“It still makes no sense to me,” I said.
“Those are Fibonacci numbers,” Chou said.
I turned my attention to her, “The Fibonacci what?”
“Each number is the sum of the two numbers that came before it: 144 plus 233 equals 377. 233 plus 377 equals 610.”
“Oh, wow! And 610 plus 377 is 987,” I said, suddenly understanding. Math wasn’t exactly my strong point, but the idea was simple enough for me to grasp.
Albert nodded enthusiastically.
“You amaze me sometimes,” I told him. “It’s like we have our own personal Google.”
Albert just smiled sweetly, despite him having no way to know what Google even was.
Freuchen stepped closer to us. “You think this is some form of a message?”
Chou said, “It could be, or perhaps it is more of a beacon.”
“But how vould anyvun be able to pick it up vithout a radio receiver unless…” Freuchen paused, looked at Silas then looked at me before continuing, “…Silas.”
“Right!” I said, beaming. “When the Architect left the message for me with Silas, he must have guessed that I’d take Silas with me. It has to be a message specifically for us.”
Chou did not look convinced. “It is possible, I suppose…”
“Look, we can either stand around here, debating it, or we can let Silas lead us to where the numbers are coming from,” I said. “What do we have to lose?”
For two hours, we followed behind Silas as he led the way, skirting the base of the mountain, the sun crawling higher and higher into the sky.
“Here,” Silas said, stopping suddenly. “The source of the radio signal is coming from there.” He pointed toward a section of the wall of rock that looked exactly the same as the miles of similar limestone and granite that we had already passed.
“You’re joking, right?” I said.
“No, Meredith. The radio signal is coming from somewhere within.”
I walked up to the side of the mountain, careful to avoid the scattering of loose rock and boulders. There was nothing to discriminate this part of the mountain from any other part of it—gray, dirty, craggy. I reached out with the flat of my hand to touch it… and stopped.
There was faint shuddering coming from it, like a low power hum.
“Is everything okay?” Chou called out.
I nodded. “Yup!” Then I placed the flat of my hand directly against the rock.
Eighteen
“Get back!” Freuchen yelled just as I felt him grab my sleeve and yank me backward.
The rocks were falling away, dropping… and vanishing.
“An illusion,” I said.
“An advanced hologram of some kind,” Chou corrected.
Behind the fake rockface, two enormous metal doors were opening wide, rumbling slowly apart. Whatever was beyond them was hidden in darkness and shadows.
I said, “Do you think we should—“
The darkness within the tunnel was replaced by a cool blue illumination that revealed a perfectly semi-circular-shaped tunnel as wide as the huge doors. The walls arced high over our heads and were covered in a mosaic of randomly shaped pieces of glimmering glass, as smooth as a layer of ice. The floor was a checkerboard of ever-changing blue hues, creating the illusion that we stood on the edge of a lake. The tunnel was completely empty. It stretched far into the mountains in a gentle curve toward the base of the collector, obscuring whatever lay at its end.
“It’s beautiful,” Albert gasped. He stepped across the threshold and knelt to touch the softly-glowing floor. A ripple of pale blue light spread out where his fingertips brushed against it, adding to the illusion that the floor was water. Albert looked back at us, his lips transformed into a massive grin of wonderment.
We all joined him, our shoes causing similar ripples to expand out in intricate patterns across the floor. Chou reached out and laid the flat of her hand against the wall, then jumped back as a ripple of light expanded upward, and a sound, like someone humming a single musical note, rose from all around us. A second later, it began to fade. Albert rushed to her side and placed one of his own hands against the wall. A new note sounded, a little higher in frequency than the first. Chou turned back to look at us, trying but failing to keep the smile of enchantment from her face.
“Silas, what is this?” she asked.
Silas did not immediately answer. Instead, he reached out a hand and drummed his fingers against the wall, setting off a cascade of ripples and notes.
“The Architect was concerned that the effects of the translocation on Candidates would induce mass-panic. While certain chemical alterations were made to you to reduce that possibility, every effort was made to ensure your environment was as calming as possible. I imagine this is a simple attempt to ensure that whoever passed through this tunnel remained tranquil.”
“Though it is enchanting,” Freuchen said, apparently immune to the desire to touch the wall, “ve do not know if this area is shielded from the negative effects of the aurora. I vould suggest that ve make our vay to vatever lies at the end of this tunnel as quickly as possible.”
“Peter’s right, we really should keep moving,” I said. I adjusted my backpack and began walking again.
Albert skipped ahead of us, jumping left then right as if the enormous tunnel was his own personal hop-scotch board.
We adults walked abreast of each other.
“Vy so big, do you think?” Freuchen asked, swinging his head back and forth as he took in the cathedral-sized dimensions of the tunnel.
“Perhaps it was used to transport parts of the collector or other machinery,” Chou said.
“Or maybe they just expected a ton of people,” I added, then said, “Silas, got any ideas?”
“I’m sorry, I do not have any information on why these tunnels were built to such specifications,” he said.
We had only gone a hundred steps or so when a rumbling echoed behind us, causing all of us to stop. The two huge doors were closing again. They were still thirty feet from meeting when a screech of grinding metal called out to us… and the doors shuddered to a stop.
“Well, that can’t be good,” I said.
“Nothing ve can do about it. Ve must carry on.”
I agreed, but until the curve of the tunnel finally blocked the route back from our sight, I could not shake a nagging sense of worry that periodically drew my attention over my shoulder to the two stuck doors and the open space between them.
Nineteen
Forty-five minutes later, we reached a second set of doors identical to the first. At least we assumed they were identical because only the left one was in the closed position, the other still in its recess.
Freuchen looked at Chou, his eyebrows raised questioningly. He didn’t have to say a word. It was obvious we were all thinking the same thing. Here was just another indication that this place had fallen into disrepair. And that did not bode well for us finding anyone alive within.
“Ve need to be careful,” Freuchen said, edging along the door toward the gap where the other should have been. “Ve have no idea vat—“
“Albert! No!” I hissed as the boy happily skipped his way past the door right into the gap. Albert stopped, started to turn back to me, and froze, his eyes fixed on whatever lay beyond. He turned to face us, his eyes full of awe, and waved eagerly to us to join him.
I ran to his side, my back toward the gap. “You have got to stop running off like that,” I said, pulling him back in the direction of the door, but he refused to budge. “Albert, you have no idea what—“
“Look, Meredith,” Albert said, pointing one small finger past my head. “Look!”
I heard a duo of simultaneous gasps.
Chou and Freuchen both stood rooted in place.
Slowly, I turned to face the same direction as my friends… and felt my words disintegrate as my tongue sucked all the saliva from my mouth. And that was okay, because I was beginning to run out of adjectives to d
escribe the almost constant flood of mind-melting sights that bombarded us on an almost daily basis, and I wasn’t sure there were any that would truly sum up the grandeur of what I was now seeing.
I settled on, “SHUT. THE. FRONT. DOOR.”
We stood on the edge of another world. One that was, at once, both familiar yet alien. Fields of green grass stretched out for miles and miles. Sprinkled here and there was the occasional plot of what must be wheat or barley, I couldn’t quite tell. It created a quilted pattern of yellow against the backdrop of green. A river, a quarter-mile wide at the point closest to us, bisected the landscape, meandering serenely through the fields, past copses of willows and oaks, and other more exotic-looking trees.
And, oh! the scent was heavenly.
This microcosm of Eden was contained beneath a dome of some barely visible energy. Shifting blue hues moved over its surface, and puffy white clouds — actual clouds — scooted across the counterfeit sky.
And sitting in the center of it all, rising up to almost touch the apex of the dome, was the most beautiful building I’d ever seen.
Five jade green flute-shaped glass spires soared toward the uppermost reaches of the dome, each one a different height from the others, but all connected by what I thought were covered walkways. I saw stained-glassed windows and balconies with ornate metal railings that must have given an even better view of this land than we had. The spires rose up from a five-level ziggurat-like glass-sided building that was as large as any cathedral I’d ever encountered. Five other buildings were scattered across the landscape, all as large as a big city museum and with the same beautiful architecture as the cathedral.
What I took to be a monorail connected each of the buildings. It, too, had fallen into disrepair in places, with large chunks either missing or lying in piles of debris.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea,” I whispered, quoting Coleridge’s most well-known poem.
“Are those trees in the buildings?” I said, pointing toward the cathedral.
“Fascinating. Each level appears to contain a different biome,” Chou said.
She was right. On each level of the ziggurat were trees and flowers, each level representing a different environment: deep forest, jungle; rainforest; tundra.
Beyond the energy dome covering this place, set back perhaps a mile or so from it, the gray and black face of the mountain this idyllic space had been carved out of rose up around us. Distorted, as though I saw them through a haze of hot air, giant tightly wound corkscrew-shaped protrusions that must have been miles long, extended out of a circular opening. They stretched out on all sides, their tips buried deep into the walls of the mountain. Further into the opening were what looked like colossal milky-white pyramids, each as wide as a jetliner, they’re apexes pointing downward, forming a crystalline ceiling.
“We must be directly under the very center of the collector,” Chou said, pointing up at the corkscrews. “Those anchors must help secure it in place.”
As if by some psychic agreement, all five of us stepped into the amazing landscape and began walking toward the nearest building, about a mile or so away. We had walked less than a hundred feet when, from behind the buildings to our left, I saw movement. Freuchen must have noticed it too because he let out a gasp of surprise. Something rose quickly into the air above the building’s alabaster walls. It stopped, hovered momentarily, then accelerated in our direction.
It was a machine, I realized… and it was enormous. Its body was orb-shaped, the diameter of a Greyhound bus. Hanging from beneath its bottom sections was a cluster of long articulated tentacles that made it look like a giant metal jellyfish as it sped toward us.
Chou frantically searched the nearby landscape for anywhere that we could use as cover, but there was nothing nearby. I looked back over my shoulder toward the doorway we’d come through, hoping we might have time to run back to it. However, when I turned to look again at the thing flying toward us, it was already closing faster than even Chou could run.
We were caught out in the open. Proverbial sitting ducks.
With less than a hundred feet left between us, Silas took several steps toward the fast-approaching machine and said, “Hello. I am Standard Instruction and Learning Servitor 762. You may call—“
There was a white flash of light from an aperture at the top of the machine. Silas’ eye-bar snapped back into his head with a loud crack. His eyes blinked out, and he collapsed motionless in a heap on the ground, like a marionette that had had its strings sliced.
“Silas!” Albert yelled and took two steps toward our friend before Chou caught his wrist and swung him in one fluid motion into her arms. Freuchen growled and placed himself in front of us, his shoulders so broad he blocked my entire view. I had to step to the left to see the machine as it slowed to a stop, with less than ten yards separating us. Around the circumference of the orb was a recessed trough; lights, all of them blue except for a single red one that was obviously fixed on us, glowed brightly. As I stepped out from behind Freuchen, the red light that had been focused on him turned blue, and the one to its immediate right changed to red… its focus now me. I couldn’t help myself; I took an involuntary step back. This thing was hugely intimidating.
The machine dipped lower and covered the distance between me and it in the blink of an eye, its tentacles rattling like wind through metal trees. At the end of each tentacular limb were various blades and drill bits, saws and pincers, scissors and hammers. They could be tools… or weapons, for all I knew. All I did know was that everything the Architect had placed in this world was designed to aesthetic perfection. Silas, the collectors, the graveyard of dead robots, all had been meticulously constructed. Even the ruined tower where we’d found our metal friend back on Avalon, despite its state of disrepair, had still retained its elegance. This machine had none of that finesse. It looked like it had been cobbled together out of spare parts.
Its outer casing looked to be made of copper that had long ago lost its luster. It was scratched and gouged in places. Here and there, blue flakes of paint still clung to it like scabs. Four steel panels of varying sizes had been fastened to it in places across its surface, the welds that held them in place, severe and ugly scars. This close, I could see that what I had taken for lights in the recessed area running around its middle were actually lenses, similar to telescopic lenses of a camera. At least three of them were broken, shards of glass still visible in the housings. Compared to every other machine I’d seen or met on this planet, this one looked like the machine equivalent of a bum who called a cardboard box in the back of a liquor store his home.
It drew close enough that I could feel the slight disturbance in the air caused by whatever kept it aloft, could smell the scent of oil and grease. The red lens whirred as it extended in then out again, as though it were having trouble focusing on me. One of its appendages flashed through the space between us, the pair of scissor-like blades snapping together just inches from Freuchen’s head.
“Who are you?” the machine demanded, in a disarmingly feminine voice. “How did you get in here?”
“My… my name is Meredith Gale,” I stuttered. “We were sent here by the Architect to find Candidate 1.” I paused, then added, “Are you Candidate 1?”
The machine pulled back ten feet as if I’d slapped it. Its appendages, which until now had been held like fists, cocked and ready to strike, relaxed.
“I am not,” it said, then, “Give me your hand.”
“What? Why?” This time, I pulled back.
The machine advanced menacingly toward me.
Freuchen and Chou both made to block its path, but an appendage flashed between them, knocking Freuchen aside, and grabbed me by my right wrist.
I screamed, “Let me go, you—“ I winced as I felt something sharp pierce the palm of my hand. The machine let me go, and it withdrew its tendril. There was a sma
ll spot of blood on the palm of my hand. “What did you just do to me?” I yelled.
The machine remained silent for a few moments, then it said, “A blood sample to ascertain that you are who you say you are. I apologize, but I had to be absolutely sure.”
“Well, did I pass your damn test?” I snapped.
“You did. Now, please follow me,” the machine said, its voice so gentle it simply did not fit with the sheer, ugly, utilitarian design of its body.
“What did you do to Silas!” Albert suddenly yelled, wriggling out of Chou’s arms and running to my side. His face was flushed with anger, and I felt a sharp pang of guilt tinged with a sudden surge of anger at myself that I had forgotten my friend so easily.
“He is an unauthorized SILAS unit, and I have deactivated him until I can ascertain his allegiance,” the machine said.
“Allegiance?” I said. Now I took three long steps forward until I was face-to-face with the sultry-voiced monstrosity, angrier than I could remember being in a long time. “Silas saved all our lives. He led us here. I demand that you release him, right now, or I swear to God I will fu—“
Freuchen wrapped a hand around my left bicep and squeezed hard enough to distract me. He leaned in and whispered, “Perhaps, it vould be a good idea to remember that ve are guests of this… entity.”
I got the point, took a deep breath, then backed up, but the desire to pull one of this thing’s tentacles off and shove it right up its—
“Hello,” Chou said, stepping forward. “Do you have a designation?”
The blue light I was staring into turned red as a lens closer to Chou gave her the once over. “Who are you?” The machine’s focus shifted from Chou to Freuchen to Albert.
“They’re with me,” I said, suddenly terrified that it… she… might decide to permanently ‘deactivate’ my three friends like it had done with Silas.
I was its center of attention again.
“I am Blue Alpha,” it said matter-of-factly.
A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2) Page 18