The Trilisk Ruins

by Michael McCloskey

  Chapter 9

  Telisa opened her eyes. The bar no longer surrounded her. Fear rose in her chest and stirred her heart to a rapid beat. She was lying on a flat spot in an irregular cave with light brown clusters sticking out of the walls. She saw that the clusters were made of reddish blocks with green sticks protruding from them. Some of the blocks glowed as if they were hot, casting weak light on the scene.

  Magnus lay just a few feet from her, unmoving. Suddenly an irrational fear, born of a memory from years ago, gripped her.

  “Magnus, wake up!” Telisa demanded. “Please, please be alive!”

  Magnus started awake. Like her, he stared in surprise at the surroundings.

  “How did we…?”

  Telisa almost sobbed in relief. He wasn’t dead.

  “I don’t know. I just woke up and saw this, and I thought… I thought it was happening again.”

  “Then we’re back in the lair of whatever killed Jack and Thomas.” Magnus cautiously stood up and swung his slug thrower in a slow arc, ready for anything. “What is that purple paste? It reminds me of something.”

  “Project blox,” Telisa said. “More project blox caves.”

  “Yeah, it’s those green spikes. They remind me of the sticks that hold the project blox together.”

  Telisa looked at the floor. “By the Five! Look at the floor where we were sleeping!”

  The floor beneath each of them was perfectly flat. Smooth turquoise tiles were intact in the shape of their prone bodies. Telisa remembered the color and pattern as identical to what had been behind the bar.

  “Uh, whatever’s going on here is even weirder than I suspected,” Magnus said. “Either we got moved here with the tile by some sort of transport mechanism that we didn’t feel, or the whole rest of the room melted away.”

  “I remember that ledge we were on before, and the light in the ceiling was sheared in the middle, like it just melted away.”

  Magnus nodded. “I bet that’s why there aren’t any UNSF people here. Their complex is slowly changing into this… whatever it is.”

  “And the computer network is probably damaged in the same way,” Telisa said. “But we didn’t get melted or changed or whatever it is.”

  “What did you mean just now, about it happening again? You mean someone dying?”

  Telisa looked away for a moment. “It’s… it’s dumb, I know, but one time, years ago, a boyfriend and I snuck into some maintenance tunnels to steal some extra VR time. We were at our quotas, but we thought the rules were stupid and he knew a way to hook us in without being charged. We had a good time too, until I jacked out and found that he’d been killed right there next to me in the tunnel, run over by an automated maintenance vehicle.”

  Magnus absorbed her story for a moment. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  “At first, I blamed myself for his death. We had been reckless for sneaking in there and cutting off all our senses to the real world. But a part of me blamed the government and their laws. I couldn’t help it. I just thought we would never have had to go there in secret if people were in control of their own lives. I don’t think I still hold that grudge, but it was the start of my resistance to the ideology of the world government. And of the rift between me and my father.”

  Magnus stood up and held out a hand for her. She accepted his boost up to her feet.

  “Well, we’re both still alive, and I intend to keep us that way. Let’s see if we can find any of the regular unmelted place.”

  Telisa liked the sound of that. Being back in the alien cavern reminded her of what had happened to the others. It had occurred so quickly, with no warning. Telisa feared one of them would explode and die at any second. She had never imagined such an awful feeling before. She took a deep breath and tried to quit shaking.

  “Magnus, I just realized. This must be what you went through for months, in the war. Knowing that you could die from an orbital strike at any second, and you wouldn’t even know what hit you.”

  Magnus nodded. “Yes, it’s a sinister feeling. But we got used to it. You’d be amazed what people can live with, given time.” Magnus took a deep breath. “Although I’d forgotten a little, what it was like.”

  Telisa realized that his hands were shaking too. “Five Holy Entities, Magnus. Are you having some kind of… you’re shaking as much as I am.”

  Magnus sighed. “It’s my neck. I’m really feeling the burns.”

  “Oh no. We don’t have the real medical pack. It was with the others. I have some minor stuff, though.”

  Telisa felt foolish for not offering the first aid earlier. Somehow she had just fallen asleep without thinking to help him.

  “There’s nothing that can be done,” he said.

  Telisa broke out a can of artificial skin. Without thinking, she tried her link to read the instructions from the manufacturer, but they did not come through.

  “Damn, I forgot our links are hosed here. I guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.” Telisa brought out the plastic packaging and searched for written instructions. She knew combat supplies often included written material as a backup, in case the enemy scrambled link communications or disabled links with EM pulses. She found a plastic card with writing on it.

  “Says here there’s an embedded analgesic,” she said.

  “Sounds good. Just spray some on and let’s get going,” Magnus suggested.

  Telisa applied the spray over Magnus’ angry red skin. The weeping burns had bled in spots, forming scabs. The artificial skin covered it with a smooth protective layer.

  Magnus sighed. “Thanks.”

  “I’d say we should go back and get the pack… if I knew where that was,” Telisa said.

  “Yeah. Let’s just keep looking for the exit.”

  Magnus led the way into an adjoining cavern. It seemed like just another gloomy cave until Telisa noticed brighter light coming from another tunnel. She saw what looked like a set of metal cabinets in the distance.

  “Look, there’s a part of the Terran complex,” Telisa said.

  They moved over into the next cavern. One side of the area was a normal-looking locker room, with about a dozen lockers against the far wall, and a door. Half the floor was natural stone and the other half was bathroom tile.

  “Just like before,” Telisa said.

  “And the other side is safer, unless it was coincidence that we were attacked when we came upon the caverns before,” Magnus said.

  “Well, safer or not, I’d rather wander through the old installation part. These caves are too dark.”

  “The entrance we used is in the surviving Terran section, too.”

  “Unless it melted away to become a cave.”

  “If we search the whole complex and don’t find a way out, then we can check the caves.”

  “Okay. This is just another storage room or maybe the gym lockers,” Telisa said. “I hope we’re about to stumble across the exit.”

  Magnus shrugged. “The place must be enormous. I tried the computer again, but it’s still almost useless.”

  Telisa came to the other door and opened it slowly, holding her stunner out before her.

  “It’s another corridor,” she said quietly. “Doesn’t look familiar.”

  Telisa went out into the hallway. Magnus came out and closed the door. The corridor was lit from above like the others they had seen. There were three doors within sight, so they advanced to the next door on their left. Magnus opened the door, sticking the end of his slug thrower through first.

  “It’s an office,” he said.

  They moved into the room. A hardcopy machine sat next to a data-store system, the standard arrangement for creating a permanent store for sensitive information. Most people worked from home, manipulated electronically stored files, and attended virtual meetings, but there was still an occasional need to create and store real paper documents.

  “Let’s take a look at some of the files,” suggested Telisa. “I want to kn
ow what they did here, and where they all went.”

  “Good idea,” Magnus said.

  He moved up to the file store and tried to open one of the containers. It resisted him at first, but he overcame the latch with a few well-placed strikes from the butt of his slug thrower.

  Telisa and Magnus slipped out several files and examined them. They each read in silence for a few moments, shuffling through several pages.

  “This is conductive paste. This whole report is nonsense,” Telisa said. “Listen to this.” Telisa read aloud:

  “The elevated levels of nitrite are contributing to the advanced age of all three samples. If Algeria is unable to comply by the end of the second time span, then countermeasure two will be adopted. We predict that all the aforementioned hurricanes will reach class three within five weeks of their inception. Please take all necessary vitamins.”

  Magnus frowned and kept leafing through the folder he held.

  “They’re all like that,” Magnus said. He threw down some letters. “This is all just a bunch of fakes. This whole office is an elaborate fake.”

  Telisa sat down in a plush chair. In a cursory examination this looked like an ordinary hardcopy storage office, but it was not. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to create this illusion that simply did not hold up under close examination.

  “So the next question is, is the whole complex a fake, or just this office?” Telisa asked.

  “That’s a great question,” Magnus said. “We’ve been so busy just trying to find artifacts or survive attacks that we haven’t really been looking at the mundane things all that closely. I passed dozens of lockers, shelves, boxes, all kinds of stuff, but I didn’t stop to look inside because I assumed anything valuable would be in a lab or a vault.”

  Telisa stood back up. “Well, let’s go find out.”

  “Okay.” Magnus turned toward the door. “You know what? The computer system is either broken or a sham too. It sort of works, just a little bit, but it starts to fail if you really try to make use of it.”

  “Like to find the exit, for instance.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Well, we passed some lockers just a couple of rooms back; let’s go look in those.”

  Magnus readied his weapon and opened the door. He looked out into the hallway and slowly stepped out. Telisa followed him, feeling exposed again. She had briefly forgotten their extreme danger while they had been in the office.

  Magnus strode back the way they had come and opened the door through which they had entered. He stepped into the room and Telisa moved in with him.

  “Something’s screwed up,” Magnus said. “I’ve really been paying attention because I didn’t want to get turned around again like when we were attacked. But this room is different.”

  Telisa looked around. The room was bigger than before, and instead of a wall of lockers, there were squat shelves against the wall.

  “I don’t get it. We just walked out that door and took the next door on the left to get to the office. This has to be the way back.”

  Magnus sighed. “I’m beginning to think that this place changes. This is the third time something weird has happened. The first time I thought we just got turned around because of the attack. Then the bar was gone, but it looked like it just… melted or something, like the caves were eating away at the installation. But now, the installation isn’t melting or turning into a cave, but the room has changed.”

  Telisa snapped her fingers.

  “This reminds me of a VR,” Telisa said. “Maybe this isn’t real. Magnus, tell me now if we’re on the ship, and this is some kind of test you guys are putting me through.” Telisa watched Magnus carefully.

  The idea made sense. They wanted to see how she would act, and it was all just a test.

  “I promise this is no VR, unless I don’t know about it either. We haven’t linked into anything. There’s no way we could have been linked into a VR without our knowledge. At least not without… well, without technology way beyond anything we know about.”

  “We could have been hooked into a VR when we entered. The black field we passed might have knocked us out, allowed someone else to hook us up to a VR system.”

  “No, I came back to get the rest of you, remember? It didn’t knock me out.”

  “So we might be in a Trilisk virtual environment,” Telisa said.

  “That’s a good starting theory, but there are problems with that too,” Magnus said. “Why would it work on non-Trilisks? You couldn’t build a VR that would work on alien brains without their linking in through an established interface, or any knowledge of their physiology.”

  Telisa considered that. Magnus was right. The theory sounded perfect at first, but it did not hold up.

  “We’ve got to keep thinking. We’ll hit on it,” she said. “The Trilisks were amazingly advanced. Maybe they could build a VR that could accept alien minds, just link them in without them even noticing it.”

  “Possible. Hard to believe but possible, I guess. But that’s not the only problem we need to solve fast,” he replied. “If we run into whatever-it-was again, we could be dead before we have a chance.”

  “Assuming dead is really dead, not just virtually dead,” Telisa said.

  Magnus shrugged. “I’m no simulationist. I’m going to assume that dead is dead, until we prove that this isn’t real. It’d be fatal to assume this is VR and be wrong.”

  “Yes,” Telisa agreed.