Sweet Quicksilver
Deep in a chitin forest there lived two metawitches — Strega Grigia and Blu Strega. The metawitches loved to fix things, to invent things and to fabricate things. They fixed trumpets and tawny owls, they invented insane string (much sillier and more dangerous than silly string) and iridescent facecakes, they fabricated Volvox colonies and velvet aerogels.
After 150 years of fixing, inventing and fabricating, Blu Strega was still content but Strega Grigia was growing restless. ‘Why do we bother doing this?’ said Grigia. ‘Things fix themselves now, and anybody can fabricate whatever they want. Only inventing is worthwhile, but I’m running out of ideas.’
‘Content yourself,’ said Blu. ‘Find your focus, find your centre. Use the bounty; call it forth. Shape the mostly-void… upon the mostly-void… with tools of mostly-void… in saecula saeculorum.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Grigia. ‘I know the words too, but their meaning is slipping from me. We always held the shapings sacred, and that was all. But I cannot help wondering whether the shapings matter at all. Why must I intend them? Why must I project them forth?’
Blu just looked at her and smiled serenely as she shaped an arc of spun iridium with her forming talon. She closed her eyes, and Grigia felt in her mind the sensual, repetitive rhythm of the talonwork beginning to ease her troubled mood. So sinuous… love in silvery-white… the fluid metal… shaped to my will… world without…
‘Stop it, Blu!’ Grigia snapped suddenly. ‘Stay out of my mind, and let me feel this discontent. Let it course through me. At least it’s something truly novel.’
Strega Grigia stormed out of the shaping pod, away from the habitat and off into the chitin forest. She moved quickly, weaving between the looming white and pinkish forms, her cloak streaming out behind her.
After a time, she came upon a form shaped like a chicken’s leg with four toes hooked deep into the forest floor. She rapped three times upon it, and a small door slid open just above the hallux. She entered, and the door slid closed behind her as she began to climb the pink spiral staircase inside.
In the shaping pod at the top of the stairs, she set to work. She went to a basin filled with pearly-grey ooze and plunged her left hand deep into it, muttering incantations as she did so. Grigia felt the familiar cold thrill as the ooze seeped through her skin, up her arm, across her shoulders, into the back of her neck and then — oh, sweet mercurial majesty — up into her brain.
‘Mirror to mirror?’ said the ooze in her mindspace.
‘Yes, reflect it all,’ Grigia replied in kind. ‘Feel the burgeoning discontent — so shiny, yet so featureless and so formless. Soak it into your teeming pearly mass. Synchronize with me my shaping factory, my eternal mirror body.’
At that, the ooze began to stream out of Strega Grigia’s nose. It formed into a shimmering, pearlescent double of her. When the double was complete, it reached out and plunged its right hand into the remaining ooze in the basin. With two thin strands still attached between its nostrils and Grigia’s, the circuit was complete and the ecstasy of synchronisation began.
Blu Strega was worried. The sun was setting on the chitin forest, yet Strega Grigia had still not returned to the habitat. Blu put on her thermocloak — it would now be very cold outside — and went out in search of her sib.
She hadn’t got far into the gelid forest when she began to spy familiar objects strewn about the forest floor — a golden fleece, a tricorder, a crystal tarantula, an Andromeda orrery, a clamped rabbit skull — all objects shaped in times past by Grigia. As Blu followed the trail of objects, she noticed that they were becoming harder to recognise; their forms seemed progressively fuzzier and softer — a gooey-needled porcupine lump, a floppy yellow clock draped over a chitin bough. Further along the trail, the objects were little more than blobs and puddles connected, Blu noticed, by thin strands of a pearly substance.
Suddenly, Blu Strega heard a piercing scream. She jumped up from her crouching position, from where she had been examining the substance, and raced along the puddle trail towards the sound.
At the end of the trail, connected oozily to it, stood a semi-molten chitin tower. One wall of the thing had completely melted away, and inside Blu could see a pink spiral staircase at the top of which stood Grigia, screaming a terrible banshee wail. And, wailing right back in her face, in a higher and utterly discordant pitch, stood a pearlescent double of her.
Blu Strega reached the top of the staircase in a single mighty bound. She grabbed her distressed sib and tried to pull her away, but Grigia’s hand was stuck fast in the pearly ooze. It seemed to be merging with Grigia’s arm, which was now half-covered with shiny scale-like things.
The screaming began to change, flattening out, altering timbre towards the metallic, adding high and low harmonics, then developing a pulse, a heartbeat. Blu reached deep into Grigia’s mind but found it flooded with scream-pulse. It was agony in there, but Blu probed further. The scream-pulse began to take on the character of a hard soundscape, which Grigia found she could — with great effort — traverse. She moved in the direction of its faint, human-sounding aspect.
Blu found Grigia up to her waist in a pool of pink noise. Again, Grigia was stuck fast and wailing. Blu reached out and touched her sib’s cheek. Swan-diving into this tight corner of Grigia’s mind, leaving the pink noise in her wake, Blu broke through into a blissfully scream-free space. The only sound there was Grigia’s gentle sobbing.
‘What have you done, sib?’ said Blu, softly. Grigia emerged from a dark corner, stopped sobbing and looked at her.
‘I made a shaping factory — an autonomous maker,’ said Grigia. ‘I gave it my shaping-intentions — in saecula saeculorum — so I wouldn’t have to have them any more. But when I tried to synchronise with it, it took outright control. It threw my shapes out into the forest. It has its own ideas about the shaping — banal, terrible ones — and it’s obsessed with old-world stuff, especially guns, porridge and office supplies! It’s grabbing matter at an accelerating rate, and I can’t stop it!’
‘Grigia,’ said Blu, ‘you’ve made an autonomous unmaker. What made you think that you could solve the control problem? Cornucopia machines are exquisite devices, but we keep them dumb for a reason.’
Blu began to sing a lullaby — not to her sib but to the ooze. Within the lilting melody was encoded an emergency assert-algorithm. The soundscape fell away, and Blu found herself teetering on the edge of the fast-dissolving tower, now oozily attached to her metallically-bristling sib with one hand and to her sib’s pearly double with the other. She sang louder, imploring the nanites to retreat.
Gradually, starting at its interface points with the witches’ flesh, the grey ooze began to turn blue. As it did so, the scales fell tinkling from Grigia’s face, neck and arm. Her sib’s double began to shrink as its hue changed — first to gunmetal, then gradually to pulsing cobalt.
But Blu was tiring. The effort of pushing the algorithm felt like a thousand bees stinging the inside of her head. Her lullaby faltered, then ceased. Grigia looked sadly into her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Blu,’ she said.
‘Don’t apologise,’ said Blu, kindly. ‘Your talents are wild and prodigious. You have sparked a phase-transition. I believe this to be your greatest shaping, in saecula…’
At that moment, Blu’s pulsing cobalt winked out and the world turned grey. Grigia’s double reared up, opened its funnel mouth and swallowed the two metawitches. In synchrony with all the other chitin forms in the forest, the tower fell apart. Down it came in an out-breath and an eye-blink. Down it came in a shower of paperclips, ringbinders, soft Glocks and hard Uzis. Down, down into a planet-girdling tsunami of gurgling, sucking gruel.
The fall and wave made a wet, rushing sound — the last sound, though there was nobody left to hear it.
It sounded vaguely like a word. It sounded like ‘… saeculorum.’
‘Sweet Quicksilver’ is included in D.J. MacLennan’s controversial short story collection Future Bright, Future Grimm: Transhumanist Tales for Mother Nature’s Offspring (Anatta Books, 2021).
