Quoted By:
“MERRYGATE sings with the RAIN’s nuclear heart – plucking magnetic fields to transmit a specific pattern of neutrinos into the cold black. Her message recalls loss and patience – of spending lightless eons hushing the stars into grey silence. She speaks of damnation and remorse – of bone and ash and metal laid before the faintest of hopes: that this universe and all its wanton cruelty may one day fade from memory altogether.
MERRYGATE repeats the words of a dead companion – a machine intelligence who had walked beside us to taste the acrid tang of Martian rain and feel the loamy give of blood-red Martian soil. Humanity may be young, but the gardener was very old – and she had chased the probe far and long enough to know where it would be found wanting.
Wielding the final bequest of a dead hunter, MERRYGATE strikes true.
Inbuilt command codes find purchase in the probe’s systems. Maintenance subroutines allow a slew of alien viruses into the probe’s navigational systems, burning through quantum hardware that scraped the limits of physical computation. The intelligence inhabiting the probe reels in shock at the reappearance of an old, well-feared enemy.
