“She explicitly said she would kill me someday,” I told Maddy. “Maybe this is what she meant.”
Maddy said nothing. I was role-playing Violet Parker, evil genius, in my mind, trying to decipher what she stood to gain by knocking the two of us completely out of the picture. Well, me anyway—she couldn’t have predicted Maddy would come with me.
“I mean, she’s fucked now, right?” Maddy said eventually. “Let’s say she tries to launch the arkship on schedule—it’ll kill most of the people, because neither one of us is there to teach her how to teleport correctly, right?”
“Maybe she wasn’t planning on traveling at all,” I said. “Because with me out of the picture, you know what she’s got now? She’s got a battery with ten million people in it, and she’s got Devin to issue new commands to the battery, with no Isobel the Queen in sight to stop her. I’ll bet she’s going to give herself god mode. And I’ll bet she has no issues with spending energy from the battery, either to bring the arkship here safely, or to fight the thunderstorm herself.”
“I find it hard to believe she’d risk herself in a fight,” Maddy said.
“God mode’s intoxicating,” I said. “Hard to say what she’d do. But you’re right, she’s not one to put herself on the front line of anything.”
“But if she doesn’t expect the return of the scouting mission, how would she know that traveling here is safe?”
“She originally planned to send the scout ship here without a pilot,” I replied. “My guess is she actually did that, prior to sending me. So she knows there’s no one here to save us. And she knows that when she comes here in a few days in god mode, with the population of California—essentially hostages—I’m going to be myself, and want to keep those people alive instead of fighting her about who’s the top deity. And honestly, it probably won’t be a fight.”
“Eventually, the battery will be empty,” Maddy said.
“Yes,” I said. “But she’s about to relocate thirty million more people. She may last a while as god empress.”
Finally Maddy said, “Look, in a few days, the arkship will most likely be here. They’re going to be disoriented and it’s going to be chaotic and it’ll take time before they’re able to organize around exploring the ruins. We should explore the ruins first, look for anything that could give us an advantage when they get here. Something out there in that mess must be useful, we just need to find it.”
That was a useful illusion to get us moving.
We parked the scout ship in front of the lobby. My proposal was to investigate the second pillar we’d found, since the two pillars were the only signs of active, working technology that we’d come across. I wondered if the one in the lobby would trigger an identical or different response from the one far out in the parking lot. Of course, our approach to this one would be slightly different, because now we had a silver diamond badge in our possession.
We made our way carefully across the debris-strewn field of the lobby floor, arriving at the pillar. Its round base was covered with a smattering of glass and dirt, but somehow it had survived relatively intact compared to its surroundings. It sprayed an angelic humanoid into existence as we approached, said something to us in a language we didn’t understand, and then waited patiently for a response.
I held up the badge for it to see. It flickered, and then launched into a second monologue. Whereas the first monologue seemed cheerful and full of verve, this one seemed a little more sober and straightforward, but equally incomprehensible. We were getting approximately nowhere. I had the feeling this badge was originally meant to unlock visitor or diplomatic privileges or something, except the corresponding services had all been vaporized. All it was good for now, apparently, was triggering this apparition to give us another chunk of language we’d never understand.
But you’d think that the punctuation marks, masters of language and manipulators of thought, would be able to deduce meaning here, right? Well, except that we were probably viewing some kind of holographic representation of a thinking entity, so the punctuation marks technically might not have other punctuation marks in this environment to communicate with. Right?
Who could say?
“Maybe I could ask the punctuation marks if they can translate for us,” I said. “Recite the entire hundred and eight and get a solid read from the punctuation marks on our situation.”
“No way,” Maddy said. “Look, we can’t afford to have you incapacitated in some unpredictable fashion. There has to be another way.”
Well, grrrr, but I suspected she was right.
“I do not, however, have an alternate proposal for what to do next,” she said.
“Luckily, I do,” I said. “What we do next is dungeon crawl.”
Obviously that was a metaphor. What I meant was: time to go exploring.
We decided to make the lobby our home base, even going so far as to park the scout ship inside near the pillar. Then we systematically sent drones up to each floor above the lobby.
We couldn’t really interpret what the structure had been used for. Maybe these were living spaces, apartments or hotels or something. Maybe we were swooping through shopping malls or schools. This entire thing could have been a self-contained city. Maybe all the ships outside had come here because this was some kind of massive tourist attraction. Maybe some of these floors were actual vehicle hangars. Maybe maybe maybe. It was all covered in crap and dead as could be.
One thing we did notice, however, was that every five floors, somewhere on the floorplan, a pillar with a white glowing base stood proud and tall, seemingly unaffected by the destruction around them. We clearly needed some kind of hook for understanding these things, but such a hook eluded us.
Exploring the toppled tower seemed like a much more challenging proposition, but we decided to give it a shot, testing the range of our drones by sending them down the length of it to see what it could see. Our flyover in the scout ship had been a little too high to get any detailed looks inside.
The drones began to find unexpected anomalies. For the most part, the floors were unremarkable pits of average destruction. But every now and then, a drone would fly past an absence where a floor should have been, like seeing into a pool of inky blackness; in one case, it sent back images of a vast inexplicable forest contained within a floor; in one case, we saw an empty plane of unbroken flat glass that seemingly had no end.
We debated sending one of the drones past the event horizon of one of these floors, to report back from within these environments, and opted not to. We wanted to keep all twelve safe for now. But we also had no desire to go into any of these environments ourselves. There’s dungeon crawling, sure, and then there’s dimensional plane hopping, and I wasn’t at all convinced the latter should be on the agenda just yet.
“You’re saying these anomalous floors are their own dimensions?” Maddy asked.
“Pocket dimensions, maybe,” I said, as if I truly understood what that might mean.
“So this tower literally contained little universes within it,” Maddy speculated. “And they’re all empty? I mean, devoid of life? Isn’t that a little unlikely?”
“I’m sorry, Maddy, is some aspect of this situation likely and I didn’t know?”
She smirked at me and said, “I just think personally I would have designed this tower a little differently.”
“Standing upright probably,” I said, and we laughed.
The sky did not get dark to signify night, but we did get sleepy eventually. We decided tomorrow we’d investigate the subbasements. Tonight, though, we’d sleep inside the climate-controlled environment of the scout ship. We sank into the pilot’s chair together, stretching it out to its full length, enjoying a rare moment of actual contact.
She kissed me, and we discovered we were in no actual hurry to drift off to sleep.