Chapter 68: Tyrant’s Fall
Nathan felt it when Davrar tried to teleport him into the center of the arena. It tried to shift his position to the stage, using the deeper magic of Davrar and involving forces that twisted off in directions beyond his understanding. It also failed utterly. Some element of the effect stumbled over his antimagic and caused the rapid cascade of energy to unravel without any magical or visual effect. He just didn't move. At another time, Nathan might have focused on that power, tried to plumb the interaction for everything it was worth. But right now, he was entirely focused on his upcoming speech, and the failure of the teleport mostly meant he had to get to the stage under his own power.
The Questors certainly noticed the oddity. A ripple of confused whispers flowed across the arena as Nathan approached the speaking platform, and they noticed he hadn’t been teleported to the stage as every other speaker had been. He landed on the crystal surface and looked around at the crowd. The floor was clear, giving him a full view of the sphere of people surrounding him on all sides. If he focused, he could see individual faces watching him with curiosity, confusion, or anger. But if he just looked around, they devolved into a smear, like pixels on a screen. It was overwhelming, making Nathan feel as if he were under the microscope of a god.
A slow breath calmed that minor bout of stage fright before Nathan started speaking. He hadn’t memorized what he was going to say, but that was just to give him room to improvise, to riff on other points that came up over the course of the day. Something he fully intended to do now.
“Nothing about Davrar is natural,” he declared. “This entire world is artificial, imposing order onto stardust. Davrar itself is a megastructure, a giant spinning cylinder rotating to provide simulated gravity. If all of the force comes from the spin, each rotation takes about a hundred minutes. It is controlled by an artificial, unconscious mind you call a smart system.”
He raised both hands to encompass the space and the world beyond. “This is incredible. The very purpose of civilization is to reject the natural order of things, to organize people to defy the natural order and safeguard the population against the monsters and plagues and famines that are part of nature. From that perspective, Davrar is a triumph. You have created a place of wonder, where fantasy is real, and magic is ever-present.”
He wrinkled his nose. “But the laws of Davrar aren’t physics. They’re policy, and policy gets set by the people in charge, who are responsible for the consequences of that policy.” There was an obvious implication there, but Nathan wasn't quite ready to follow through on that. He changed tacks. “You say we do not understand your scale, that we cannot hope to comprehend the Distal Expansion, or the reasons that Davrar exists.” Nathan tilted his head and pursed his lips to show his doubt. “But I was not born on Davrar. I come from a world that I am told was on the cusp of joining the Distal Expansion. We were not primitive. We reached orbit around our world generations ago, split the atom, and survived the aftermath. We began to rewrite our own genetic code and experiment with artificial minds.”
A loud murmur passed through the crowd, everybody turning to their neighbor to ask if that was true, or shouting that he was a liar, or diving into their interfaces to look for some kind of confirmation. He yelled into the disturbance, defiant. “I call upon Davrar to validate my origin! I was born on planet Earth, of the Sol system, and we have accomplished all that I claim!”
| [Validated] |