(original here)

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Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

They were the remnants of a matriarchal flesh-and-blood race of six-legged amphibious carnivores from a planet with a name that sounded like “Rastz”. It issued from their mouths like a reverent and mournful hiss. Now in exile, they called themselves a word that meant the same as “Remnant” in English, but more defiant. Like a cross between “survivor” and “I survived because I danced on your corpse and spit on your grave.”

The Remnant were one of those odd peoples who, despite the presence of a solar system brimming with habitable planets, turned inward instead. They developed intricate robotics and a crude system of cross-dimensional travel long before they thought of space flight. The Remnant wished to explore the universes contained with Rastz, and they sent forth emissaries to explore.

At first, they found every delight and torment possible: versions of their world more peaceful and more advanced than theirs, versions decimated by battles for last scraps of protein on otherwise exhausted continents and seas bare of animal life, all of it dotted with the burning fires of failed city-states gouging the earth for the last fossil fuels. They came to know the full measure of echoes…

But after about two hundred years, everything changed. On an outlier alt-Rastz, a rogue where the Remnant never developed civilization, a Remnant expedition came across a hill overlooking a bay. Upon the hill stood giant bears silent and unblinking, while below angels at play hunted Remnant for sport.

To the Remnant, angels looked a lot like the bleating livestock back at home.

To the angels, the Remnant looked a lot like what they’d been hunting in the bay, but with funny-looking toy weapons strapped to their ponderous sides.

Only one Remnant made it home, but the angels made sure she had a tracer on her. Suddenly, the Remnant knew the outer, wider universe all too well: it was filled with giant bears and beings who looked like food but had strange and possibly superior technology. And those beings were now after them.

Had they simply—“simply”—returned home and decided to stay there, turned outward, explored the planets in their solar system, forgotten they had ever stumbled across alternative Rastzs, perhaps the angels would have left them alone. But instead the Remnant decided to try to establish hegemony over the other alt-Rastz worlds and find ways to thwart the angels.

The angels saw what was happening and were not amused. They had conflicts of their own to worry about. They decided that, for their purposes, they didn’t need Rastz—any Rastzs. They sent death and destruction. They funneled plagues through the portals. They sent transdimensional fireballs that scorched whole continents across alt-Rastzs. They suppressed evolution, sent it reeling back on itself. They took some versions and smashed them, sent others spinning out into the galaxy, unmoored from Rastz’s sun. They didn’t care. It didn’t matter to them at all. They didn’t care, either, when the Remnant sued for peace. It was a process. They had begun the process. The process must be completed.

And when it was all over not a single flesh-and-blood Remnant remained alive. And the only possible savior of an entire race existed within a habitat the size and shape of a test tube hurtling through space as far away from the dead Rastzs as possible, in only one possible reality. A test-tube spinning end-over-end filled with bioneered nanotech, filled with thirteen consciousnessess downloaded into Remnant micro-brains, surrounded by anything else that could fit on information-absorbing microtic tissue sheets. Thus swathed in sheets of the sum total of their civilization’s history and knowledge the Remnant slowly traversed the universe unmoored, so small and insignificant that they did not register with the angels at all. Within each micro-brain burned just one thought: to rebuild, to expand, to seek vengeance.

The destruction of Rastz happened one hundred million years ago, if you take Mormeck Mountain’s time-spool as the baseline. This all happened long before any Earth developed civilization.

This all happened well before any of our times…and yet…and yet…it all soon became very personal to me because the Remnant told me the story while torturing me for information.

None of which really explains how I found myself half-komodo, half-worm, staring down at an underground replica of Stalingrad. Or why the pressure in my skull at that moment meant that in a few hours of my capture I would explode like the perfect bomb, in a hellstorm of fire and flesh and shrapnel.

But reconstruction is a difficult process and I am just a remnant at the moment, so I will leave that story for the next entry.