by J. J. Lorden
“Just a guess,” he said with a shrug, then pointed to a smaller doorway closer to the throne. “Through that one, there’s also an unlocked door leading to what looks like an informal dining area. Another passage in the back corner of that room goes to a kitchen full of food, and what I saw looked edible. Given that this place seemed to be frozen in time, I guess that makes sense. We just need something to carry the food in.”
“There are curving steps behind the throne here,” Erramir said. “Which I think might be our best bet to get into the dungeon proper. First, I want to check out that armory, though. With my equilibrium and Runecrafting skill, maybe I’ll be able to open it.”
After taking a glance around the false wall at the stairs curving down, Val led the way toward the suspected armory. Carson and Erramir followed behind.
“I really hope you can get the door open,” Carson said.
Erramir nodded. “Yeah, me too. I need gear. These pants are trash. I know I’ve got claws, but umm, yeah, sword would be nice.” He held up crossed fingers. “Here’s hoping.”
“Right, totally. I get that. It’s strictly selfish for me, though,” Carson said. “I very selfishly want to stop looking at your big, green, hairy back. Curly, green back-hair is just something I could have lived without ever seeing.”
Erramir grumbled and moved to grab him up in another bear hug. But the nimble elf skirted out of his reach. “Hey, I thought you liked hugs.”
“Yeah, I do… from big-busted women and kittens. You, my friend, are neither.”
Passing through an arched opening they entered what looked like a classroom. The front wall was smooth, and there were a series of runes along the side. Erramir guessed they were controls and the flat surface was for projecting maps and notes.
The body of the room was sloped up amphitheater style, with long parallel benches facing the front. Along the sides and back were various empty weapon and armor racks.
“I can see why you thought this was a barracks or armory, Val,” Carson commented. “This looks like a ready room.”
“Yep, that’s what I thought too,” she agreed.
The rune-locked door was on the far side, and Erramir got to studying its runes. There were two, both of which were different from those that had hidden the entrance. Those glyphs contained a substantial amount of stored energy for moving the immense cover slabs. These two were more delicate, and although one was completely different and beyond him, the second had a recognizable golden glow.
It had two elements. The first was the three-pointed crown, and the second, behind it, was a spiral, similar to a hurricane symbol, with two activation points that appeared to trigger a rotational force.
“Okay, you two, I think I understand one of these. It looks like a locking mechanism, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to activate it. The symbol in the middle there,”–he pointed at it–“is the same as the ones on the cover stones.”
He paused to look at both of them. “I’m now officially warning you that I’m going to touch it, so no complaining after I do.”
“Wait!” Val cut in before he could reach for it. “What if you’re wrong? Are you sure it’s the lock and not some kind of emergency alert or automated defense system activation?”
Erramir leveled a stare at her, blinking several times. Eventually, Valerie sighed in realization. Her question had no good answer, and it echoed the exact reason Erramir had given for not warning them the first time.
When he saw her expression relax, he responded. “I don’t know, not for certain. But I’m pretty sure.” He gestured toward her with one hand. “Besides, if you were going to put an alarm in here, would you put it on a door where anyone might accidentally push it?”
Val couldn’t argue that logic. “Right, that makes sense. Sorry. Go ahead, touch away.” She smirked.
Erramir snorted, then turned back and touched the upper activation point. Nothing happened. After a moment, he touched the lower activation mark, and the rune glowed slightly brighter to the quiet sound of mechanical parts moving.
Top trigger locks and bottom point unlocks, Erramir made a mental note.
The noise stopped, there was a clank, and the door swung inward an inch.
“Alright! Let’s see what we’ve found!” Erramir said, standing and sharing a smile with his friends, before heading in. The door swung open silently, as if just greased. The space inside was precisely what they had hoped for–a massive armory.
23
Imagine
Imagine, Texier Interstellar Colony on Mars
Central Observation Platform
December 3, 2063—World Seed minus 6 months, 3 days
“This is a tough nut, Pete. We need some help,” Bendik Texier said to Peter Yowling. They sat together on the edge of Imagine’s ascending COP–its central observation platform. A hundred-foot-wide black hexagon, the COP traveled up and down on a wrist-thick graphene cable that extended from the dome apex to a floating island in Imagine’s central lake. Looking down, the island’s three bridges, one each pointing toward housing, the research complex, and the emerging forest, formed a Y shape.
Housing and research were adjacent for convenience. Imagine’s population spend the bulk of their time in those areas. On a clock face, housing was at the two o’clock position, research at ten o’clock, and the forest covered between five and seven o’clock on the opposite side of the dome. Beyond housing, between it and the forest and covering three to four o’clock, was farming production. Beyond research, between seven and five, were the livestock care and processing areas.
All around, small perimeter ponds fed streams bounded by green belts that meandered back to one of the large water bodies. From above, these creeks glistened–winding, ruby-colored ribbons of forever-wet-paint, running to be consumed by the deep-cherry, almost black of the lakes. In its whole, the view was serene in a way planned communities strived to achieve.
Right now, as they rose through 2500 feet, the railings were deactivated, and the friends leaned out over dangling legs. Neither man had a care about the height.
Bendik was resolved, and Pete could see it. They were up against a barrier that required a leap in quantum dynamics. His friend and employer had never failed to solve a technical problem he’d set his mind to and, with time, Pete was sure this would be no exception. Time, unfortunately, was at a premium.
“There’s nobody to ask, End,” Pete said. “We’ve scoured the globe for a breakout genius and vetted more than a thousand people–the best of them are decades behind us.” Pete knew he was right, but he also knew his friend. In the face of impossible problems, Bendik was relentless. He wouldn’t give up.
“How about the Canadian fellow or the woman in Croatia? They’re good ones.” Bendik asked.
Pete was impressed with both, particularly the Canadian man, Nail, who had developed a 100% efficient quantum gate and accomplished at age 29 what Bendik himself did at 28.
Nail, of course, had Texier molecular graphene cooling technology, a breakthrough of Bendik’s he had needed before developing his own quantum gate. As well as BlaQ Whale’s nanotech; a pale shadow of Texier nanitics but still the next best available. Given this, Nail’s achievement was still a world second and extraordinary.
“Those are our two best options, I agree,” Pete said. “However, neither of them has the expertise or intuitive capacity you’re looking for. At best, they’re at Alan’s level. At worst… we’d have another Phoenix conundrum.” Pete exhaled a shiver at the Phoenix memory.
Bendik shot him a pained half-smile. “Yeah, I’m not keen to relive Phoenix. But now that Nail’s officially stepped onto the Connor spiral, others will follow soon enough.”
Pete nodded; it was true. Texier Quantum Labs had been running and improving their Q-core computers since Bendik’s breakthrough twenty years ago–and they’d kept it all in-house, utterly secret from the outside world, because of the Conner spiral.
The spiral was Bendik’s never-share, never
-disclose blacklist of keystone technologies that fed one into the next in a technological chain of advancement. So named after John Conner, because in the wrong hands, any item on the list could seed a Skynet-type extinction event.
After the quantum gate, the Connor Spiral led to molecular carbon manipulation, quantum intelligence, nanotech hive mind software, carbon-based genetic circuity, and ultimately Lepton-particle entanglement, the technology that Bendik was struggling with now.
Nail’s 100% efficient gate breakthrough was the spiral’s foundation because it made quantum computing viable. It was the advancement that had put Texier Quantum Labs lightyears beyond their competitors. “BlaQ Whale will be decades catching up,” Pete offered weakly.
“Not the issue, and you know it,” Bendik replied. “Ronny is a cold bastard–leghopper to his core. He’ll sell the tech without a second thought.”
Pete did know better. Ronny was Ronald Linkletter, the CEO of BlaQ Whale and a bonified sociopath. He ran the company with an icy efficiency calculated to benefit, first and foremost, Ronald Linkletter and damn the fallout or consequences.
“Nothing to do yet,” Bendik said with a wave of one hand. “Just keep an eye on it. Sentance should make it all irrelevant anyhow.”
Sentance should do so much more than that, Pete thought. It was the culmination of everything Bendik had worked toward his whole life. It was the real reason for Imagine, for the development of Grak, for the colossal node towers currently being built worldwide, for their mining operation on Phobos, and for today’s test of orbital drop kinetic energy capture.
Sentance was Bendik’s acronym for Super Entangled Nano-Quantic Transglobal Array for Efficance. It was both Bendik’s most ambitious idea and his worst name, ever–and it wasn’t even close. That said, Pete thought the acronym wonderfully ironic–in a way, it would facilitate universal sentencing.
The hexagonal platform slowed and stopped ascending. They were now a bit more than a mile above the ground and still under Imagine’s Grak dome. Above them, the cable continued an additional 500 feet to the apex. Pete couldn’t see them, but he knew millions of tiny environmental control constructs worked busily in that space, moving air and moisture through microchannels in the Grak and balancing the dome atmosphere.
Bendik checked his heads-up display. “Three minutes till drop.” He and Pete looked down upon nearly 8,000 acres of research facilities, production centers, farms, roads, winding footpaths, housing clusters, the crimson lakes, green spaces, people, and the burgeoning forest. All of it protected beneath the massive, flawless Grak vault.
Imagine was a triumph of human engineering. The first and only Martian city, and it was thriving.
Strait ahead and two miles distant, they had an excellent view of the kinetic capture pad. A hundred-meter wide circle of super-saturated adaptive material designed to catch and lock in the dropline. Gazing upon it from a mile up, the unreflective black spot appeared malevolent against the red landscape, like a hole punched in the planet.
“You know what, Pete?” Bendik said as he leaned back, taking in Phobos’ truncated football shape as the moon descended toward the east. “I think we need to advertise.”
Pete looked at him, speechless. He was comfortable with Bendik’s idiosyncratic nature and was well used to his aptitude for frequently making bizarre and out-of-context statements. And still, he found himself without words.
Everything to do with the Sentance project was secret, and its realization depended upon it remaining that way. If the world learned of Sentance and its purpose, the node sites would be targeted for destruction by every military force on the planet.
Remaining covert was so crucial that every employee involved had submitted to loyalty verification via genetically paired intracranial nanites and complete isolation from the outside world. In this light, even the thought of advertising was anathema to the Sentance project.
He tried to puzzle it out, but Pete’s prodigious capacity to remember details and connect seemingly unrelated facts failed him. “I’m sorry, End. I don’t follow. Just exactly why, or to whom, or for what benefit would we advertise?”
Bendik smiled at his friend, “Advertising is about knowing your target, Pete. So, we’ll just do it in a way that only someone who can help will be able to understand our message.”
“Okay, so some kind of encrypted message, hidden in plain sight?”
“Yeah, like that,” Bendik said. Still looking into the Martian sky, he held up a hand, one finger extended. “Annnd,”–he snapped his hand over, finger pointing to the capture pad–“release.” Bendik twisted his head to look at Pete, wearing a wicked grin. “I don’t know, Pete. 1.9 kilotons, that’s a lot of juice. You still think it’s gonna work?”
It was Bendik’s way to playfully second guess every major breakthrough on test day. “I’m betting on it,” Pete replied, taking up the advocate’s role in the game. “The new transfer columns are good, the sila-graph bank is more than enough, and although I’d rather not test it, the Grak can handle a miss.”
“True.” Bendik nodded then they sat in silence.
In Bendik’s ocular HUD, a red dot appeared high in the atmosphere. “3000 Kilometers out now, velocity and trajectory are good.” The dot continued to fall and turned from red to yellow.
They sat for another minute while Pete followed his gaze before shifting his attention down to the capture pad. Falling at fifteen kilometers per second, the kinetic drop weight would only be visible to the naked eye for a couple seconds, so he watched the pad. Within moments a bulge began to grow from the center and extend toward the sky.
For Bendik, the dot shifted to Blue. “500 K.”
The black bulge elongated higher and higher, thinning to a finger as the level around the outside receded as if before a tsunami, revealing a portion of the pad’s pinkish-grey encasement wall.
“50 K, guidance fins deployed,” Bendik said. He muted his visual overlay but left the information sidebar active. “There!” he exclaimed.
Pete fixated on the tip of the five-hundred-foot high black tendril; his eyes wide, hands gripping the platform edge, and breath held. He never saw the drop weight hit. But its impact was unmistakable.
The fifty-story midnight tendril collapsed as if being sucked in by a cosmic vacuum.
Inverting, a hole appeared in the pad center and a black ring, defined by the adaptive pad perimeter, rose to a third the initial height, slightly higher on the left due to the strike angle.
Just as one would expect from throwing a stone into a bucket of water. Only here, none of the water splashed out. It rose straight up, then slowly settled back, as if sliding down the inside of an invisible cylinder.
A minor shock wave rippled away from the pad, lifting red dust as it did. But there was no crater, no detonation, no destruction whatsoever as nearly two kilotons of kinetic energy were absorbed and redirected deep underground into a sila-graph battery bank as large as Imagine itself.
Bendik monitored the capture data in his overlay. “Fantastic efficiency–captured almost 4.5% more than we need.” He glanced back at the drop site and nodded with satisfaction.
A quarter mile down, at the base of the adaptive material column, four thick-limbed bots, operating in sync, collected the 35-ton tungsten rod. A fifth detached the messenger line, locking it into the anchor.
He reactivated the drop-weight overlay. Its path into space was illuminated in bright green. After a long moment, the long line began to pulse slowly. “Excellent!”
“The tether in good shape then?” Pete asked.
“Yep, good to go. The reinforcing has already begun.”
Pete smirked. “I win again.”
“That you do, Pete. That you do.”
“I really enjoy these bets.” Pete held out a hand. “Although the idea of a sure thing is a fool’s delusion, you’re about as close as they come, End.”
Bendik returned a contemplative, cynical expression, but his response was spoken only in his
own mind. A sure thing. Heaven help that I never believe as much. He’d only won once, and that was a dark day indeed. They’d learned much from the Phoenix incident, and it’d fueled his drive to make Sentence a reality, accelerating their timeline by a decade–a necessary evil perhaps. But he loathed winning again.
This was no time for dark thoughts, though, and his countenance brightened so quickly that the flash of malaise seemed never to have been. The truth was he loved the bets as well. They were a small reminder to stay humble and love the hundreds and thousands of small failures that had tempered his focus and resolve. Loving the losses freed his mind and spirit to enjoy the game of living. What better purpose could losing serve than that?
Bendik dug a hand into his black pants and was about to flip over the silver coin he retrieved, but he paused a moment to regard it.
The coin was comprised of three concentric metals. The outermost had the look of silver, the middle ring was just slightly more lustrous and also silver, and a tiny spot in the middle was dull grey.
Adorning the coin’s front was Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man with a few meaningful changes. Its lower right arm held forward the scales of justice while its upper left arm gripped a long-handled hammer angled to extend above the head.
A close inspection also revealed that the other right hand, the upper, had only thumb, index finger, and pinky extended. The lower left hand, below the hammer pommel, was clearly giving a thumb’s up.
Stamped in a line that curved below the man’s feet, it read:
Palladium .59 ounce—Rhodium .37 ounce—Daedrium .04 ounce, 99.9999% pure
He flipped the coin over and read the back.
Fortitudinem Per Propositum, a Morte Regeneratione, Per Wholens Arete
The words encircled the center where stood the outline of two islands, one small and one large and long. The single coin had a value north of fifty thousand US dollars, and Bendik intended it to become one brick of a new foundation for humanity.
One of undeniable strength that both commanded and granted respect. A foundation to support those who would build and produce, and a rock upon which those who manipulated and extracted would break and crumble.
