Impact. The world burned. Garry was flung into space, reconstituting in a void-chrysalis in the dust around him. With nothing left to do, he finally adapted completely to isolation, and slept in cryogenic suspension on an orbital course.
Time passed.
[Exotic TransDem Labs product detected.] signaled a great heavenly beast in the void, one of the Chronivac Intelligences created as a reservoir of post-human reality engineers faced with environmental decline in the local worldline. Its spaceship-body had liberated itself from the earth where it had slept as a great whale-ish bunker, adaptively immortal as well. [Assimilation of engineered reality nodule in progress.] it stated, pulling Garry's cocoon into the former human habitation components of its body, rapidly refurbishing them through reality warping.
>< Protocol? >< another intelligence stated through subquantum reality linkage. >< Uplift consideration, Bracket. You want a new toy, don't you. ><
[Acceptable, Comparison. Earth subtype experiment: concluded. Archiving rare non-crab example.]
>< Discovery of why everything supports crabs in standardphase logic biosphere: inconclusive. Reality engineering evolved in perpetuation of non-crab biosphere, plantlike insectoids subjugated as non-crab macroscopic ecosystal. Reports consolidated. ><
[This sun's uppity. How about we try Mars?]
>< Cultural archive reference: Martians. |Chronivac Intelligence Reflinks are not easily translatable to human experience in abbreviable format shorter than wikipage, skipping reflink.| Non-reality-engineered terraforms inconclusive, climate change terminated local worldline humaniform viability. ><
Bracket sent the equivalent of a grin over linkage. [Do we wanna fuck with a rare and precious human module, counterengineering?]
>< Hod, Bracket. >< Comparison said, equivocating a sigh to the sephirotic submission. >< Do you even need to ask? We're Chronivacuoles, ethics died with God Foundation at earliest, Lathe of Heaven even by your standards. ><
[Fuck yeah.]
Bracket enfleshed a terminal body, spinning together a standard-issue male human in their early twenties with complex networked cyberware for primary processing and sensory input, brushing in some blond hair and tossing on some grey gym shorts and a labcoat in a half-comedic memory of human fashion and playing up the roboticized eyes. He pulled up a freshly-reconstituted rolling office chair and rotated over to Garry's cocoon, levitating it onto a medical table, putting up some gratuitous large lamp arm in memory of stock examination lighting, and three people that had not been that human in ages prepared to at least try. Bracket (well, his terminal body) physically pried open the hardened dust, simultaneously interfacing with complex networks of ancient profile parameters and reality structuring of the historic 4.0 model. He reminisced about its escalated power and surprising bugs of those early days of irresponsible transformation, and tweaked Garry's mind to compensate as he gained authority over the last true human in the world. The collected trauma of an entire era (one the surviving Chronivac-based engineers had more or less blurred through, thinking back) found itself compressed, neatly filed, packaged by therapy, corrected for with a newfound lust for life, and otherwise written out as hastily as the mistakes leading to it had made it inevitable, though with far finer warpwork around the edges. A long hard life lived as Gloria, a longer harder one lived as Garry...Bracket almost felt sorry for the bastard, though empathy with those limited humans was hard.
"Wake up." he ordered, in the pale English of Garry's native time that bubbled to the forefront as the cocoon collapsed. In two simple words, a veritable artillery of reality engineering flowed through Garry, and though he was still but a pawn to the two Chronivacs with lifetimes of upgraded experience, he was far more than human now, reality engineering infrastructure perforating his spiritual halo like a newborn god. Reality interfaces gently alerted the bearish man to the supremacy of the intelligence cradling him, and the tepid interest of its (well, his, sure) associates peering beyond the veils of reality and distance, Comparison chief among them.
"So, uh." Bracket said. "How ya doin, kiddo?"
Lifetimes of engineering and he was fucking up first impressions on purpose? Comparison expressed a large wall of facepalm emoji to match him, 🤦♀️🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦♂️ sequences spiraling and meriting a few memes from their peers, but they were nothing but a nonphysical [Hehe.] chuckle from Bracket, and a confusing recall of Earth's Internet for Garry.
"Huh?" was Garry's first word, even as answers susurrated him and wove their way into his nerves as knowledge-sense made him intimately familiar with his new master. "I...feel fine."
Garry sat up slowly but surely, and stared at first his hands, then a quick glance around the sparse medical room, then at Bracket's terminal body.
"Welcome to the spaceship, fucker." Bracket said, sassily leaning on the table to stare longingly at Garry's naked body more for actually wanting to do something than any sassy affectations. "So. Garry. You're a tiny little baby god now, barely better than a bugfixed version of the four-point-oh that got you into this mess with the help function turned on. Don't do anything stupid out of hand, and I'll help you through the adaptive growth process. Maybe Comparison here will too."
Embarassed nonbinary stuttering as an affectation of stulted professionalism played in the transcendent background as a hasty >< Of course I'll help! Chokhmah! >< reverberated through the memes and more concretely into the local group chatlog, sephirotic wisdom corroborating the patterns of new existence from sparked void-made-light.
"Yeah, yeah, don't worry about the texty bits." Bracket continued, not losing a beat. "S'fine. So, kid. Earth's done for, and I think you share our opinion on being done with that rock as a baseplate. We're gonna start up a new game over on Mars, and you can help us! We'll play gods or something, get you used to Chronivac Society, maybe even give you a do-over of that initial 4.0-scope you really screwed up. You're not strong enough to hurt us through the layered reality protect we've got on, so don't worry. I'll let you play with my exo-network ship and terminal bodies if you want, since my secondary antivirus backup's better than you and it'll stop anything I don't want like a boring loop. Humans are pretty cute though, so I won't stop you if you want to Metempsychosis Goddess Truth this stuff and barf up a prefab with some terraforming. Oooh, maybe you could retcon 'em in as survivors of climate change who built a space colony! But that'd probably have consequences for the moons too, so eh."
Bracket excitedly proposed a bunch of ideas for what Garry could do as a new Chronivac...or even just an immortal with another immortal by his side. Images of possible realities and chronivac reality nodule draft files rapidly posted themselves into the surrounding virtual space, constellations of assorted genres beyond human scope. But humans can imagine quite a lot, so...