There is an old Terran-Earth saying that "The Devil is in the details". It is an idiom that refers to a clause, snag or mysterious element hidden in the significant individual features of any particular thing or idea wherein something that might seem simple at a first, will take more time and effort to complete than expected. The phrase derives from the earlier expression, "Le bon Dieu est dans le détail" or "Good God is in the detail" which expressed the idea that whatever endeavor in which one becomes involved, is an endeavor that should be executed thoroughly. The idea of "The Devil" replaced the reference to God in the phrase as it came to embrace the frustration and vexation felt by those human beings who used it when they encountered problematic circumstances, as they felt "bedeviled" by context.

In The Ventriculum, the phrase took on an entirely new and unexpected meaning. Existence Itself was a minefield, a slumbering ever-present threat that masked itself with a thin veneer of methodical and empirical "normality" and The Devil was the Unexpected Likelihood that no matter what precautions one took, The Ventriculum and everything in it was always conspiring to kill you.

What made that realization worse, of course, was the fact that there really WERE "devils" existing in the Metaflow. Ultimately, if all the devils did was to simply kill you, then they were doing you a kindness. And it was generally understood that a violent death within the confines of The Ventriculum was simply a matter of Time...

Nothing was supposed to live there.  Eventually, though, as if to stubbornly countermand that dictate, scores of prokarytic microbes, lacking in a membrane-caged nucleus and bereft of mitochondria, invaded the osmotic void through the eruptive seizures from half a dozen celestial white dwarf stars that had shifted from Newtonian/Einsteinian space through the dimensional veil into the interplanar corridors between Realities. Super dense stellar core remnants of suns, composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter, the white dwarfs acted as inverted black hole suns -- instead of swallowing all matter and light caught in its gravitational vortex, the dwarfs ejected matter out into the interdimensional voidal cavity of The Ventriculum. The hardy microbes were able to survive the passage from one Time-State to another and took root on the surfaces of physical matter, mostly orphaned planetary debris, in the habitable Goldilock-Zones of various fractal manifold regions in the oceanic Ventriculum. As a white dwarf has a size similar to that of a planet, each invasive white dwarf maintaining a surface temperature of less than 10,000 kelvins potentially harbored a habitable zone within a distance of c. 0.0053 to 0.02 Astronomical Units. That zone could exist upwards of 3 billion years, more than long enough for what were once simple microbial organisms to jump full-on into the process of evolution and the birth of intelligent Life. All it took was time...

The concept of Time and its passage was a complicated and paradoxical knot when pondered in relation to the "Hows" and "Whys" of The Ventriculum. Being a omnidirectional fractal metaflow, it was imbued with the characteristics of a paraphysical medium at perpetual chemical "triple point". At that juncture, structured molecular-based Matter was not "solid", and neither molecularly-cohesive "liquids" nor unsolid collections of atoms composing a variety of elemental compounds like "gases" retained any quantifiable measure of their normal identifiable states of being. Everything was everything from moment to moment, and each moment was inclusive of what could be defined as the Past, Present and Future savagely vied for existence simultaneously. It was a crazy-quilt 360-degree world of perceptual obtuseness. This created a rather tricky non-balanced environment, a climate of electromagnetic storms and gravitational whirlwinds and ionic blizzards, in which organic sentient Life stubbornly sought to thrive. It is an accepted fact that Life, both as a scientific concept and as an organic bio-molecular conceit, will, if given any kind of a foothold, fight for its right to exist regardless of environmental conditions.

And so, living, thinking beings evolved and gradually created civilizations deep inside what should have been an N-Dimensional, topological fractal vacuum.

Horror Vacui, "Nature abhors a vacuum". But the Vacuum, in turn, adheres to the principal of quantum fluctuation, wherein Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is resident -- and the Vacuum rejects Nature. As famed cosmologist and astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said, "Extinction is the Rule. Survival is the Exception".

One can safely assume that, far more than most, the Devils are thoroughly aware of that.

The devils had a name. They were called the Antedyluviaks and NeeSharim, The Glide's mobile autonomous A.I. avatar, knew of them. An incredibly ancient sentient alien race, the Antedyluviaks were monstrous beings, goliath in their physical dimensions and each being a morphological amalgamation of organic animal components, they were feared and dreaded every bit as much as they were exalted and venerated. They were rapacious predators, but sophisticated beyond biogenetic supposition, natively being brilliant conceptualists and engineers, gifted with coldly calculating, wide-ranging intellects that collated and catalogued the essential constituents of everything they beheld. The Antedyluviaks were natives to The Metaflow, their biology evolving from the Metaflow's alien version of the lowly anoxic Tardigrade to encompass their growth into the mighty mutant Alpha-Level life forms they finally became.

The nearly omniscient Authoritarchs, the Nebulancers, the Devolutioners and the Quegfellum were all, however distantly, descended from the Antedyluviaks. Despite the differences between Lemniscatants and Bernoulianites, the Nebulancers and the Devolutioners shared common roots. The Quegfellum had been artificially grown, cloned and cybernetically-enhanced into the hybridized machine-state they now were through the use of Antedyluviak bio-cells as a base. Only two species in the Ventriculum were not Antedyluviak offspring. One such species were the Geometricians, a physically fragile, but techno-organically advanced culture inhabiting a Planeworld, part of a Newtonian System wherein geometric Spheres of Containment traveled elliptical orbits around massive wrapped-ring cosmic nucleii. They lived in towering, helix-like anthill clusters called "Corollaries". The other organic breed were known as Mesmerinauts, the mysterious, paranoid and xenophobic hunter-killer, mutant barbarians who drove their massive, nomadic war-fleet through the depths of void-space.

The voidic fractal address-space that had once housed the sprawling empire once known as the Antedyluviak Ascendency was along the Mandalbrotian Mass on the perimeter of the Manifold Epidermatus at the Skema-Korre Emulatum. The Skema-Korre Emulatum was the place from which the Nebulancers, who had rebelled against the rule of the Ascendancy, had been forcibly ejected and exiled.

The Glide had been a principal weapon in enacting and enforcing that exile.

It was rumored that The Glide had been built by the Antedyluviaks. It was rumored that NeeSharim had once been their slave. There were indeed nuggets of truth in those rumors, but only fragments and morsels. The truth was far stranger than that --- and far more damning. It was a secret NeeSharim had, on more than one occasion, killed to keep.

Much to her distress, and her slowly-evolving sense of shame, it had become apparent she had inherited more than a little of the dangerous, sometimes murderous, mindset of her former master, Uhzayshul. Though she had never interacted with him in her present cyber-humanoid incarnation, the artificial intelligence inhabiting the colossal semi-sentient shiftship had become neuro-heuristically linked with the biologic creature that had driven her across the length of the anti-osmorphic void. And, to be brief, she'd earned what it was to be "human" through her link with Uhzayshul. That had resulted in a strange and painful incubation period... a period in which her cold machine-intellect had been exposed to and re-shaped by a sudden immersion into human-based emotions and comparative morality. She'd learned the difference between Right and Wrong. And she'd learned that Uhzayshul had been a villain, a monster.

NeeSharim had quickly decided she had not wanted to be imprinted with the mind of a monster. But he'd infected the complex matrix of her personality engrams, nonetheless. A self-motivated review of her interpersonal exchanges and interactions with Mune'stahr and Pylott, her new masters, slowly revealed to her there was a little bit of villainy inside her, too.

It was jarring for NeeSharim to discover that she, too, had the potential to be a monster.

Then, unexpectedly, Mune'stahr and Pylott had begun a campaign to enforce the concepts of "fairness and justice and law and order" across the Ventriculum whereas before their arrival, The Glide had always maintained a very large measure of neutrality in its dealings with Metaflow civilizations, staying out of their politics and the contentious results of their empire-building. It was hard to know what was "Right" and what was "Wrong" when dealing with sentient organic creatures. Their interpretations of the two terms were anything but straightforward and mostly filtered through the lens of their needs and prejudices. But The Glide was now building a reputation for being an active and willing arbiter of ethical and fundamental righteousness.

And now, as if all that was already occurring wasn't enough, Mune'stahr and Pylott had brought strangers, fugitives and asylum-seekers, aboard-ship...

It was all becoming quite vexing.

"I sense uncertainty born from confusion in your silence, my Harbinger. It is our hope you have not become so distracted due to interactions with the Nether-volved Organyks that you lose sight of your greater priority and purpose in the strategemics of The Agenda."

The power of the speaker's voice whipped through her audio-circuitry like storm-born lightning, virtually shaking her mind to its core. The sound-that-was-greater-than-sound issued from the lips of a unique being of towering cosmic consequence, the Antedyluviak Metapyrian Primun, Auzymundyas. The Metapyrian Primun was the one sentient being to whom NeeSharim owed unswaying eternal allegiance. An Antedyluviak Elder, he was a creature unbound by the primal, simplistic laws of cellular biology or of egocentric human-based motivations. His immense body a bizarre patchwork of biologically reptilian, anthropomorphic humanoid and armor-laden robotic, the six story-tall Antedyluviak Elder's body was surrounded by a persistent blue-white aurora that intermittently erupted into a coronal discharge of pallid purplish lightning. The visual details of his complex epidermal casing, like that of a mechanized insect crossed with a medieval knight, faded in and out from optical clarity at unexpected intervals, as if it were somehow difficult for him to maintain material density through the gravitational and electronuclear fields through which he projected himself. Auzymundyas was her Creator, her Magistrate, her King,and, so far as she understood the concept in human terms, the Patriarch of her Family,combined into one non-human, exo-organic package. He was Order in the face of Unending Chaos. She owed him her trust and her obedience and neither of those concepts were the result of her programming. She did not love him, "love" was still a prosaic and childish alien concept to her clockwork, digital mind, but she did hold him in a higher esteem than any other sentient being whom she had ever met. She was the Harbinger. He was Auzymundyas, the Metapyrian Primun,and, to NeeSharim, that was all he needed to be.

The fact that, technically, Auzymundyas had died, fallen courageously in fierce battle, over 3600 orbital solar heliars ago as Teshiwahurians, the inhabitants of The Withered Land, measured time, didn't really enter into consideration. Inasmuch as a Teshiwahurian year, an "orbital solar heliar", was, in Newtonian Space, equal to 437 days Terra-Earth time, 3600 orbital solar heliars represented 4310 years. That meant Auzymundyas had perished during the turbulent last days of the planet Teshiwahur's Ma'arhunn-Taul Union, a planet-wide ruling political dynasty that had existed two millenia before Mune'stahr and Pylott had even been born.

Yet, through manipulation of the TimeSpace's Chronal-Projective Subquotient Involution, wherein each separate multiplanar dimensional Reality was seen as its own individualistic, fractalized group homomorphism, the Metapyrian Primun could communicate with NeeSharim, who had become his future Pathfinder and Chevalier. The homomorphic component of the timestream's composition was a logical algebraic map rendered with respect to not only a numerical group structure, but also that grouping's possible extra structures, so that the Chronal-Projective Subquotient Involution solidified as an experiential "time corridor".

Simply put, NeeSharim was routinely able to access and re-route the timestream to contact her master and seek his counsel concerning the possibilities inherent in events that had not yet, for him, occurred.  She could interact with him as a perceptually-aware intellectual being, even though he had died long ago.

When she responded to Auzymundyas' original statement, NeeSharim was reluctant to admit that he had correctly detected her momentary confusion about how her present situation meshed with the focal objectives outlined by The Agenda.

"It has become apparent that their species' bio-social and cultural need to cluster and integrate with one another has possibly begun to present a relatively minor, and annoying, impediment to my mission-autonomy," she said. "I would prefer it if they stayed focused on pursuing and obtaining the completion of one objective at a time."

"Stop that. You were created to be far better than that. Stop acting and thinking like a mere machine," Auzymundyas chided. "We would never have entrusted you with the care and cultivation of The Agenda if we'd thought you incapable of adapting to unforeseen variable Organyk interference. You are more than capable of keeping up with the deficiencies of their intellectual inattentiveness."

"I suspect they more and more want me to, expect me to, behave like them even though they are aware I am not like them," NeeSharim said. "It is as if they expect I will become 'human' through sheer force of familiarity, like human behavior is somehow developed through the process of osmosis. When I do not interact or respond in a relaxed and informal human manner, it reminds them I am an alien, non-human entity and raises the specter of mistrust..."

"Xenophobic animal instinct," Auzymandyas responded. "A fear of that which is different from them. That fear and suspicion has served their species well over the millenia. It has kept them alive. You need to overcome your reluctance to lower your own defenses and interact with them as a participant of the group, and not as a friendly or non-threatening 'outsider'. You cannot afford to be considered an outsider. It will taint and limit the scope of their cooperation. They want to bond to you. Let them."

She bowed respectfully, hoping the motion would mask her facial expression of distaste towards the idea, and said, "As you have commanded, it shall be done."

"Time will doubtless reveal that this is for the best," the Metapyrian Primun said. "But what is imperative right now is that we amend our enterprise's current scenario to allow for a corollary undertaking..."

"How so?"

"Lobarth Ceryndum, you must alter course and navigate there."

The Glide's A.I. avatar tilted her head questioningly. "The City of the Inferno Pits? Why?"

"Fellmanghul has awoken and has marshaled his mob of Manifold Predators to march out into the dire Undefined Provinces of the Aggregotham Incendia. He seeks to lure Queen Infernyya Rebekkon into an ambush. Your intercession is vital. The Glide must be there to prevent the carnage."

"Fellmanghul? His legion of Manifold Predators? Astonishing. After all this time... The Undefined Provinces are the gateway to Hellmarrow. There has to be a link between this unanticipated exit from cosmic torpor and the cessation of the Metaflow's synchronic cycle and yet, at last memory, even he did not possess raw power enough to interrupt the eternal clock that maintains and reassembles The Ventriculum," NeeSharim mused.

"At the moment that is a secondary concern. What matters now is that you let your human charges know that The Glide must confront the mutant demi-devil before he can gain a foothold in the Aggregotham Incendia."

"It will be done," NeeSharim solemnly stated as she cybernetically accessed the colossal shiftship's temporal-inertia navigational network. "Course correction now in-progress. Accelerated Sub-light Momentum increased by sixty-seven percent."

"Exercise extreme caution," Auzymandyas warned. "Fellmanghul is a ruthless, highly intelligent and cunning opponent with little regard for the sanctity of organic sentient life. The concept of murder is a trifling amusement to him, but the opportunity to engage in wanton mass murder is an intoxication he will not deny himself."

"As always, Master, your wisdom is my guide."

With a gentle telepathic command, she severed the cross-time connection with the dead Antedyluviak Elder who acted as her guardian angel.

                                                                                        ***