Chapter 14
The mountain’s first name was lost to time and the technophage, but Ada was sure it must have been something grand. It stood as a great white sentinel lording over the fir forests, visible from Glass Peaks and Campus and no doubt Hive as well. And here, on its north-eastern slopes, was… nothing.
Ada had briefly considered that Cherry might be wrong about the location. There was nothing here to indicate any kind of ancient facility. No ritualistic offerings, no shrines, nothing at all. But the ghostly images of the facility’s interiors that Cherry painted in her vision were clear and steady, and so she started firing gentle blasts at the rock face that seemed closest to an entrance.
Of course, Cherry wasn’t wrong. As her weapons carefully picked away at the rock and snow, a door started peeking out, as though it had been buried by some landslide in ages past. That fairly unremarkable door was now all that stood between her and… well, probably more doors. The words etched above it read Equipment Storage. Innocuous-sounding, though the door seemed rather suspiciously far from any place that might require equipment.
Ada hopped out of the ship and walked up to the door’s control console, and as her hand grazed the edges, two sets of code began to light up - one the intricate, beautiful etchings of ancient machines, and the other the clumsy and ignorant smears of much more recent coders. She marveled that her ancestors were able to do anything at all here; the outers must have helped more than she had thought.
It seemed her work was already done, though. She touched the command console, code of both styles lit up and pulsed with new life, and the door hissed open. The walls inside were dimly lit by ugly sigils, smeared in place by coders hundreds of years ago, and she was frustrated to see there were other lights, ancient lights, that they apparently hadn’t bothered to use. She even saw the tiny trigger for the lights. She activated them and grinned as the soft, bright lights in the ceiling lit the entire space up. The coders’ bluish scratchings were just feeble shimmers in comparison.
As Ada walked through the ancient halls she mentally ran through everything Cherry had taught her. The concepts were bewildering and strange, but she was beginning to understand the basics. The afterlife, like all the other thousand worlds, was a vast set of rules building dreams of other worlds inside machines. The gods projected these dreams onto Earth wherever a walker or something similar requested it, but in the absence of such a request the dreaming continued unhindered, simply invisible and intangible to humans. The thousand worlds really existed inside the machines, and to their inhabitants - spirits, ghosts, dead ancestors - they seemed just as physical and real as anything else.
And so Elysium was its own set of rules and information - a configuration of natural laws and space writ in code. It needed to be installed, explained to the machines so that they could perform the necessary rituals and keep it separate from the rest of the thousand worlds, but her ancestors had apparently botched that process. The rules of Elysium had been corrupted, and the gods were instead dreaming a nightmare so dark and terrifying the dead themselves were fleeing in despair.
From the sounds of it, reinstalling Elysium might not even be so hard. Assuming she could figure out where it was, and what installing even involved.
Her foot crunched on something, snapping her back into reality. There were bones underfoot, old and brittle - human, from the looks of them. Many, many bones, some cracked and splintered, many more evidently ground to dust.
What the hell had happened here?
Ada looked around but found no further explanation. Maybe they had died defending the place, or maybe they were ghosts slaughtered as punishment. Whatever the details, she wouldn’t like them. She was here to put a stake in the madness, and this was just more proof she was closing in on the heart.
Cherry, where is the installation centre?
I can show you.
Through the pilot suit Cherry was able to project lines and arrows into Ada’s vision, and Ada followed them. The facility’s ancient grandeur was marred by code and cracks and damage throughout, and she saw pain and anger etched into the ruined walls in every hall she walked and every room she saw. This place had been a stage for plays of enormous frustrations and violence in the past.
She reached a cylindrical elevator that seemed remarkably untouched. She walked in and looked down, following Cherry’s directions. She was going to the lowest level of the structure, it seemed, a few floors deep.
“Please state your destination.”
The ancient dialect was crisp and only slightly warbly, and Ada smiled. “Bottom floor.”
“Sublevel three, confirmed.”
The door slid shut, and the elevator eased into descent. How much time had been wasted, how much blood had been spilled, by those who had come here without the guidance of a ship such as Cherry to know where they were going?
The elevator gently slid to a stop, the door opened again, and Ada stepped out. She didn’t have her gun ready; she didn’t feel the need. There was nothing active down here - everything had been laid to ruin hundreds of years ago. There was only dormant technology, Elysium, and herself. It was a nice, simple world without all the people.
She stepped into a broad, two-story-high room lined with stone pillars. The pillars seemed to serve no function in and of themselves, but ancient machines and consoles were nestled between and behind them. Artificial lights still glowed here, and weeds had sprung up through cracks in the corners, reaching towards those eternal white lights. At the end of the room she saw a small staircase that rose up to the second floor; the trail Cherry had traced ended somewhere up there.
Ada climbed the steps, reached the end of the path, and saw something more beautiful than she could have imagined. A smooth, translucent white crystal half again as tall as herself stood in the centre of a circular room, and around it filaments of light slowly coursed up and down its length. Complex blue patterns of something like code floated around the crystal in the air, arcane sigils alive of their own accord, and thin beams of light gently crisscrossed the shard’s depths. It was glowing and sparkling, galaxies of code swirling within. It was Elysium - the beating heart of the world after death.
She stared at it, mouth agape. “Woah.”
This is a holographic storage crystal. It contains all the necessary information to run Elysium from the the ring’s simulators.
“What’s with all the floating lights?” Subvocalizing didn’t even occur to her.
Holographic storage, while long-lived, is not infinite. What you see around the crystal are maintenance code strands designed to detect unexpected changes in the data and correct it, to prevent information degradation. Without this maintenance, Elysium would have been lost several times already.
“And there would have been no afterlife anymore.”
After the mandated redirection of uploads to Elysium, yes. The uploads likely would have been discarded instead.
Ada sucked in a breath of cold, dry air. That was not a pleasant thought. “There’s no backup copy?”
Unknown. There are no other holographic storage crystals that I know to be active, at least none that would be large enough and well-maintained enough to house a copy of Elysium. This project’s financial, logistical, and bureaucratic details are all impossible to find in any public records. All signs indicate this was an unfinished prototype by a private organization. If there were more, they would be similarly undocumented.
“So there might be a copy, but nobody knows where, and it’s probably not being used. So we can’t mess this up. Hey - any idea how anybody found this facility in the first place? How did they know to look for those archives?”
Unknown.
“Great. I’ll need to ask the outers about this when I - holy shit! That’s disgusting.”
Ada had only just noticed that the walls of the room she was standing in were covered with scratchings of code, haphazardly lighting up and clearly etched by hand. It was a horrible mess, with no cohesion or fluency,
like it had been copied off a stone tablet by someone who could barely code while they were ducking weapons fire.
Come to think of it, maybe that was exactly what happened.
“What is this mess?”
A code analysis is inconclusive. The code appears to make multiple references to an unknown interface that I do not have on record. There is a self-scanning portion to it that feeds into the console to your right.
“Self-scanning? Oh. Wait a minute. Is this how they installed Elysium? They wrote shit on the walls?”
It’s possible.
“Gods damn those idiots, that’s now how this was meant to be used!” Ada took a deep breath, running her hands through her hair. “Okay, any other insight?”
The systems in this facility use a highly idiosyncratic and hardened shielding system on their data nodes. I can scan functional code, but I can’t read the data stored anywhere nearby. Cryptography matches the type shielding the automatons at the previous facility. It’s reasonable to believe the two locations were operated by the same organization.
“How did the outers even know what to do in the first place? Why haven’t they told me?”
I cannot speculate.
“Can you ask the gods?”
Sending request.
Cherry was silent, and after a moment Ada decided there must be some kind of negotiation going on. She started examining the code, not getting too close to the crystal for fear of damaging it somehow. There were so many symbols and patterns here she had never seen before, so much of it tangled together in so many strange ways. Even the elders of the Institute could never have coded such a thing on their own.
Suddenly Cherry’s voice filled her head again.
It appears that there was a break-in at Campus data storage facilities approximately three years after the initial Elysium installation attempt. A golem of unknown ownership broke into the facilities, destroyed rare equipment, and there was a firefight that resulted in damage to the golem and several outers killed. The gods did not view the event as significant to human welfare as no humans were involved, but suggest that it is the most likely cause for lost data on this subject. This was all the information they provided me with.
Ada groaned. “A rogue golem? Why is everyone is always destroying shit?” She looked around, clenching and relaxing her fists. “Gods damn it. Okay. Can you help me figure out what this code does?”
My code analysis was -
“No, I mean help me with individual parts. If you can’t figure this out, maybe I still can, with your help.”
Very well. What would you like to know?
Ada walked over to the console where Cherry had said the self-scanning code fed into. “Can we start with this?” She turned it on, and words began appearing on the screen.
Ada started diving into slow time to keep up the pace. Cherry’s explanations were blunt and simple, on the surface, but they assumed much that Ada had to keep asking about. The console was the main interface that monitored and managed the connection between the holographic crystal and the gods on the ring, and it seemed clear that the coders of centuries past had done something with it to provoke the separation of Elysium from the rest of the thousand worlds.
The more Ada and Cherry perused the code, though, the more Ada began to realize that there was too much left unsaid for them to know anything for certain. Ada could only venture guesses as to what the code might have done. Some kind of exception was being established, some special rule written on the walls and passed into the code alongside Elysium’s own code, but she didn’t understand what that rule said or why it was important. Was it the separation of Elysium from the thousand worlds? Was it the installation process? Was it something else entirely? She didn’t know. The only people who might were the outers themselves.
“Cherry, can you communicate with Campus directly?”
I can hail them.
“Do it. Tell them I want to know everything they know about the code that runs this place.”
I have sent the query. Please note that they may take some time to respond. In the meantime, there is a situation outside.
Ada felt like she had just been hit by a brick. Were the enemy here already? Was Isavel here? Was she already out of time? “A situation? What kind of situation?”
A hauler is approaching the facility. It is being piloted by Sam. There appears to be an injured child aboard.
Ada frowned. A child? What did a child matter? And what could they possibly be doing with a child, anyway? Any child who got anywhere near the ghosts or the army…
“Oh. Shit. Do I - Cherry, do I have time for this?”
I cannot prioritize for you.
“Damn it. Can you guide them in here? And -”
Very well, I shall provide them with verbal directions. I also have established a connection to the outer’s command room.
The alien voice that followed was Elder Kseresh’s. Ada? You’ve found the control centre?
Her mind was off in too many places, and switching focus yet again took a second. “Yes, I have, and I’m baffled anybody in the past was able to understand what the hell is going on here. My ancestors made a mess of this place and they obviously just barely had enough help to get the job done. What can you tell me? Make it quick.”
Unfortunately, we have few records of the architecture. We are not sure why.
“Because a golem broke into Campus a few decades after the initial attempt and wrecked all your archives?”
The pause sounded fairly guilty. That did happen, yes.
“Did you actually lose everything? Come on, Kseresh - I can’t afford to waste time here.”
We have no further records on this. Believe me, we have been looking for weeks. What makes you want to get into contact with us just to check this again?
Ada was staring at the code on the walls, and she heard voices and footsteps in the distant halls. She could guess, but she didn’t want to be wrong.
“I’m staring at a… holographic storage crystal? Look, do you know anything that could help me figure this out? Any kind of information at all?”
I apologize, I really do. When our ancestors assisted in the initial attempt to create Elysium, we had access to more information about the code involved than we do today. We cannot help.
Ada set her jaw, staring up at the code. “Have you heard from Zhilik?”
Yes. Apparently you told them to commandeer an ancient warship when it arrived at Campus? The elder sounded confused. We do not have the time or facilities for a ship of that -
There was whimpering outside, in the antechamber, and Ada knew something was expected of her. “Sorry, Elder Kseresh, but I have to go. Figure something out for that ship - it’s already on its way. Cherry, end the call.”
Ada took a wistful glance at the crystal before stepping out of the room, her brain quietly picking at all the questions in the back of her mind.
What she saw in the antechamber was exactly what she had expected.
A young boy, probably no older than ten, was sweating, swollen, simpering on the ground as a few people she recognized as ghosts were tending to him and trying to pat him down with wet towels. He was overwhelmed, and he was going to die. This was pointless. What were they even doing here?
“There’s nothing I can do about this!” She stared at Sam, who looked back up at her with a mixture of pleading and frustration.
“You go on and on about being special, Ada - about being an Arbiter.” Sam looked more distressed than Ada could understand. “You have to be able to do something!”
“I really can’t. It’s… there’s nothing I can do.” Even as she shook her head, though, Ada reached out to her ship. Is there, Cherry?
I am unfamiliar with these symptoms.
Ada stepped closer and kneeled down. “Where did you even find him in the first place? How did he get overwhelmed?”
“I found him in the woods.”
Sam was breathing heavily. Ada locked eyes with her. “And
what do you care? He’s too young for one of you to take.”
That comment drew glares at her from all three ghosts present, but she wasn’t about to back down.
“I’m serious. What do you care?”
“You know where we’re from! You think we’ve never met the souls of dead children?” Sam had a haunted look in her face. “They don’t age, Ada - they never have, not before the Ghost War and not since. Their minds are trapped as children, forever; their memories are short and weak; they can’t even possess human bodies, they don’t understand how. The afterlife is bad for us, but at least we can think . They’re hurt, lost, confused, scared, and they never, ever get better.”
Ada’s eyes widened. That was something she had never even considered.
“Ada, you said you want to help people. Real people.” Sam reached for her. “I know you meant it. I think you can fix this.”
Ada flung her arms in the air. “But I can’t! It’s in his blood . I can’t - I would need way more time, and I don’t have it!” There was nothing to be done about this, nothing she understood or could even begin to approach. She felt like an untrained child all over again, and it stung, curling hot around her spine. “Why are you even here? Get out of here! I have work to do, and if I can get it done at least he’ll be an eternal child in an Elysium worth living in!”
“I don’t think you’re as hollow as you pretend, Ada.”
Ada blinked. “What? I’m not putting on an act! This is serious!” She pointed towards the room with the crystal, knowing that what happened in there would affect far more than the few children getting overwhelmed on a regular basis.
Sam stood and pointed at the child. “But what happens when you’ve restored the afterlife? What then? Is that it? It won’t help him any! He’ll still be a child, too young to understand or take advantage of what’s been given to him.”
Ada looked down at the boy and sighed. “Of course that won’t be the end. But I don’t have time to worry about that right now. Gods, surely you can see that I don’t have time for this!” It was true, but even as she said it, she started puzzling out the implications of trying to fix the technophage - the consequences of failure, the promise of success.
First Angels Page 24