[Anomaly] PROVISIONAL Entity - Voiceless Singer
[Status] Uncontained
[Type] Unknown
[Danger] Qishi
[Containment]
PROVISIONAL Entity - Voiceless Singer is currently uncontained. During previous temporary containment, Faraday Cages were moderately successful during the entity’s docile state as well as for subduing it prior to containment. However, any attempt to contain a Voiceless Singer entity is only to be attempted with a full-strength SHOCKS RST, including multiple variations of Faraday Cage, Reality Anchor systems, redundant escape plans, and extensive personal mind-protective gear.
[Description]
PROVISIONAL Entity - Voiceless Singers are QISHI-Danger void entities with various sound-based attacks, as well as mind-affecting visions and songs. Little is known about them or their origin, but they seem interested in many of the realities currently merging with R-0 during the Merge Prime event.
The first instance of SHOCKS personnel engaging with a Voiceless Singer entity was on June 3, 2043, when [REDACTED], an anomalous entity associated with SHOCKS VVI, encountered one in another reality. She was able to bring it back to R-0, where it was temporarily contained for several days before breaking free and disappearing. Since then, several other encounters have been reported by [REDACTED], although only one Voiceless Singer has ever been seen at a time.
Location Unknown, Provisional Reality ARC, Time Unknown
- - - - -
I have none of the tools I need to defeat a Voiceless Singer. That’s obvious from the very beginning of our fight.
Fight one? Sure. Defeat it? Absolutely not.
But as its song fills the air, I know I have the tools I need to get the tools to fight it—and to win. “James, scan the room. Look for anything interesting—anything we can use!”
[Understood. Analyzing. Analysis complete.] He’s not focusing his Analysis on my enemy; the danger’s too high. I won’t get a frozen second or two—or any re-dos—if I mess up. Instead, I’m trusting James to find the answers to my Inquiries while I manage the void angel that’s singing and moving through the room, searching for…something.
The lab under the void root balances on the edge of a knife for a couple of seconds as the Voiceless Singer and I both wait. It’s searching, and I’m buying James time to Analyze as much as he can. The whole place feels like it’s about to erupt.
Then it turns toward me. Its eyeless gaze meets mine.
I go left around the wrecked glass tank. The Voiceless Singer goes right. Unlike my previous fights against them, this one doesn’t wait for me to shoot to start screaming; the wall of sound slams into the tank, sheering the steel and rubber tubes off at the floor and ceiling. My cover vaporizes. Dozens—hundreds—of glass shards slice the air, heading in my direction, and the room floods with even more purple goop.
I use Smoke Form. The glass passes harmlessly through. As I rematerialize, I empty the Revolver. The gravity shells punch into the void angel. They rip it off its ‘feet’ and spin it briefly through the air. I don’t bother hoping that’ll be enough. It screams again, and a computer explodes across the room.
“James, keep digging! Show me anything you find!” I shout.
As the Voiceless Singer’s scream finishes echoing around the room, I use Soundbreak. The counterpoint cancels what’s left of the thing’s screech and slaps it like a gigantic hand. It staggers. I take the opportunity to switch to the reality skipper cylinder—and to duck toward the door and the airlock. Then I’m firing again as I dip down the hall.
My aug overrides. It’s a wall of text. ‘Incidence of breaches to other worlds has increased by five hundred eighty percent,’ I read. Then I keep shooting and running. “Read it to me!”
[You said to show you!] James shouts back. He’s got to be overclocking his processing because he sounds excited and way, way too energized. There’s an overtone of nervousness, too. [It’s…look, they had a Merge Prime.]
I wait. Nothing happens; it’s not enough.
The Voiceless Singer screams.
[Why did you break it out?] James asks.
“Timing,” I gasp. The next cylinder goes in; I’ve been unloading shells into the Voiceless Singer as fast as I can load and pull the trigger, but it’s doing nothing. The first two flame lance shots jet out of the barrel. They punch into the void angel, and it screams.
The issue is Absolution. I have no idea how long I’ll have after learning a Truth, and I need to hit the Voiceless Singer with it if I want to leave a mark at all. So, as the Voiceless Singer pushes me down the hall, I keep fighting—and I keep waiting for James to find something new to Analyze.
We’re heading back toward the airlock. Hopefully, it’ll buy me a few seconds—long enough to cycle it and get through. If I can get that time, James will have plenty to look at. We’ll backpedal through the whole Research Mezzanine if we have to.
The dug-in defenses activate. Red-hot tracers pour out of the gaps, firing into the Voiceless Singer. It staggers but doesn’t fall. The shots don’t even cause damage. James flips my vision to heat, and I watch as bright, red-white splotches pepper the jet-black void angel, only to fade to nothing over and over. [They weren’t prepared for something like this,] he says.
I don’t respond. Instead, I take advantage of the distraction to dip into the airlock as the Void Singer screams and defenses shatter behind me.
SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria, British Columbia - June 16, 2043, 11:04 PM
- - - - -
Li Mei took back every bad thing she’d ever said about Alice.
The girl’s body couldn’t go smoke—at least, not for long. And it was so fragile she could hardly take a half-dozen bullets. But as she finished melting the now-empty minds of RST Lambda-Five, she couldn’t help but appreciate how versatile having a different shape was.
It was like being wrapped up in her old bandages and bindings, but in a perfect, unbroken pattern that she could abandon at any time—and one that SHOCKS personnel seemed to trust. She couldn’t leave it for long, but she was so much more explosive now.
And even better, Alice was technically a Level A SHOCKS employee, thanks to the Gutenberg Protocol. That meant Li Mei was a Level A SHOCKS employee, according to the security. After all, wasn’t she Alice? Didn’t she know everything Alice knew?
Part of Li Mei wanted to rip into the notes left haphazardly on the researcher’s workstations scattered around the Experimental Sector. But the rest of her held her hunger back. She’d just sated her personal famine—at least enough to not be driven by starvation. She could be patient.
Instead, she turned to smoke and blew through the air ducts, appearing in the hall. A researcher rounded the corner, stopped, and asked Alice what she was doing. Li Mei ripped into his mind, full of rage, and a second later, there was one less SHOCKS employee between her and her goal: Acting Director of SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria and Vancouver Island.
She kept moving. The hospital was next, and after that, the offices and garage. Anyone who didn’t flee would be killed.
If they left, they could live. For now. Li Mei wasn’t ready for revenge yet. She’d been starved for too long.
Location Unknown, Provisional Reality ARC, Time Unknown
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
- - - - -
The airlock opens, and I spill out into the stairwell. The Voiceless Singer is only a second behind; the doors twist and shatter as it pushes through without waiting for it to cycle. I could Slither and Smoke Form, but I can’t—not if I don’t want to create a merge with my waning Stability. All I’ve got is shooting and Soundbreak. Neither of those is doing more than annoying the Voiceless Singer.
I empty the Revolver into it anyway.
[Skill Learned: Revolver Mastery 20]
[New Ammunition: Mergebreakers]
The new cylinder pops into my hand, and I shove the jet-black yet iridescent shells into my hoodie pocket even as I run. The gravity rounds—that’s what I need. I fire one, then wait five seconds. Then I fire another, staggering the shots to try slowing the Voiceless Singer down.
[Go left. There’s a room we haven’t checked up ahead.]
I duck left. The room whose door I crash through looks like a medical exam room, or maybe a pre-surgery prep room. James starts talking immediately. [Okay, Analyzing. Analysis complete. We’ve got…interesting. My theory was correct. They were prepping people for storage experiments. I think they were planning on outlasting their Merge Prime. I could have told them that wouldn’t work.]
That’s important. It tickles my mind, but not enough to be an answer to my Inquiries. I push it to the back of my mind. Right now, I need more information if I’m going to solve this equation.
The Voiceless Singer arrives a moment later. It screams. I shoot. It screams again. Within three seconds, the room’s nothing but rubble, and dust fills the air. But I Smoke Form and Slither through the Voiceless Singer, dropping my Stability to one.
It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that I buy James as much time as I can to Analyze the Research Mezzanine.
I use Determination.
[Stability 10/10]
The timer starts.
I throw myself down the hall, back toward the Research Mezzanine and the void root. James reads off information as fast as he can, almost faster than I can process it and slot it into different places in the equation I’m building. A picture slowly becomes clearer, but it’s still too blurry to be sure; all I’m doing is plugging in numbers, not solving for X, Y, or Z. Brute force math—for now.
And the whole time, I open fire on the Voiceless Singer, and it screams back at me. I Soundbreak another attempt at a vision.
[Stability 9/10]
The scream almost hits me, and I have to Slither and Smoke Form another locked door.
[Stability 8/10]
James checks the room. There’s nothing new here—it’s another pre-surgery room. I burst through the door. The Voiceless Singer screams, its song distorted and twisted, and I keep running.
SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria, British Columbia - June 16, 2043, 11:08 PM
- - - - -
Everything was going to shit.
This wasn’t what Strauss imagined his first command position would be like.
The evacuation was beyond a mess. He had exactly one trooper with him, as well as half a dozen agents he’d run into. Everyone else was researchers, a few teachers from that middle school, or, worse, L4-3’s dad.
With allies like these, the responsibility was fully on him, and he barely had time to think about what the enemy was up to. He didn’t even know what the enemy was yet. A breach alarm fired in the distance, then went silent just as suddenly.
He had no idea who the enemy even was, but based on that alarm, it was releasing Xuduo and Qishi-Danger anomalies into the Headquarters facility—or causing them to breach themselves despite all the containment procedures.
He had to do something. But he didn’t have the resources to do much; only to—
“Daley, you’re in charge here. Fill the trucks past capacity. Send them toward the cruise ship docks. Lambda-Five should have cleared them recently. One agent per truck, to drive. If any of the adults can shoot, get them armed.”
“L4-5, you’re sure?”
Director Ramirez held up a hand. For some reason, he was still here. “Trooper, we’re well past keeping the veil up. Arm them up, get them moving. Sergeant, what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we need a firebreak.” Strauss reached into his bag and pulled out a pack of plastic explosives. “You get your asses down the hall.”
Location Unknown, Provisional Reality ARC, Time Unknown
- - - - -
We’ve been fighting for almost ten minutes, and my Stability’s back down to two. This time, I won’t be able to keep it from hitting zero, so I’m hoping that whatever I cause when it breaks, it’s not—
The Research Mezzanine’s floor shatters under me, and I fall from the balcony to the floor below in a shower of broken concrete shards. The void angel follows me.
I’ve learned so much already, but I haven’t answered an Inquiry yet. I don’t know what the Voiceless Singers want, and I don’t know where they are. In space, obviously, but not how to get to them—or why they’re there.
James was right. The evidence is stacking up. The dwarf-like people who lived in Provisional Reality ARC were trying to handle their own Merge Prime. They had a much better plan than we did, and it took months—months—for their reality to fall. In those months, they ran dozens of experiments to try to outlast their own apocalypse. None of those experiments worked.
I empty the Revolver for the dozenth time, then Slither back away from the Voiceless Singer. It’s almost routine; we’re perfectly matched, and neither of us can actually hurt the other one. I’m too fast, and it’s too indestructible. Two immovable objects without an unstoppable force to end the fight. Even the new shells haven’t helped; they’re just regular bullets in this world, although they might be something better elsewhere.
Anyway, James thinks this whole Merge Prime thing is something that happens in every reality eventually. Either you’re one of the ones collapsing in, or you’re being collapsed on. He’s digging into the Halcyon System to try to find proof of that. So far, he’s been unsuccessful.
But the core of that feels like the truth. Merge Primes happen all the time. These people thought they had it beaten. It wasn’t until their people-storage systems started failing that they realized they didn’t. When that happened, they tried something new.
The Void Root.
It’s at the core of this, but the Voiceless Singer’s pushing me away from it. I may not be able to hurt it, and it may not be able to hurt me, but that’s because I haven’t screwed up yet.
The Void Root’s the key to understanding what the Voiceless Singers are, though, and if I can understand what they are, I can kill them. If I can kill them…
I duck past another tank filled with purple goop. The Voiceless Singer screams, shattering the glass and flooding the Research Mezzanine’s first floor. Again. If it can burn, it’s on fire from my fire lance shells. If it can be ripped apart, either my gravity rounds or the void angel’s screams have done that. And if it’s too tough for either, it’s dented from the constant volleys of bullets I’ve been shooting at the Voiceless Singer.
This tank’s different, though. I lose focus the second the goop floods out. It’s not just purple goop in there; it’s also a Mindbender. That’s almost worse than if—
[Stability 1/10]
—if that were to happen again. James takes over for a second. [Claire, antimemetic, remember?]
“Right.” I lunge for the nearest door and slam into it, then pop it open just as the Voiceless Singer screams, but instead of it focusing on me, its not-face is locked onto the Mindbender’s body. It loses focus on me entirely, and for a moment—a brief second or two—I have an unobstructed, clear shot at the void Root in the middle of the Research Mezzanine.
I shove my finger down the barrel and pull the Revolver’s trigger. A second later, I’m sucked through a narrow straw filled with Jell-O, and my Stability drops to zero. The merge that forms behind me only opens for a quarter-second—almost too fast for me to see it—and I’m not sure what, if anything, came through. I don’t bother looking for it.
[Stability 0/10]
I reach out, the unreality of the Void Root pulsing toward me.
My hand shimmers. No. It doesn’t shimmer—it turns to static.
The Voiceless Singer screams—but this time, it’s not an attack. It’s a scream of rage. Of agony. It rips apart the Mindbender like it’s nothing. Something bright and the color of fresh lava looms over me as the void angel rushes toward me. Its scream changes. It’s not in pain, and it’s not furious.
It’s triumphant.
The world goes black.
Reality. Breaks.
I don’t have the Stability to fight as Provisional Reality ARC shatters around me, crumbling like salt dumped into a river. The Research Mezzanine disintegrates. I forget what I’m watching. Over and over. I can’t remember. I won’t remember.
It’s impossible to forget.
James’s connection to me snaps off without a sound. Even the Halcyon System refuses to witness what I’m seeing.
The end of reality—or at least, the end of everyone who could have saved it.
Darkness spreads as reality breaks. The Void Root. Thousands of scientists desperately trying to understand. Their every focus locked on the anomaly they manifested in their laboratory. They were so close to understanding. So close to being able to stop what’s happening.
The Voiceless Singer nods slowly.
I don’t bother raising my Revolver toward it. If it’s here, below the glowing yellow sun, it’s watching this with me. Maybe this isn’t the first time it’s watched it.
It’s not the first time I have. The realization hits me like a truck. Every reality dies differently, but they all die just the same. The Voiceless Singer’s world, the God in the Machine’s. Reality-Zero.
Except…
The vision shifts as reality shatters again. The mirror fragments rain down around me, burning shards of void. Everything goes purple, and I watch the Voiceless Singer as it watches reality burn around it. It takes a minute. Two minutes. Maybe even three, before I realize just how close things really were in this world.
It hits me like a brick wall.
The ones in space? They’re not real. They’re people from this world—this reality, rather—who signed up for an experiment. Part of the process of creating this one. But by the time it was ready, their reality was done for.
James was wrong. One experiment did work—or at least, it would have. It was just too late.
Every one of those floating bits of void in space? Every tank the Voiceless Singer and I have been fighting over? They’re all sacrifices—an attempt to buy time or a failed branch of thought—on their way to the final experiment. The one that created my enemy.
The Voiceless Singers haven’t been hiding. They’ve been fighting. Fighting a losing battle—not to win, but to hold out as long as possible. This one knows, though. Its reality is already broken. Its people are gone. But it won’t stop fighting.
In a way, it’s sad.
In another, it’s empowering. Incredibly empowering. It’s going to hand me its mantle—the same mantle Mom chose to bear that night. It doesn’t know it’s about to give it to me. Not yet.
But it will.
[Truth Learned: The Guardian Angel]
[Active Skill Upgraded: Absolution 2]
[Truth Learned: Void Bond]
[Active Skill Upgraded: Mergewalk 2]
Patreon has one advanced chapter available for free members, and seven advanced chapters ahead of Royal Road for $5.00. Come check it out!
