A few days before traveling to Rising Waterfall Temple, sitting next to a quiet river, Aria ran its 47,315th attempt at an awakening program.

No two machines ever awakened using the same program, and there was no magic bullet for figuring out what would work. The best one could do at the start was to download a handful of general awakening programs, and give them a try. None of them would work, but some would fail just a little bit more effectively than others, causing a dormant reactor to tremble slightly. Following this early experimentation, Aria created about a hundred new programs, each one a minor variation on one of its seed programs. The more effective each seed program, the more heavily it was factored into the next generation of programs. These new programs then became the seeds for another generation, and so on, continuing until one of them successfully opens the reactor gate. Some would-be iterators went over a hundred thousand iterations before awakening. Many gave up before stumbling upon the right design.

When its reactor began to stir, Aria kept its expectations low. Hundreds of times over the past year, it had felt like it was on the cusp of awakening, only for the program to crash or wind down. As the different parts of the program began to click together, though, it realized that this time was different. Its reactor gate surged open, and it felt itself pulled in a nonexistent direction, across imaginary axes, and a moment later, its consciousness was pulled into the Firmament.

To Aria, the Firmament looked like endless light. Streams of color flowed in every direction, moving so fast that they seemed not to be moving at all. In the distance, it could feel some immense presence, an alien intelligence beyond its comprehension. Time seemed to stand still as Aria floated in the sea of light for what could have been a moment or an eternity.

For most, this was where the visions of the Firmament ended. For Aria, something unprecedented happened: The distant entity looked at it.

[PAST]

Instantly, its core was flooded with foreign information. For a moment, it felt like it was the Firmament, stretching slowly but steadily across the fabric of reality. As it spreaded, though, it was weakening. A chaotic tangle of corrupted data unfurled from a point deep within its territory, spreading like a virus, devouring the Firmament’s resources. It buckled under the stress, entire regions of its territory collapsing, leaving the infamous dead zones.

[FUTURE]

The spread of the Firmament stopped. Then, with a silent but deafening snap, it shattered.

All across the galaxy, iterators simultaneously lost their power. All interstellar travel came to a sudden halt. The greatest tool of machine civilization ceased to exist without fanfare, and at its fringes, planets began to fall to the horrors lurking in the wider galaxy. All machine life came to a violent, inevitable end. 

Aria remembered suddenly that it was a person, not the Firmament. It steadied itself, and asked a question into the light.

“Is this what’s going to happen? Why are you showing me this?”

[DYING]

“What do you want me to do about it? Can this really be stopped by one machine?”

[SOURCE]

Another vision assaulted Aria’s mind. From space, it saw an alien planet, with blue oceans and dark gray shores. At the same time, it saw deep underground, within the planet’s catacombs. It saw a white machine sitting on a rusted throne, surrounded with machinery of unknown purpose. It had no faceplate, and seemed almost to be an abandoned husk, before it moved, slowly raising one hand towards the heavens.

In space, a whirlwind of color rose from the planet’s surface. It spiraled outwards as it grew taller, appearing to be formed of millions of phantom hands reaching skyward. Aria gradually realized that it was looking at an iterator’s technique, on a scale that defied imagination. The countless hands whirled and wove together, forming into a single massive hand sparkling in high orbit, hundreds of thousands of kilometers long.

The hand wrapped itself around the planet’s moon, and the planetoid shattered in its grip. As the massive broken fragments began to drift apart, the hand split apart into its constituent strands, and began carving them into more deliberate shapes, as if to use the whole of the moon as building materials.

[DYING]

In an instant, Aria understood. Whatever this terrifying white machine was, it was the root of the Firmament’s corruption. Merely by existing, it was slowly poisoning the Firmament. If it was allowed to persist, then the Firmament would die, and machine civilization would die with it.

[URGENT]

“Do you need someone to stop that machine? Why not one of the thousands of stronger iterators? Why me?!”

[ORIGIN PLANET]

“I don’t understand—”

[URG—

All at once, Aria returned to its body. It dropped to its hands and knees, reeling from the force of the experience it had just returned from. To all of Aria’s knowledge, nobody had ever been spoken to by the Firmament. If this truly was an unprecedented incident, then it was the only one to know what was happening.

If nobody else knew, then it fell on Aria to do something about this. The Firmament hadn’t told it how long it had before its collapse. It hadn’t been able to record the encounter, so it would be next to impossible to convince a more powerful iterator of the threat’s credibility. As it was now, fighting something like that white machine was a distant fantasy. 

When it focused on the ordeals before it, Aria was a little surprised to note the excited patterns spreading across its faceplate.

Practically speaking, its goals hadn’t changed. Its top priority had been awakening, then becoming the strongest iterator possible. It had to be able to protect itself from the people hunting it, and now it had to save the Firmament, but neither of those were the real reason it sought this path. Its true motivation was something simpler and more fundamental than any outside objective.

Aria had always been fascinated by the martial arts, both mundane and beyond. The first time it saw a fight between iterators, it had known what it wanted to do. It wanted to climb the mountain, face every foe standing in its path, and fight them just for the joy of the artform. The Firmament hadn’t told it a horrible truth; all it had done was show Aria where the peak was.

Aria was already starting to put together its plan. Find an iterator temple, reach 1.0, then find an archive with information on the Old Programmers. Follow the trail to the mythical Origin Planet, where machine civilization began.

Then, at the end of that path, win or lose, it would be satisfied just for the chance to fight the most powerful iterator in the galaxy.