The Semaphore

"Tell me everything," Hobbes Nicole instructed when they were all seated in her office. "From the beginning."

Pontis sat across from her, nodding along as the coat recited the story of his and Varia's journey, starting with the appearance of the girl in Lowood Den.

When it mentioned Coden Hummel, Hobbes Nicole smiled softly. "I've had the pleasure of meeting Doctor Hummel," she said. "I'm surprised he is still around. He must be well over a hundred, poor boy."

Kamê Astrelon stood at the window staring into the square, where the people of Osseon had begun filing into Malory's palace, led by President Logora, to pray. Its door was so narrow that they had to enter single-file.

Mondagreen had heard the first half of Pontis and Varia's story already. He smoked in the corner and cleaned his katana with a cloth. He had devoured two plates of food, and now eyed the one Pontis had left untouched. He did not understand how the kid, after all he had been through, had no appetite; he had eaten a single grape off his plate, chewed it disdainfully, and then pushed the plate away. Maybe it was nerves. Or maybe it had something to do with the coat.

When they got to the part of the story following their descent into the hole in Arborvale, Mondagreen leaned forward. Hobbes Nicole's eyes—old eyes that did not match her child's face—peered at Pontis, as if noticing something about him that no one else could.

The coat told of the encounter with the eyeless man, and about how Varia had been stabbed. It told of the narrow escape into the white tower, and the discovery of the coat itself, which Pontis had taken from the seatback of a chair for no reason other than to stifle Varia's bleeding. Here, Hobbes Nicole raised a palm—pausing the story—and turned to Kamê Astrelon.

"All this time…" she said, before turning back to Pontis and gesturing for the story to continue.

The coat told them about the rooms on the second floor of the white tower, the strange dioramas. It told them about their encounter with the man in the long mask, and some of the things he had said—I am only sorry that you will not get to meet Grandmother—and how he had then cast Pontis and Varia into a frigid tundra. It explained that Varia had died while wearing the green coat, and that Pontis had nearly died as well. It told about their escape from the tundra and their arrival in Lowood Den, where they found the people of their city in some kind of trance, walking single-file into a white tower—the same tower they had found underground, they thought. It described their battle with the eyeless man, how they'd torn his tongue from his mouth, though not before Pontis's sister's throat was cut. It told them they brought her to Coden Hummel, where he narrowly managed to save her life. It told them Hummel had instructed them to travel to Osseon to speak to Hobbes Nicole, who would know what to do. It told them they had returned to Lowood Den briefly, and found the tower gone and the people loosened—though not fully broken—from their trance. It told them about their visit to Tecca in search of Mondagreen, and how they had intervened to save a whale.

"Ah, that was stupid," said Mondagreen, interrupting for the first time since they'd begun. "No wonder they didn't like you."

Hobbes Nicole leaned forward on the desk. "You mentioned earlier that you've had contact with a girl," she said. "A girl with white hair…"

"Oh right," said the coat. "We forgot that part. Both of us, Pontis and I, started having dreams about her almost as soon as we left Lowood Den. We made the connection later on, when I was able to see his dreams."

Hobbes Nicole's eyebrow rose. "You dreamed about her before you found the Semaphore?"

"Yeah," said the coat. "Almost a week before."

Hobbes Nicole was silent awhile, thinking deeply. "Can you see her now?" she asked eventually.

"No," said the coat. "Only when Pontis dreams…but since I've been in here, I've… there's been someone else with me, though I can't figure out how to communicate with them. Why? Who is she?"

Hobbes Nicole sat back in her seat. "My big sister," she said. "X Parke Penate."

Pontis's eyes widened, and the coat flittered.

"We were orphaned," Hobbes Nicole said, gazing into the middle distance. "Just before the onset of the Plangent Age. Our parents—like many healthy adults—were inscribed into a siege known as the Great Try. Humanity used their most powerful weapons on Malory, but they had no effect other than to level the city surrounding his palace and kill millions. Historic architecture, hundreds of years of culture and knowledge—obliterated over the course of weeks. This museum and everything inside it is a replica of the original, which I helped reconstruct from memory during the Refabrication. But I digress.

"A man named Richard Gillick, a brilliant engineer, took us in after our parents were killed. He had lived here in Osseon for years—back when it was still called New York. After the appearance of Malory, he spent time near the palace, sometimes even inside the throne room, furtively taking measurements, samples, observing Malory's behavior and the behavior of things around him. He wanted to understand what it was that allowed him to work the way he did.

"After the Great Try he took X Parke and me and moved up north, to a farm in a place called Vermont, east of the Chavanuck Mountains. When the music started, Richard was able to use what he had learned from observing Malory to build a room in his house into which the deafening music could not permeate. This was the beginning of the construction of the Semaphore. I was only eight years old at the time, but had been— before everything fell apart—somewhat famous among academic circles, a prodigy in math. This is why Richard adopted us, to have access to my mind. He assembled a small team to expand the principle of the room into something more…offensive. That was where I met Kamê Astrelon.

"It took us many years. There were countless setbacks, and Richard was not the most… understanding. Frustrations mounted. Were it not for the room's sound-blocking qualities, the raging music would have driven us insane, as it did to millions of people across the world. We did our work in there, for days and weeks and years, trying to formalize a science for a set of phenomena that we could barely observe.

"Finally, four years after we started, we began to make some progress. Without getting too technical, we discovered a way to convert the inert material of the room's insulation into a conductive element, similar to how certain metals will conduct heat if applied to electricity. The first time this happened, Kamê Astrelon and I, along with Richard and the five other members of the team, were exposed to an emanation resultant from this conduction. We didn't know it at the time, but that emanation had effectively ablated the entropy of our cells. This is why I look the way I do, and why the Sage has also hardly aged since that day, three hundred ninety nine years ago."

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Pontis blinked at Hobbes Nicole, and then at Kamê Astrelon.

"It took us awhile to understand what had happened," Hobbes Nicole continued. "And what it meant. But once we did, we also understood a central component of the technology we were working with, something that eluded us until then. It was not long until we had a prototype of the Semaphore complete." She looked at Pontis, her spectacles reflecting the green light. "Initially, our idea was to use a single operator, who would enter inputs with their fingers—similar to how the Votaries channel their Hemmick invocations. But this proved too clumsy, and the reaction times required were too slow to be effective in combat. From there we attempted to bring in a second operator—a cognitive operator—who could input signals from a remote location, freeing up the somatic operator to keep track of the minutiae of their environment. But the problem here was that over great distances, the system lagged. At a hundred miles, there were microsecond delays—life or death in the circumstances for which we had devised the machine—and at a thousand miles, that delay was sometimes as great as an eighth of a second. For a while we were at a loss. But then Richard had an idea.

"A few decades before Malory's appearance, a group of scientists had managed to imprint a human consciousness—memories, thought patterns, self-awareness—onto a device at the time of death. From this uploaded state, the consciousness could operate at full or even augmented levels. Richard had been involved with the research that led to this accomplishment, and set about installing a similar device into the Semaphore. It was the perfect solution to our dilemma: instantaneous reaction times with no risk of distance-induced lag, two minds operating the weapon at full capacity. Finally, ten years into the Plangent Age, we had built the perfect weapon with which to intervene and save humanity from a slow, brutal extinction. The only thing left was to find the two operators who would wield it into battle."

Through the window, the lights of the buildings of Osseon illuminated their dark facades in blue and gold and orange.

"The somatic operator was decided on right away. Woodrow Saint September, a refugee from New York with whose father Richard had been close. He was twenty-five at the time, athletic, a gentle and good soul. The first time he donned the Semaphore—before we'd installed the cognitive operator—he utilized its Autonomous Motor Program functions—the increased speed, jump height, grip strength, augmented reflexivity, regenerative concomitants—to frolic through the meadows and the woods. He leapt over trees, glided on the wind, flipped and twisted and somersaulted with joy. He wore it as naturally as if he'd been wearing it for years. It was a sight to behold."

"Regenerative…" the coat said. "You mean like healing wounds?"

"Among other things," Hobbes Nicole said. "Woodrow's cellular regrowth was accelerated while operating the Semaphore. His bodily processes were monitored and assisted, balancing any deficiencies, correcting any anomalies. He required less sleep, and hardly any food and water."

Mondagreen stood up, snatched Pontis's uneaten plate from the desk, and returned to the corner with it where he shoveled the food into his mouth.

Hobbes Nicole cleared her throat. "Of course selecting a cognitive operator was a more difficult task. The somatic operator could remove the Semaphore whenever he wanted. To Woodrow, the commitment was one of incurring the risk of combat. But the cognitive operator would have to sacrifice her body. She would be permanently installed in its software. And after that there was only one way out: erasure. It was too much to ask of anyone. We fretted for weeks, until a volunteer appeared.

"X Parke was different. From a young age she was different. She was smart—as smart as me perhaps—but there was angst in her. She was moody, rebellious. She hated school as a child, dyed her hair all manner of colors, wore dark clothes and dark makeup. I remember once, when I was too young to understand it, walking in on her while she was changing, and seeing rows of scars on her thigh. Years later, once we were living on Richard's farm, she confided in me certain… incidents from her past, involving a supposed family friend, and for the first time I understood her…" Hobbes Nicole paused and removed her glasses to wipe at her eyes.

"As a young adult—she was eighteen when construction of the Semaphore was completed—she spent her time standing on the shore of a lake on Richard's property, just standing there staring off across the sky as the ear-shattering music boomed. Where others lost their sanities, X Parke would smile at the music. For hours. At first I worried she would go deaf. But no one went deaf; that was part of Malory's cruelty. Regardless, when she learned about the search for the Semaphore's cognitive operator, she volunteered. No, not volunteered. She insisted. I did not want her to, for obvious reasons. We had already lost our parents, and the danger of facing Malory was extraordinary. We had no way of knowing that what we had built—and the plan we had devised—would work. But Richard was happy with X Parke's decision—she was smart enough, eager enough—and he took her side. The only condition X Parke set was that she be allowed to choose her own manner of death. I remember our last night together, the two of us alone in the room we shared, communicating with a pad and a pen—how nearly all communication was performed during the Plangent Age, when no one could hear anyone's voice over the endless barrage of music. I remember she told me…" Hobbes Nicole took a slow, shaky breath. "…It's irrelevant. The next day she donned the Semaphore. We shut off its automatic functions, which would have done everything to prevent her death. She walked into the lake, the lake she'd stood beside for years. She walked into the water and she drowned herself, just like that…"

Hobbes Nicole lowered her face into her hands. Kamê Astrelon placed their hand on her shoulder. After a moment, Hobbes Nicole looked up, patted the Sage's hand, and smiled softly at the green coat.

"And the Semaphore was complete," she went on. "X Parke was a natural cognitive operator. She learned all of its systems quickly—even went out of her way to name the various programs with her own stylistic flair."

'That explains a lot,' Varia said in Pontis's ear.

"Within weeks we launched our offensive on Malory and his Votaries," Hobbes Nicole said. "And as we succeeded, Malory grew increasingly deranged. The War on the Mountain was, in its essence, a death rattle, the final blows of a cornered animal. But it nearly killed us all. It nearly produced the same end Malory had intended from the beginning."

Pontis rose from his chair and the coat flared.

"We are ready," the coat said. "We will fight Malory if he awakes. We will protect the world from his—"

"No," said Hobbes Nicole flatly. "You are not. And part of the evidence for your unpreparedness is the fact that you think it is Malory you will be fighting."

Pontis glanced around the room and sat back down.

"You would die in an instant," Hobbes Nicole said. "Even Woodrow and X Parke, who were trained in every aspect of the Semaphore's operation, never intended to do battle against Malory himself. He is impervious to physical force. He is immune to violence. He is, as far as we can tell, utterly infallible."

"So how did you stop him?" Mondagreen said, lighting another cigarette. "We know you did, since we're all sitting here. He's got to have some weakness."

Hobbes Nicole nodded, her hair tittering along the rim of her glasses. "We learned a great deal very quickly during the course of the War on the Mountain," she said. "The War itself lasted only three days, but in that time, and with the help of the Semaphore's extraordinary capabilities, we were able to trace the origins of Malory's power to a specific source. To something called Nonk'non."

Pontis sat forward. "Are we finally going to learn what it is?" asked the coat. "Or are you going to speak in riddles—it's a place, it's an idea—and then send us hundreds of miles away to get the answer from someone else?"

Hobbes Nicole smiled softly. "It is not a what," she said. "Nor is it a place or an idea. Nonk'non is a them. Nonk'non is a civilization."