I was suddenly wide-awake inside the cramped confines of the scout ship. I had lost consciousness when the scout ship jumped across the multiverse to the coordinates specified in the Beacon’s signal. A loud siren filled the air.
No wait—that was inaccurate. I had ceased to exist during the scout ship’s particularly impressive transmutation/teleportation combo. And so this was me, uh, resuming to exist apparently, and it was a very loud experience because of the siren, which was actually me screaming, which I was doing a lot of.
Where’s Maddy?
On the ceiling. Check.
Oh wait—now she was falling on top of me. The perils of two people in a one-person scout ship: only one seat belt, hence Maddy had spent the trip pressed against the ceiling above the pilot’s chair. But lest you mock, you know who didn’t rematerialize screaming for her life? Here’s a hint: it was Maddy.
She didn’t have far to fall, and then she was on top of me. The reclining pilot’s chair nearly flattened out in response. Instinctively I wrapped my arms around her, thinking to hold her close in case of further turbulence.
More screaming—no wait, that was an actual siren, don’t worry, I was getting the hang of it. The scout ship was doing the screaming this time.
“DOES THAT SIREN MEAN ANYTHING?” she shouted in my ear.
“PROBABLY!”
The siren suddenly stopped, the ship stabilized into a smooth flight path, and the onboard AI chimed in: “The cautionary siren is a notification that the jump drive is now idle and you may assume manual piloting.” Cameron had chosen to use the Dauphine’s voice for the onboard AI, a sly confidence-boosting measure which made impending disaster seem somehow pleasantly manageable. “The autopilot is engaged until you’re ready to take control.”
“Are we in any immediate danger?” I asked.
“None that I can detect.”
“Then keep control, please, put us in a holding pattern, and kick off data collection.”
“Understood.”
Data was already coming in actually. A panoramic display of the scenery outside the ship filled the wraparound viewscreen. Raw incoming sensor readings fluttered across the screen as well.
But I didn’t care about any of that just now, because Maddy occupied my complete attention. I was stunned by her presence in multiple ways.
She managed to lift herself up so that we could see each other’s faces—tricky, considering I was still holding onto her as tightly as I could—and said, “If you’re planning on scolding me for being here, I don’t want to hear it.”
“No,” I managed to say, because even though she should’ve stayed behind, I was unbelievably happy she was here. Sure, I’d be absolutely devastated if anything happened to her on this trip, but our chances of surviving together were much higher than mine were on my own. I realized I’d been cavalier about my own survival when I volunteered to be the cabal’s scout, but with Maddy here, I was vividly reminded that I absolutely wanted to survive. Oh and sure, something something save the Earth or whatever. “Thank you.”
She nodded and said, “Next time you volunteer for a potential suicide mission, ask for a two-seater. Now let’s get this done and get out of here.”
The sky was a dark orange, filled with haze. We were thousands of feet above a flat desert. The ruins of a toppled tower or skyscraper stretched impossibly from a “ground zero” all the way to the horizon, as though pointing at something out of sight. And then scattered all about, we saw wreckage: massive chunks of the building that had blown clear across the desert, huge shards of black glass that had sunk into the desert like splinters into flesh, and a myriad of what we presumed to be vehicles that had been flipped about, tossed around, upended or destroyed by falling debris. We decided the tower, when it had stood tall, must have had a parking lot, and these vehicles were the collateral damage of the tower’s collapse.
The first floor of the tower remained somewhat intact. It was as though someone had surgically sliced the tower off its base, then knocked it sideways. The haze in the sky seemed to make sense as lingering dust from this collapse, imagining no wind had blown through to clear the air.
We saw no signs of life or activity.
The Beacon was a small thin pillar a mile away from the first floor, which the ship identified as the source of the signal that had brought us here. I landed the scout ship nearby. The ship’s sensors were being cheeky, displaying a “Chances of Survival” meter that was currently stuck on “Pretty Good.” I was all in favor of simplified data visualization for laypeople, but this was kind of insulting, to be honest.
Typically—in the exactly one example we had to work with—when we moved from Earth to the logosphere or back, transmutation kept us alive by adapting us to the environment we were entering. That’s how the Dauphine had become a real person when she entered the gymnasium. That’s what we were counting on now.
We popped the lid on the scout ship, and slowly climbed out onto the dry desert. The temperature was warm, and the air was dirty but breathable. Felt like “normal” gravity, too. Either this place was a near match for Earth in these ways, or we’d been transformed during transit to feel comfortable when we arrived.
If we were traversing a book with infinite pages, what was the likelihood we’d flip forward a bunch of pages and miraculously land on a page suitable for human habitation? Maybe we weren’t human anymore, transformed so extensively by the punctuation marks to survive here that we only superficially resembled our former species. Maybe we hadn’t been human since we started using power morphemes in the first place, for that matter, racking up mutations that extended far beyond the vocal cords. Anyway maybe the Beacon was specifically designed to attract humans to a rallying point that was actually safe for humans, and other species got routed to a different exit off the interdimensional freeway or whatever.
An important test remained. I delivered a simple, harmless power morpheme sequence that we should feel as a small gust of air rising up and gently passing us by. Check: at least we still had spells.
The Beacon was composed of a thin pillar maybe eight feet tall and a foot in diameter, its surface smooth and metallic, culminating in a crystal that glowed with a bright blue light. The pillar was attached to the rim of a base, a flat round platform that seemed illuminated from within by soft white light. A person could stand on this platform if they wanted to achieve the daunting feat of being half a foot above the desert surface. It all seemed rather space-age alluring to me.
We walked all the way around its perimeter, looking for control interfaces or access panels or the like. No dice. I wanted to stand on the platform because it clearly seemed like a platform designed for people to stand on, and I just really appreciate an intuitive UI like that, but Maddy suggested otherwise. The exchange went as follows:
“I would like to stand on the platform,” I said.
“Do not,” Maddy replied.
The pillar suddenly hissed loudly, and somehow seemed to spray a humanoid figure into existence on top of its white platform in a blast of color and steam. Its features were pearlescent, impossibly smooth and beautiful and radiant—angelic, perhaps, but with a sharpness that also seemed robotic. It wore a slick blue jumpsuit, its silver hair was tucked under a small matching cap reminiscent of a crisp military beret, and a silver diamond-shaped badge was affixed to its jumpsuit in the front.
It smiled at each of us in turn, then began speaking in a rich, sonorous voice, and neither of us understood a word it said, or even recognized its language’s family tree. After maybe a minute, it stopped, smiled, and then began speaking again, in a different language this time, and only for a sliver of the time it spoke before. It switched languages twelve times before completing what appeared to be a set. I recognized none of these languages.
Finally it fell silent, a smile frozen on its face to a magnificently creepy effect.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Isobel Bailie. Can you understand me?”
I received no acknowledgment whatsoever.
“We came here because we heard your signal,” I continued.
“I don’t think it’s even listening,” Maddy said. “Maybe it’s a recording.”
But I knew damn well when I was being ignored by an NPC, and you just had to be patient throwing conversational triggers out until you got to the core message. If this construct didn’t understand English, the only other mutual language we might have in common was music. I proceeded to sing the first few phrases of the musical signal from the Beacon that brought us here. I hadn’t been able to learn the entire ten-minute motif overnight, but I definitely managed a good rendition of the first few lines before faltering.
The figure turned its head and performed a slow form of salute to me, its hands briefly covering its eyes, followed by a very slight bow of its head. A silver diamond-shaped badge materialized in its hand; it solemnly offered the badge to me, and you don’t have to ask me twice to take loot from an NPC. Then the figure dissolved into a mist. I stuck the badge in the pocket of my jumpsuit.
“What just happened?” Maddy asked.
“Our quest begins,” I replied.
But as we wandered the ruins, it became apparent that if this was the rallying point for survivors, we were not going to find help here.
As we wandered through the parking lot, not only did we see no signs of life—we saw no remains of life either. It was as though an EMP had gone off, except instead of simply knocking out all the electronics, it had disintegrated anything organic as well. Periodically we’d stop at a shelled-out wreck of a vehicle, and Maddy would stick her head in, poke at some indecipherable controls, but we didn’t manage to trigger a response out of anything.
We got back in the ship and flew slowly toward the first floor, the lobby of some kind of massive office building. Many of the windows were blown out and a fire had clearly raged through and burned itself out. Inside this lobby, we spotted another pillar like our Beacon, blackened but still standing, emitting a glow from its round white base. Impressively, as we got closer and fully understood the scale we were looking at, we realized that what we’d been calling the “first” floor actually must’ve been at least fifty floors.
“So look,” Maddy said, “let’s say survivors arrived here, just like us, and this is what they found. Do you think they’d stay here? Or would they maybe wander off to try to find someplace else to settle or collect themselves? Like, out of this desert altogether?”
“Worth a look,” I said.
We found no “out of this desert.” This was a deeply artificial place.
As we flew the scout ship along the line traced by the ruined tower, we found ourselves heading straight back to the lobby without noticing that we’d ever turned around. We hadn’t noticed any shift in perspective along the way. The illusion of our direction of travel confused even our AI. We’d clearly flown hundreds of miles away from the lobby before realizing we were now traveling toward it.
“Have we learned enough to head back?” Maddy asked. “Or should we see for ourselves what’s inside?”
“Let’s unpack the drones and send them in,” I decided. “Let’s at least try to survey a sliver of the interior before we leave.”
We set the scout ship back down and unpacked the drones. We had twelve to work with, capable of sending signal back to the scout ship for us to watch and record. We sent the first one into the lobby. If it had ever been furnished in some way, the furnishings were melted to slag or burned to ashes, all except the blackened pillar. The drone didn’t trigger an interaction from the pillar as it zoomed within close range. Beyond that, the only notable find was elevator banks, positioned to rise up the sides of the building in broad shafts that might be accessible somehow.
We sent drones scouting into several of the floors above the lobby, letting them flit through broken windows to survey incomprehensible layouts. The second floor, for instance, was one big, uninterrupted space, completely full of destroyed robotic machinery, whereas the third floor seemed like some kind of nuclear or electrical facility’s command center, except, of course, fully destroyed by fire. Higher floors revealed no meaningful secrets; giant cubicle farms might have existed here, or laboratories, or greenhouses—impossible to deduce via drone’s-eye view of ash and slag and wreckage.
On one floor, however, one of the supposed elevator doors had been blown inward, and the drone could slip inside the shaft beyond. Sure enough, this shaft traveled up into the sky above, but also down well below the surface level, to multiple subbasements—we counted twenty-three. There was no opening for the drone into any of these levels.
“I want to see what’s down there,” I said. “I get a very specific feeling when I’m in the presence of a new dungeon crawl opportunity.”
Maddy said, “Can it wait? I’d feel weird about leaving the scout ship unprotected.”
“Yes,” I said, “at the rate things are going back home, we’ll be back here in a few days in the arkship. Dungeon crawling can wait until then.”
This time we were able to situate ourselves in the scout ship, with Maddy sitting on my lap instead of sprawled on top of me after falling from the ceiling. It felt nice to be able to wrap my arms around her again.
“Are you comfortable?” I asked her.
“Sure. Are you?”
“I’m feeling good, yeah.”
“Are you now?” Then after a beat, she said, “You plan on taking us home anytime soon?”
It was the pinnacle of selfishness to want to stay here, just to be alone with Maddy, when the stakes at home were so high.
I sighed and said, “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”
I pressed the button that would take us back.
Nothing happened.
I pressed it again. Same result.
“Ship, what’s going on?” I asked.
“The jump drive is not active,” the ship replied.
“Oh. Can you activate it please?”
“I cannot.”
“What?”
“I cannot access the jump drive.”
“But the jump drive is programmed to take us back, isn’t it?”
“It is not.”
“But Cameron said it was!”
“It is not.”
I quickly cast a healing cantrip on myself to stop myself from hyperventilating with fear.
“So how do we go back?” Maddy asked, steel in her voice.
“We do not,” the ship replied.
“Ship, are you broken or is this by design?” Maddy asked.
“I’ve been programmed for one jump only,” the ship replied.
“So Cameron lied to us,” Maddy concluded.
“No,” I said, bitterness rising up in the back of my throat like acid. “Two people had access to the arkship’s operating system. I’m guessing those same two people had access to the scout ship’s operating system. And I’m guessing it wasn’t Cameron who did this.
“I’m guessing it was Violet Parker.”