Matryoshka Doll hovered in Samson’s hand. “What should we do with this?”

 

“I know just the thing.”

 

* * *

 

The land again bathed in sunlight, Samson back in destrier form, Eithin stopped before the girl’s house. Scowling, she slowly approached. Eithin reached down and dropped a beautiful sealed locket and golden chain into the girl’s extended hand.

 

“Keep it safe and the wizard will never hurt your family ever again.”

 

She smiled like the sun.