Fine Structure

by qntm

"Zykov is dead," says Calrus. "Oul is not dead. "Zykov didn't have enough power. He used arcane Script technology to put together what modern science would have no recourse but to describe as a magic spell and tried to summon the rest of Oul into his own body. He got it wrong, and instead Oul's fragmented power or soul or 'essential attributes', or whatever you want to call it, starting striking people at random. First in Russia, and then all over the world. The word 'summon' means 'call forth'. Specifically, it means 'call something or someone which is over there to come and appear over here'. Why did he get it wrong? Oul's power isn't locked up in some extradimensional cloud, like mine. It's here. In reality. Oul - all of him - is in this universe already. He's just not here. "He's not even in this galaxy yet. "We've known he was coming for fifteen months. We've got no plan. Nothing. Nobody who knows the Script like you do is still alive. Zykov and the Imprisoner saw them all off, in one way or another. Teleportation is locked out, so we don't have lightspeed transposition. We don't have time travel. If we knew what we needed we could replicate what we need, but subnucleonic replication is gone. FTL comms are gone. Klick's Exit - heaven - is closed. Chorus Injection is closed. We don't have space arks. We don't have Orion. We don't even have the Space Shuttle anymore. We're down to spam in cans. "Zykov did all of this deliberately. He was trying to make sure that humanit...