Ray frowns. "So not like a pumpkin?"
"It's enough like a pumpkin," So answers. "You can think of it that way. Everything we see now around us is the Molten Core, crushed. We're standing on the outer shell of it now."
"So does that mean we're on the outside now?" Doe asks. "If we're on top of the disc, which was a sphere, were we actually inside before when we were buried in the mud?"
"No," says So, "because it's a spatially resonant flattened sphere, not a straight flattened sphere. Which is to say, it maintains some knowledge of its own sphereness. Watch." She fires another, even simpler simulation over to them, of a globe compressing, and narrates as it unfolds.
"Everything we see around us is the outer skin and the inner skin of the Molten Core, usually a sphere, mulched together." The simulation shows the sphere flattening. "But it's not so simple as that, not just three dimensions rendered down to two, because some structures of the host mind have proven more durable than others. They jut out of the mud-sandwich, which is what the rest of the Core has become. Mud, I mean."
Doe and Ray both gaze at her. "So we're standing on top of the mud," Ray says, pointing down. He is inexplicably physical. "It looks like we're on the outside. But because some existing structures are jutting through, it means we're not actually on the outside? We're on the inside, now?"
The mild panic on his face is gently hilarious.
"Essentially, yes," says So. This is obvious, she thinks, elementary collapse dynamics, but plainly not. Even Doe just looks at her blankly. She goes on.
"We are on the inside, though it may seem otherwise, because the resonant edges of the Core's sphere are not defined by the mud, though the mud does define their hard edges." No further clarity seems to arise from this statement. "Imagine this. There's a tree on the ground, and you build a house around it. Then one day someone smashes the house flat transversely, and the tree with it. So where is the tree?"
Ray frowns. "Inside the house sandwich."
"Yes and no. All the top of the tree is, the trunk and branches, but you're not thinking about the roots. They bed down in the ground still, because they didn't get crushed with the hut."
Ray sucks air through his pierced teeth. "You didn't say anything about roots. I guess they weren't in the house. Maybe a basement?"
"There's no basement," So says, disapprovingly. "That's not possible. For a Molten Core, those roots are the shape it takes in the aether. They still remain, hanging in a collapsed space above or around the mud sandwich, even after the bulk of the Core is gone. That's where we are now."
"So we are inside the sandwich," Ray says. "That's all I need to know, isn't it?"
So considers explaining why that statement is not purely accurate, since they are not in in, but resonantly in, yet a look from Doe stills her.
"It's not important that he understands," says Doe. "Tell us what it means for us."
So nods, pulls up the original simulation. "Two things. One, everything is rotting. That means a continual suck, as the roots linking the sandwiched sphere to the underlying aether snap clear. Those snaps will be vastly destructive in this interim-space we're occupying now. They'll lash back like elasteel lines under high tension, and the landscape will buck and buckle."
"That's one," says Doe.
"Second, the mud we're on is shifting, like tectonic plates. There's residual heat within, from the breakdown process, and it's got to get distributed. That will cause bubbles, which will blow apart huge sections of what we see now and hoover them in."
"And that's it?"
"That's it for now. But remember, all this is happening on top of an already rickety, dense, resonantly disharmonious flattened superstructure, every part of which is fluid, chaotic, and constantly reducing down. It's like we're in a stew on a slow boil, with great spoons whacking down on us, and the bottom of the pan shifting position constantly."
Ray rubs his chin thoughtfully. "Stew," he says.
Doe points off toward the White Tower. "But that is the Solid Core, isn't it?"
"Certainly. Or at least, it's highly likely. But what everything else we're seeing is, I don't know. I also have no idea what caused the tsunami, or the collapse, only that it is ongoing."
La stands up beside them and adds her voice to the discussion. "I think we might have an answer to that."
Ti stands as well, holding out a silver spectroscope platter, upon which she's laid out the dissected husk of one of the off-white maggots. It turns So's stomach, the color of cream gone sour.
Ti flashes a close-up into their HUDs. The interior of the whitish thing seems to be made of rings, like a tree, all the way to the center, with no visible organs or sensory apparatus.
"It's made of data," La says. "Accreted data, seeking logic, and it's growing."
"What do you mean, made of data?" Ray asks.
"I mean made of data, as in facts and numbers and figures. Every ring of growth is an extra layer of digested information packed on like a skin. And it's dense. We looked into its genetic make-up with some sample cells shaved off- they're still alive and growing too, by the way- and it seems to be some kind of language information. I don't recognize it, but the patterns are linguistic."
Doe considers. "This thing is made of language."
"Its raw code is, yes. It may even be some kind of offshoot of the Lag. It's rooting around to find data to dig into, but since there's no good Core here and everything is already pretty much mulched, it's getting frantic. That's why it bit Ti, looking for a place to bite in. And it's not only language code. We scraped a dozen other samples, and found patterns analogous to mathematics equations, historical records of some kind, experiential encodings, and what was the other one, Ti?"
"Recipes," says Ti.
Ray barks a laugh.
"It's not funny," says Ti. "If it had bit me any deeper, it would have filled me up with recipes like a poison. It's saprophytic, but it doesn't care if the flesh it digs into is living or dead. It would turn me into a nice repository of cooking knowledge, but I'd be dead."
Ray coughs. "Sorry."
"It's fine," says La. So notices that she's batting her eyes a little. Does she like Ray too?
"And you said they're growing," Doe says.
"They are," La says. "Even this one, it isn't dead, just because we cut it open. It's under a field right now, but if I-" she clicks a button on the edge of the platter, and the little discolored speck starts to wriggle again.
"Ugh, gross," says Ray.
"Quite," says Ti, clicking the field back in place. "Now imagine one of these ten times bigger, a hundred, a thousand, fat with all the data it's eaten through. It would be as big as us, then it'll be bigger. There may already be some that size, like whales moving in the muck underneath, hunting us out. They're like magnets for fresh information, so I'm sure they'll be drawn to us. We won't be able to outrun them, if the speed of these little ones is anything to go by, and our suits won't be any deterrent to us being swallowed whole."
A long beat passes. Underfoot So feels the squirm of the maggots and it revolts her.
"What about the White Tower?" Doe asks. "Can they eat that too?"
"It'll surely hold the longest. But it'll fall too."
Doe looks at Ray, and Ray looks pale.
So speaks up. "If it isn't the maggots that bring it down, it'll break with the collapse. Any tremors and lashbacks we feel are only going to get stronger, and become more focused around the tower."
"Understood," says Doe. She nods briskly. "Thank you. Everything you're telling me suggests the tower is soon going to be at the center of a storm. But everywhere else will be dead before then. So we make for the tower, and hope we find some answers there."
So wants to say something about Me, that perhaps he'll be waiting for them in the tower, but she doesn't. It doesn't seem right, almost childish, to worry about Me like that. But he is part of them.
"Enough talk then. We need to move. So, give me a route. Ray, take the rear on
the lookout. I'm not going to lose anyone to one of these things," she points to the maggot. "And everyone, HUDs on and turn your suit to anti-collision lock, in case the ground quakes hard enough to break bones. We're going to stay solid, and we're going to stay whole. Understood?"
We're going to run for our lives, So almost adds, but she doesn't. It wouldn't help. They all see it there on her chest, paint that won't peel off. Instead she prepares and sends a preliminary route to the White Tower, skirting the black road of the dead and one of the heaped pyramids.
Doe nods, pulls her QC, then starts down the mud-hill. So drops into formation behind her, La and Ti go next, and Ray brings up the rear.
The mud is slippery-black, and alive with churning maggots beneath So's feet. They seem to come out of the muck like froth on the boil, gathering in frenzies in each of her footfalls, biting at the skin of her suit.
SQUISH
They say underfoot.
SQUISH SQUISH
Doe leads them down off the mud-hill and into a shallow furrowed valley, which spreads out into a long flat expanse, skirting the road of the dead. Everywhere is black, gray, and deserted. Underfoot there are the frail skeletal frames of buildings, So reads via gamma-scan, but with every moment passing they thin a little more. There was a city here, lined with roads and buildings where some kind of metaphoric people lived and worked, and now it is all turning to mud.
Information as DNA.
There are tunnels far below, once bored for underground trains to move within, now filling in with maggots and filth. So notices the mire creeping up her legs with every footstep forward, wants to blast the QC at her legs to clean them off, but that would be a waste.
Instead she focuses on her surroundings. La and Ti are chattering behind her on a private blood-mic. She can just make out their voices through the HUD skin, like the warbling of doves. That is alright, nothing new. She is mostly alone in the chord most of the time, and that suits her. She likes to figure out puzzles, she isn't a leader, and she isn't attracted to any of the others.
Except perhaps Doe. But she doesn't say anything about it, because it isn't that important. Doe is with Ray. That is fine.
She trudges on over the Sunken World, following Doe following the course she'd laid. Maggots squish underfoot like white beans. She tries to think of the last time she ate anything, but it is far off. They didn't ever eat, on the Bathyscaphe. Even all that time she'd spent in the Napoleonic ring, guiding the others through the fractal maze toward the blast-door at the middle, she doesn't think she ate anything.
All that time is blurry anyway, the memory insubstantial, like she'd only been half there, or a quarter there. There had been the map, and lullabies, and glimpses of the world around her. Then she was reborn. It seems an awfully long time to go without any food.
Squish squish, say the maggots underfoot. Squish and squish.
The sky glowers darkly overhead. The wastes around her are rutted and heaped, here a churn of boulder-like lumps, scattered about with torn and burnt pages of books, bustling with maggots. Ahead lies the first pyramidal hump, seemingly made of mud and great oblongs of dissolving stones, like some vast burial mound.
To the right lies the black road of dead bodies. Her course swerves them around it, but that doesn't stop Ray from peeling off from the chord to go investigate.
So tenses, afraid for what he will find. As he trudges over to the broad swath of decaying bodies, she fears any of a dozen things will happen to him. A giant maggot will bite off his head. The earth will rock and swallow him up.
He reaches the road, and looks a lone figure standing amongst all those prone bodies.
"Nothing," he calls back through blood-mic. "No faces. No clothes. They're hardly even human anymore."
"Get a sample for La and Ti," Doe says. She has her bondless shoulder-cannon trained on Ray's environs.
Ray bends down, one knee in the dirt, extracting a sample kit from his hip pouch. A brief moment of clarity strikes So then, of what they are and what will be. She loves Ray as much as she loves Doe. She would die for either of them, if she had to. They are her, but greater than she is. She will always stand in their shadow, and be happy to do so.
Then Ray is falling. So is falling too, as the ground drops ten feet away from her.
SLURP
Screams ring out on blood-mic as every member of the chord crashes into the mud. So hits hard, feels the impact but little pain as her suit locks tight around her. One leg lodges into the muck but her weight rocks her backward, causing her foot to dig out a sucking tuft of fibrous black muck.
"Chord call in!" Doe's voice comes through blood-mic, urgent but flat, then the earth bucks again and So is hurled spinning upward. Maggots spread around her like a cloud of snowdrops, the sky revolves, then she hits the ground like a punch in the head, burying her whole face straight in the mud.
"I'm buried," she has just enough time to shout, then the earth jolts and flips her again like a pancake.
SLAP
The ground thumps her in the back, maggots fall like rain around her, and gazing stunned up at the sky she sees a flash of heat-blurred movement arcing down. The resonant bonds are breaking.
"Whiplash!" she shouts, as the humming line of force bears down. In that moment So knows it is coming for her.
She thinks of all those days watching Doe shrug on her battle-gear, glimpsed from far down the forging line as Doe hastened to the conning tower at Me's side, while So was left to watch, sent to flush the trim tanks, gather navigable information, and report in.
Every one of those moments was one she lived for. To speak with Doe about vortexes in the Molten Core and have her say, "Good work," when it was done, have her flat, authoritative voice ring through her mind, and envision Doe's taut white body wrapped in under-suit wear, musky with sweat and exertion, breathing words of praise just for her.
Was that love, So wonders, as the whiplash bears down on her. She has instants only, time for just a flash of thought, but enough to remember her proudest moment yet; slowly disappearing in the outer ring of the Solid Core, singing lullabies to herself just so she could hold on, enduring long enough to guide Doe through the aetheric bridge and save them all.
Doe, Ray, Me, Far, La and Ti. Ritry Goligh. She misses them all already. She loves them like they are part of her, which they are.
"G-" she manages, of the word goodbye, before the whiplash hits her full down the middle and bursts her apart, and the Sunken World fades to black a final time.
OUROBOROS D
I dive and rebound again. The shell around the outside of Mr. Ruins' mind tastes like bitumen. I can't even form the Bathyscaphe and glass-bomb the exterior, because I'm too far out. There's nothing to work with.
I roam the outside hunting for a way in. The surface looks brittle and crystalline, but when I hammer against it there is no give, only the bonging of a weary pulse. I study the structure of the crystal wall, and conclude it is as Carrolla said; a kind of frosting of engrams fused with a last-ditch defensive measure.
It is sheer and unbroken, with no entry points in and none leading out. I wonder that it may have prevented some of the flood I injected into him, but it has also blocked him inside. He is a prisoner in his body.
I surface in the bright medical room. My newly attached fingers itch, and I lie there for a time in thought.
I've already been inside that crystal cage. The thought of that is still startling. When I pushed back through the bridge and for a terrifying few moments was inside the shut-off, isolated world of Ruins' inner mind, it was almost as though I was part of him. We became one and the same.
He was half-mad already. He was wasting away, without sense, sight or sound, just as I had when an EMR trapped me in my own mind. For Mr. Ruins now it has already been longer. I have no desire to make that voyage again, to conjoin with his flagging consciousness, but if it is the only way…
I dive again, and steer the Bathyscaphe into my own Molten Core, toward the m
oat-line around the Solid Core, but it is no longer so easy. It is in fact too hard. I drive the sublavic on, but can only just break the periscope through the bubbling inner surface of the Molten Core. Peering through the sight as it rises, I briefly glimpse the Solid Core hanging overhead like a dark and hollow moon, whole and unbroken, before we sink away.
The hole we bombed open has healed and reinforced itself with thick scar-girders, and there's not enough candle-bomb in the whole ship to blast through it again. Neither is there the will in the chord to fight through the outer ring, into the mazes within.
It is too hot already, as the ablative bricking peels away. Already Ti and La are burning in the screw-room, and So is screaming into the comms that the ship cannot take it. Me can see the Lag at my heels.
It sees that I am weak. I toss the memory of eating breakfast out to keep the Lag appeased, and flee.
I come to panting. My mind's architecture is stronger than ever before, and I am weaker within it. Without some kind of bond to harvest that matters, something more than the random thoughts of ex-skirmishers around me, I can't infiltrate the Solid Core again. Even the depth of faith in the godships would barely get me above the surface.
I need Loralena, Art, and Mem. Even distant memories from the life we built together allowed me to fight my way through the marines on the Helter line. But the last thing I can do is go back to them. I am hunted now, and I cannot risk it.
I lie back, waiting for my heart to stop racing. I need to do something, but I don't know what it is.
Don Zachary comes to sit by my side, because I called.
"Why do you want to rule the world?" I ask him. It seems like something I ought to understand. He no longer knows he has the capacity to do it, since I took the memory of his quakeseeds away, but I don't think I could ever Lag that core drive wholly away.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 6
