by Hugo Huesca
With my mindjack on, I was surrounded by darkness.
Then…
Resume Deep Dive immersion?
Yes.
Welcome back to Rune Universe.
The Diplomatic Immunity had landed. Beard had moved me out of my pilot chair and was nowhere to be seen. Rylena and Walpurgis’ avatars where right where they had left them, unmoving, unblinking, like statues.
If I focused only on my surroundings, on the virtual escape that Rune offered, even pain felt like something far away. I could see my chest and it was intact underneath my spacesuit. Yeah, I could barely breathe. But I may as well focus on the good parts, right?
Here’s another good part. Here, in Validore, I was going to have one hell of a dying hallucination.
I ran to Rylena’s avatar and rummaged through the backpack and tool-belt she had installed in her spacesuit.
“There you are, 401,” I whispered as I found a pocket that released the happy spherical drone. It flew around me like a puppy greeting its master’s friend. “Cmon, buddy, we have a last job to do.”
There was only one reason Beard would’ve parked the ship. At least I hoped so, because I didn’t have time anymore to search the whole planet.
Don’t do this any harder, Rune, just let me reach the damn door. Or whatever.
Perhaps it was the state of my mental condition, but I was now praying to a damn videogame.
To the videogame’s fairness, it answered back.
“HAS THE TIME ARRIVED, MASTER?”
Francis’ robotic voice had a twinge of hope around its edges. I remembered that every NPC in the game, including drones like 401 or Personal Assistants like Francis, were built on top of the same alien system that became Rune’s engine.
Was Francis the voice of Rune? A bugged AI that someone —quite possibly a ghost— had to dig out of the trash.
“Yeah, Francis, the time has arrived,” I told my friendly undead AI as I stumbled to Validore’s surface.
“FINALLY,” Francis chirped. “GOOD LUCK, MASTER.”
“Sorry for killing you before, man.”
“NO HARD FEELINGS, MASTER. IT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE.”
Teddy’s hatches were open and the staircase deployed. I stumbled out, trying to control my breathing, while trying to ignore the fact I could feel myself bleeding to death in the real world.
Yes, please, let’s ignore that fact.
Validore’s surface was so hot my boots seemed to sizzle when I first stepped into the fine golden sands. While it was technically a deserted planet, Validore felt more like a never-ending beach. It extended all over the horizon, as far as the eye could see, with golden swirls of sands being carried away by the wind, like spirits.
Except if you looked up. Then the planet’s heaven-like peace was shattered with the massive sky-battle that raged on in the firmament. Entire patches of beatific blue were burning. Pieces of molten metal fell to the earth covered in plasma fire, like meteorites.
I had never read the Bible, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if I found out I was walking into an apocalyptic passage.
Beard, like a prophet in the desert, waited for me atop a far-away dune. Walking was hard and even with my life-support system cooling the temperature, every painful breath I took was hot and heavy. More than once I stumbled over my own feet and it took all my force of will to not fall flat on my face.
Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to stand up again if I fell. The trick was to keep moving. Keep moving no matter what.
Validore was infinite and no matter how much I walked, the dune always was as far away from me as ever.
The trick was to keep moving.
“You guys alright?” Beard’s voice was muted, but when I looked up from my trembling legs, I saw him standing in front of me. I looked back to the ship. A line of footprints in the sand followed me and began at the Diplomatic Immunity. A hundred meters at the most. I stared back at Beard with my mouth hanging open, but without strength left to even be confused.
He didn’t appear to think anything was amiss. “You three suddenly stopped moving. What happened? You OK?”
I thought it over and nodded, faking a carefree smile. “False alarm,” I whispered. Then, after I deep breath, I managed to add: “What did you find?”
“See it for yourself, man,” he smiled as he moved to the side. I climbed the last few meters to the dune’s top with a supreme effort of will. Beneath the dune waited a cave. It was perfectly circular and huge, big enough to fit Teddy with room to spare for a squad of light carriers. The wind sang as it passed through the brown and gold edges. A third of the entrance was already submerged in sand, but the fact it had managed to stay unburied for god-knew how much time was a miracle.
Rune wanted us to find it, I reminded myself. Rules didn’t apply here.
The edges, pointed inward, were covered in teeth.
I was staring at the fossilized corpse of a giant worm.
“It’s the only place on the entire planet with an energy emission,” Beard explained, “beautiful, isn’t it?”
In a terrifying way.
I had seen a giant worm just like that one before. In the only place in Rune you could find them, before Validore. In the death world of the Prime System, where I’d fallen deep into the ground to meet for the last time with Kipp.
“This is the place,” I said. My voice was low and raspy, barely a whisper. I could feel my legs tremble over my weight. Soon, they wouldn’t be able to support it.
“You sure you’re okay, kiddo?” Beard asked again.
I didn’t bother to nod. Instead, I walked down the slope of the dune, trying as hard as I could not to fall. “Let’s go, man.”
Circling around me 401 sang, impatient and energetic, hauling me onward as it flew around me, like a tiny herd-dog.
We’re almost there, little buddy.
The entrance —the mouth— was in front of us sooner than I’d have thought. Perhaps Rune realized we didn’t have much time left. Perhaps I was simply hallucinating. Maybe I was a ghost already.
The interior of the dead worm was dry and dark. With the passage of time, the sand had fused with the corpse and had morphed it into a golden and brown monument. The sand at our feet was hard as a rock, compact, and littered with the bones of small critters. Small shadows saw us approaching and ran at the edge of my vision, never letting themselves be seen.
We were the first human beings that stepped foot onto this planet. I knew this.
As we walked, the corpse-cave dragged deeper and deeper into the ground. The walls around me lost their golden edge and became brown walls of bone. They’d never seen any kind of light either, until my suit’s lantern came along.
Was I supposed to walk until I reached the end of the corpse? Because then I’d never make it. I was already on borrowed time.
“You’ll have to finish the mission, Gabrijel,” I told him, resting my back against the bones of the ancient monster and sliding to the cold floor. “I can’t go on anymore. Take 401 with you. Tell my family I love them, too. That I’m sorry for everything.”
I should have stayed away, I thought, without really meaning it. Rune had cost me everything I had and it still demanded more. It was a hungry god.
Well, I have nothing else to give. As I waited for the peaceful darkness, 401 —Rylena’s drone— sat in my hand, chirping sadly, trying to nudge me forward. Sorry, little buddy. Go over to Beard. I can’t help you anymore.
But Beard made no sound and no attempt at helping me up, or at least carrying me all the way to the end, as it would’ve been dramatically appropriate.
I looked around and realized that I was alone.
401 —did it even count as company? It was an NPC…— tugged my hand with all its tiny might, trying to get me to stand up and follow it. Around us, the corpse of the giant worm had shifted without a single warning.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, I thought. It was a quote from somewhere, but right now, I could barely remember
my own name.
The walls had expanded and the tunnel-like bones had become a great chamber. The floor was solid blocks of rock and it was all centered at the middle. There stood a closed gate built out of granite and giant bones. At the gate’s center, I could see a tiny triangular protrusion surrounded by concentric circles carved around it.
I had seen those circles before… In a Quest Item that a golden avatar had gifted me.
The effort of getting up was so huge that tears streamed down my virtual eyes. 401 tried to help me, but it was too small. Instead, it flew into my back and nudged me forward, towards to the gate.
“Alright, buddy, alright. I’m getting there.”
I was running on fumes now. But also on something else. Just good old damn curiosity.
Curiosity killed the cat, right?
Well, this cat is pretty tired. Let’s get this over with.
The door wasn’t much taller than a normal one. Behind it, there was nothing. A door that led to nowhere.
That would be hilarious. Perhaps I’ll open it and there’ll just be a note. “The secret was inside you all along,” or something. I chuckled out loud and then cupped 401 in my hands.
“It’s time, buddy, let’s find out what’s on the other side of the rainbow.”
401’s inventory was tiny, with only three slots. Rylena used it to hide emergency items: a blaster, several thousand credits, and a Keygen.
I hadn’t seen the lead sphere in a while. It was heavier than I remembered. And hot. Even through my spacesuit’s gloves, I could feel it radiating warmth. By its middle, the Keygen had a triangular hole.
I put it right by the middle of the door. It was a perfect fit. I didn’t expect it to be a literal Key, but the sphere turned around my hands just like a real key, and the door’s circles shifted with it like they were gears in a lock’s mechanism.
Something clicked. Then, the door and the world around me dissolved.
I wasn’t in a cave anymore. Blackness extended in all directions around me and 401, which kept close to my chest as I walked down an ever shifting landscape. An eerie, grim light bathed the ever-changing metallic blocks all around us. It was as if I was surrounded by natural formations in the shape of skyscrapers. As far as the eye could see. Never ending.
But they moved. Some of them grew taller, others became smaller. Some of them caved, like calculated landslides that threw geometric debris into the air. Instead of falling down and following the laws of gravity, the blocks gathered together and flew in the air like they were propelled by invisible air currents. They would swirl and dance and flutter in every direction until, ordered by some invisible directive, they would gently pose themselves around another skyscraper and become a part of it.
As I walked forward, a path in front of me opened. Buildings swam to the sides, blocks ran to the darkness by my feet (I was hesitant to call it a vacuum. A vacuum wasn’t emptier than this darkness) and became the floor I walked on. Sometimes, one of the black and green skyscrapers would leave a wound in the metal surface of its former neighbors and a torrent of green light-water would fall to the darkness like a waterfall. Or the open vein of a giant that bled light.
When the path had outrun me into the distance, I could see the Core. A green star, floating in the middle of nowhere, impossibly huge. It was its light that bathed everything around me. Even my hands and feet looked eerie and mystical as I approached it.
Swathes of energy flickered constantly in its interior as if it was made of transparent glass. Currents of blocks flew straight towards it. Then they were reduced to bits —or were they pixels?— before my own eyes. New ones would fly out of the Core as soon as the last of the old ones were consumed.
It was a voracious killer and a loving mother, all at the same time.
I didn’t have a background in computer science. I suspected that no one from Earth could ever describe exactly what was that place. But I knew its name. I knew where I was.
The Source. Rune’s Source. The entity you’d have left if you stripped the fancy graphics away. The NPCs. The ships and the weapons. The planets and moons. The stars. Even the void. This was the signal Rune had been built around, by the genius minds of the Patel family.
“You’re the Quest system, are you not? At least, part of you is,” I whispered to the Core, reverently, like a believer who was meeting their god in the flesh for the first time. “Ogawa said they never programmed you.”
It didn’t answer. Perhaps it was unable. Or uncaring.
401 nudged me forward, eager to get me closer to the Core. As I walked the last meters —as always, distance seemed meaningless in that place—, my suit started to disperse in the same way the swathes of blocks did. Would my digital body follow suit?
As I drew closer to the Core, I realized energy wasn’t the only thing filling its interior. In fact, it sizzled mostly just beneath its surface, like water flowing underneath a sheet of ice. Behind the water, I could see life.
Tiny flickers of green light shone in its interior. Too many to count. They were stars in a miniature universe and some of them where connected by frail lines of glass that constructed a web in the interior of the Core.
My spacesuit was gone now, and my skin was following. It left my body in flakes, leaving behind darkness and data. No muscles or blood. Those weren’t part of the original Rune’s source, after all.
I realized what I was looking at. Those were Cores, too.
They thought it was a weapon, I recalled. Stefania Caputi, Seitaro Ogawa… And why not? That’s how they saw the world. The strong had tools to enforce their strength. If you gained —or stole— those tools, you’re as strong as them, too. Right?
The beings who created Rune’s signal had no use for strength.
It reaches all over the universe, doesn’t it? Rune had taught me something about space. It was vast, huge, impossibly big. The human race could easily spend our entire existence alone, in the dark, thinking we were the only ones in the entire cosmos.
Those Cores were too many to count.
I raised my hand —a hand made of data and structure-lines— and pressed it to the Core’s surface. It was burning hot but, at the same time, it didn’t harm me. The surface was soft, brittle, and I knew it would easily give in if I pushed.
I let my hand fall limply to my side. I couldn’t shake in terror anymore, I didn’t have enough air left.
What’s out there? Those Cores were too many to count.
Anything could live out there. “You’ll doom us all,” had said the man that shot me. Perhaps I would, after all.
What would gaze back from the abyss as we gazed in?
Rune’s purpose was to be a meeting place. That much I could tell. The beings that created the signal had found a way to make information skirt over the laws of the universe in a way matter could not. A way to edge out the limitations imposed by the speed of light.
It was a way to let civilizations meet one another without having to become gods first.
Some spiders made it easy for they prey to reach their lair, too. They built sand-traps beneath the ground and waited for the insects to step in. Compared to their prey, they were huge, monstrous, unstoppable. And lazy.
The risk was too big. The responsibility too high. How could I put the entire human race in danger? I was not the one to make that call.
The only reason I was here was because Kipp’s had left me a piece of code that opened a door and he had told me, “here man, get to the bottom of this.”
Whatever would come out of those Cores would be unknowable to us. How would we ever be certain of their true intentions? They could look however they wanted, say whatever they wanted.
Some predators pretended to be ants, so they’d gain access to the colony. Then they would feast.
By my side, 401 beeped sadly. It didn’t nudge my hand, but if the tiny thing had eyes, they would be fixed on mine. Pleading? Reassuring?
“That’s you?” I asked it, pointing at the Core. “
You’re every NPC in the game? You’ve been following me from the beginning.”
401 didn’t respond. For an AI to be able to do what I thought the Core did… The beings that created it must be so far beyond our understanding that we may as well build them a church and be done with it.
And with all their superiority, I knew that if I didn’t push the Core’s surface right now, the chance would be lost.
I had a choice.
Why would a spider bother giving their snacks a choice? Stefania Caputi didn’t give me a choice, not a real one, either way. Kipp had given me one. I was never forced to follow this Quest, no one forced me to run out of jail, no one forced me to come this far, sacrificing so much in the process.
I had gained things, too. Things that I’d learned about myself. About my friends. About Kipp. Even about people like Lance. Rune had given me all those things.
Oh…
“So I have a choice?” I asked 401, “well, here’s my choice. Let’s choose to believe we can know people… at least enough to trust them.” Even if they wouldn’t look like we expected, or speak our language, or share our customs. Let’s choose to believe that someday, two very different beings could stand side by side in the bridge of a spaceship and marvel together at the sight of a blue star.
I placed my hand on the Core’s surface and pressed.
Around me, the world exploded in a storm of light. It passed through me and engulfed me. The Core beat like a heart as its surface —its prison— shattered in a shower of glass.
For a brief instant, I felt the connections being made. The change in the signal that was echoed all across the real Universe, a singular announcement to everyone willing to listen.
Hey, guys. We’re alive. We exist. Let’s have a chat. See if we can find something in common.
A choice it had offered to everyone who would be able to listen in the universe. Every civilization advanced enough to find the signal and access it. Every civilization willing to take the risk and access the ability that Rune’s true creators extended.
My mindjack’s connection was breaking. Perhaps my mind was finally dying, its purpose fulfilled. My avatar was dissolving into light as Rune’s Source shifted. Completed itself. I looked up to the darkness and discovered it wasn’t empty space anymore. Atop the Source and underneath it and at its sides, everywhere as far as my eyes could reach, green Core stars shone in constellations never seen before by a human mind.