Null Reading

[Daimon]

Null Reading
The Interstellar Market

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The Interstellar Market was a wound in space that had learned to profit from itself.

Commerce bled from every surface. Stalls stacked three high along corridors carved into the moon's pale rock, draped in signal-banners advertising translation services and currency exchange and gene therapy and weapons that were almost certainly illegal in at least four quadrants. Changeling merchants haggled in clipped, officious tones. A Namekian street vendor shouted prices for something that smelled like engine coolant and tasted, presumably, worse. The gravity sat at half-standard, which gave the crowd an odd, buoyant quality — beings bouncing slightly at the apex of each step, as though the moon couldn't quite commit to holding them down.
Into this noise, a sound that didn't belong.

High and thin, like a glass rod drawn across the rim of something vast. Light followed — not an explosion but a seam, vertical and precise, splitting the air in a narrow corridor between two textile stalls. White-gold, bright enough to make the nearest merchants shield their eyes and reach for their wares. It lasted two seconds. Then it was gone, and where it had been, someone was standing.

Daimon did not arrive. He was simply present, as though the market had blinked and missed the part where he wasn't there.
He stood still while the crowd eddied around him. A few traders glanced his way — the violet skin, the pointed ears, the gold eyes that caught light strangely — and then looked away, because the Market had taught them not to stare at beings who appeared from nowhere. It was bad for commerce.
He took a breath. Let the data come to him.

The air was thick with competing signals: perfume, ozone, grease, spice, the faint ionic residue of a dozen different propulsion systems venting somewhere overhead. Beneath it all, the low constant hum of life energy — hundreds of Ki signatures pressing against his awareness like the murmur of a crowd heard through a wall. Mortal. Faint. Uninteresting.

Except one absence.

Not an absence, exactly. A shape where something should be legible and wasn't. He'd felt it the moment he arrived — or rather, he'd felt the outline of not-feeling-it, a gap in the noise the way a missing tooth is a shape the tongue can't stop finding. There was something here that read as almost. Almost divine. Almost familiar. Almost, but not.

The Kanassan seer's vision had been fragmented. A white figure. Crimson light behind closed eyes. Hands that were made to hold something sacred and then emptied. Created for divinity and found wanting. The seers hadn't spoken those words. They'd bled through as an impression, sharp-edged and involuntary, while Daimon sat motionless on a stone floor six star systems away and let alien psychics rearrange the architecture of his mind.
He'd opened his eyes. He'd left.

Now he moved through the crowd with an unhurried precision that made other beings step aside without knowing why. His robes — black, high-collared, silver-threaded in patterns that mimicked Kai formalwear without any of its sanctity — didn't brush the stalls he passed. His hands stayed clasped behind his back.
He found her in a provisions district, three corridors deeper into the Market's gut.

White skin, flawless in a way that announced itself as engineered. Black hair too long, too straight, falling like a curtain she hadn't decided to open. A single horn curving from her forehead, fading to dark at the tip. Crimson eyes with white pupils — the inversion of something natural. A spiked collar at her throat with no visible clasp. She moved through the stall's offerings with a quiet efficiency that might have read as confidence to someone who wasn't paying attention.
Daimon was paying attention.

He stopped six paces away. Close enough to speak without raising his voice. Far enough that she had room.

"You won't find what you're looking for here."

His voice was low and unhurried. Not a warning. Not a threat. A statement of mild interest offered to the open air, with just enough specificity to make ignoring it a choice.

 

[Failure-64]

64 hated this part of the Market.

The stalls were too tightly bunched and the cries of their vendors too many pitches too high. The stench of various beings' bodily fluids swirled into a noxious fume that could be considered biological warfare in some systems, she was sure.

But she needed the blasted cooling agent for their storage room. Surviving on hardtack for the next third of a year was out of the question -- she had standards, even if Gehn didn't appear to be too picky.

"You look like you have a discerning eye! You'll only find the--"
"Don't let the prices fool you, miss, the quality is--"
"Now, what's a fine lady like you doing out--"

She would pause at any stall that had something vaguely akin to food storage on display. Of course, none of it was even vaguely close to what she was looking for. Why would it be, this deep in the Market?

Maybe she should try...

A voice unlike the leering vendors disrupted her thoughts enough that it gave her pause.

She turned and found a violet-skinned ghost looking at her with an assured, but small, smile.

Like Gehn, she sensed nothing within him. Not a single drop of power. In a world where she hadn't been awoken by a Cyborg, she would have been caught off guard. In this world, she saw it as odd, yes, but not unbelievable.

What truly gave her pause was everything else. His odd skin tone, pointed ears, and piercing yellow eyes. Many of the creatures in the Market were odd, but there was typically a pattern to the races. This man, with his fine clothes and excellent posture, didn't follow any of those patterns.

"Oh?" She answered him with a slight tilt to her head.

A contemplative pause filled the silence between them for a single beat.

"Then where might I find it?"

She sincerely doubted he truly knew she was hunting down, but it would be amusing to hear what he thought she needed; a welcome break from the frustrations of the day.

 

[Daimon]

Daimon's gaze moved past her, briefly, to the stalls she'd been browsing. Provisions. Storage components. A pattern that took no great insight to read — she'd been stopping at anything adjacent to cold-chain equipment and moving on unsatisfied.

"Cooling hardware," he said. Not a guess. An observation, delivered with the same unhurried certainty as everything else. "You've passed three vendors selling thermal units, but nothing rated for long-term preservation. This district trades in bulk dry goods and personal electronics. The cold-storage suppliers cluster two levels down, near the docking ring — they cater to ship outfitting."

He let that sit for a moment. Practical. Verifiable. The kind of information that cost nothing to give and made ignoring him slightly harder.

His attention returned to her fully. The gold eyes settled — not staring, but reading, the way someone reads a sentence they intend to remember.

"Though I'll admit that wasn't what I meant."

The faintest pause. Not hesitation — selection.

"You carry yourself like someone who's used to being the most unusual thing in any room. This market is loud enough to hide that, but not from everyone."

He didn't step closer. Didn't gesture. His hands remained clasped behind his back, his posture the same studied stillness it had been since he'd appeared.

"My name is Daimon."

Offered like a card placed face-up on a table. No title. No context. Just the name, and the quiet expectation that she might — or might not — offer hers in return.

 

[Failure-64]

Her brows tensed, lips just a hair thinner. She wasn't sure if she was uneasy because he had been watching her, or because he was able to so easily assume so much from such a relatively brief encounter. The logic was, indeed, sound, but how many others had such a critical and confident analysis?

A slight tilt of her chin acknowledged his answer, while also implying some level of gratitude for pointing her in the right direction. Otherwise, she did not fill the silence between his comments. A distinct pause between carefully constructed words, not too dissimilar from her own patterns.

Gehn had commented on her quietness; it was odd, apparently.

The man introduced himself as Daimon, but nothing more. The much more important questions of why he was here and how he knew her would have been much more appreciated, but she understood how polite conversation went.

"I go by 64," she answered after a pause of her own. "I wasn't given a proper name."

She looked him over just once, crimson eyes flicking down then back up before settling on his golden. Her lips parted, a breath passed by, and she said--

"Listen, if you ain't buying anything, move along, lady," the vender from behind scoffed. He waved a dismissive hand. All sense of friendliness gone the instant he knew she wouldn't be buying from him.

64 closed her eyes, centering herself, while she gave a curt nod to the man.

"He's right. Besides, it reeks here," she commented.

A plain gesture to Daimon welcomed him to follow as 64 began to make her way in the general direction of the elevators. Though, now, her pace was slowed. Casual and without the hurry her irritation had fueled moments ago. Each step deliberately delayed by just a split second. Enough to give them plenty of time to speak.

"So, Daimon," she sampled his name. The slight lift of her tone implied a growing interest in wherever this conversation would take them. "With the pleasantries dealt with, will you tell me why you're here? Odd as I may be, I can't say that any have actively sought me out like you have."

Only afterward did she realize that was the most she had spoken at once without being actively prompted.

 

[Daimon]

He fell into step beside her as though the invitation had been expected.

Sixty-four. A number, which meant a sequence: at least sixty-three before her, each one presumably weighed and found insufficient. The designation told him more about the creator than the creation. You number what you intend to iterate on. You name what you intend to keep.

She had not been kept.

He filed that and let the silence hold for a few strides. The Market's noise closed around them like a sentence resuming after a parenthetical.

"I was on Kanassa," he said. "The homeworld of the seers. Their minds reach across the universe and return with impressions. Fragments of things that are, or will be, or almost were."

He navigated around a pair of Changeling traders arguing over a crate without adjusting his cadence.

"One of those fragments concerned you. A being that was built to hold something divine and then set aside when the result did not meet its architect's expectations."

His gaze moved to her. Brief. Measuring how that sentence landed before he committed to the next.

"I found that worth the trip."

The crowd thinned slightly as they neared the elevator corridor. Daimon's hands remained clasped behind his back, his posture unchanged since the moment he had appeared. He walked the way he spoke: nothing wasted, nothing offered that had not first been weighed.

"As for what I am looking for — I do not have a complete answer yet. I came to see whether the fragment matched the reality."

A pause. The kind he used the way other people used punctuation.

"So far, the reality is the more interesting text."

 

[Failure-64]

Kanassa?

64 had surface knowledge of the key planets -- truthfully, she only had surface knowledge of most things that were beyond the metal walls of the facility. But there were two things that stuck out the most in what she had learned:

Kanassa and Namek.

The beings native to those planets were what had inspired the Doctor during her creation. For the Namekians it was for their unique ability to regenerate and other manifestations of power wholly unique from anything else in the universe. For the Kanassans, it was their prophetic nature and innate psychic abilities. Theoretically, the combination of the Namekian physical traits and the minds of the Kanassans would have proved to be a potent combination.

In her eyes, it was. Unfortunately, she and the Doctor didn't see eye-to-eye on many things, she now realized.

Her answer came after a pause that went on too long. Her gait had slowed even more, as if everything was dedicated to her thoughts. The stoic gaze she typically wore had shifted into something softer, curious, like she had been introduced to a new and exciting puzzle to solve.

She blinked, realizing her silence might lead Daimon to think she lost interest or maybe he might grow impatient. That blink was like a reset button: that impassive stare returned, her pace picked back to the original, and she gave a low hum in response. Her head tilted ever so slightly when her eyes turned to the side and met Daimon's.

"You're certainly not a Kanassan," she pointed out dryly. "In fact, you seem to not be anything I've run across."

The implied question hung in the air: So what, exactly, are you?

Normally, she would have stopped. Waited for him to give what she wanted. But in that moment, perhaps fueled by her mind running wild with possibilities, she instead continued:

"I was created in a lab," she offered, showing her own vulnerability to further intice more from him. "About 16 years ago, though I only remember a few months after that day; I was locked away prematurely. Recently, I found myself freed of the stasis I was put under.

"Those seers were partially right: Divinity was involved in my creation. But not to contain, to surpass. To be something greater than even the gods themselves."

Pride warmed her tone, coloring her words with the first splash of emotion. Beneath it, the tiniest rumblings of excitement, as if a door had suddenly opened for her -- a line of thinking never once considered.

"I was tossed aside before he could fully grasp the magnitude of what he had made."

 

[Daimon]

She had shown him something. The softening of her gaze, the slowed gait, the way her composure had opened for a half-second before she caught herself and closed it again. Both halves were instructive: the unguarded moment told him what interested her, and the correction told him she tracked her own readability. Most beings did not.

Then she told him what she was.

Kanassan psychic architecture. Namekian biological resilience. A deliberate synthesis designed to produce something that could exceed the divine. The word she had used was surpass, a more ambitious verb than the alternatives it displaced.

Daimon let that settle into the model he had been assembling since the seer's vision first bled through. The shape was resolving: a creator — she called him "the Doctor," a title worn like a name, which told its own quiet story — who had studied the gods' component systems and attempted to reverse-engineer something greater from the parts. A rational project. An ambitious one. And it had produced her: iteration sixty-four of presumably many, locked away before the data could be properly evaluated. The pride in her voice when she described the discarding was the most legible thing about her so far.

"Shinjin," he said. The answer to what she had not quite asked. "My kind are born from the fruit of trees that grow on a world called Kaishin. In the conventional telling, those fruit produce the Kai. The divine overseers of the universe."

The word sat between them. Divine. The same category her creator had been reaching past.

"My fruit fell before it hatched. I was born in Hell."

Delivered the way she had delivered created in a lab: without ceremony, as a piece of architecture that explained more than it appeared to. An exchange of equivalent weight, offered because she had offered first.

"The reason you cannot sense me is that what runs through me is God Ki. It does not register to conventional detection. To your senses, I am simply not there."

The crowd moved around them. Daimon's attention did not move with it.

"Your creator was trying to build something that surpassed what I was born as. I find that worth understanding."

 

[Failure-64]

During Daimon's explanation, they had slowed to a stop. They stood close enough to a corner as to not disrupt the flow of the crowd. Now, for the first time, both seemed to have each other's full attention. The half-distracted wandering of 64's eyes was gone, and Daimon shed much of his cryptic half-answers.

Though, that didn't do much to staunch the flow of questions that came with his every sentence. It was shocking all on its own that the most believable thing he had said was that he hatched from a fruit.

It was a lot to process and 64 didn't hurry through her thoughts. She bought time by looking him over, now with renewed interest.

She stood at a cross roads with paths that branched into infinity. Did she even trust him in the first place, or was he lying? Even worse, he could just be completely mad and this entire exchange was just a waste of her time.

But what if he was truthful? The closest thing she had to a purpose was to prove without a doubt that she was not a failure. That she even surpassed what was intended for her. But what did that even mean?

If she killed Daimon, would that prove her point? Was such a brutal approach even the right answer?

Was he even the sort of "divinity" she was chasing after? He had fallen from grace before he was even born -- or, well, hatched. Or did him being raised in a place with such heavy connotations of ruthless suffering make him even more superior than what she once believed was the peak? Or did it nullify the concept of divinity?

Her head started to hurt.

"Those are quite the bold statements," she finally decided on an initial answer. "I've read passing mentions of so-called Kai, but they were chalked up as myths -- for good reason. Most writings are akin to fairytales told to children."

She shifted her weight onto a single leg. Relaxed in both the casual sense while also ready to lung forward at a moment's notice. Whichever her intent wasn't clear -- it wasn't even clear to her in that moment.

"You expect me to believe this simply because you speak with a confident tone?"

Again, her words meant more than was spoken: Prove it.

 

[Daimon]

The skepticism was expected. It would have concerned him more if she had simply accepted the claim: credulity in someone engineered for superior cognition would have suggested a flaw in the engineering. Her resistance suggested the architecture was sound.

What held his attention was the secondary calculus running beneath her words. Her posture had reorganized itself, weight redistributed into a configuration that kept multiple outcomes equally accessible. She had not decided whether this conversation ended in exchange or violence. The maintenance of both options simultaneously was, in its own taxonomy, a kind of compliment.

"You can sense energy," he said. Her Kanassan-derived architecture would have guaranteed it. "You are standing three paces from a living being and your senses are returning nothing. No power level, no signature, no confirmation that I exist at all."

The crowd moved past them.

"That absence is not a malfunction. It is the evidence you are asking for. God Ki does not register on any detection method available to mortal senses. You could scan every being in this market and find me indistinguishable from the air beside me."

The connection between his claim and her own experience was simple enough to verify without trusting a word he said. She was sensing nothing. He was telling her that was the point.

"The writings you encountered were incomplete, not inaccurate. The Kai exist. Most prefer to remain exactly as theoretical to the mortal universe as those texts suggest."

The condemned, of course, had never shared that luxury. In Hell, the gods were not myth but distant, indifferent authority. Daimon had grown up among beings who knew the divine was real and knew equally that it did not help them. He did not share this observation. It was not the kind of proof she was looking for.

"I am not asking you to believe me. I am pointing out that your own senses have been telling you something since I arrived. I am merely providing the annotation."