Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (23 page)

YOUNG RITRY C

The corridor without is much as the corridor before, metal-walled, lined with its tiny RG reminders that we are a pulse of Ritry Goligh, or a figment of Ritry Goligh, some envoy dispelled into the system.

"Doe take point, Ray and Far middle," I order, and they adopt the positions as though out of old habit. There is so much to say, but so little, because we all know as much as the others.

"So, come in," I call through blood-mic, as we start down the corridor at a hot run. Already I can hear the distant thumping of the lip-intestine, hunting us down. Already the sharp relief of these RG embossments are beginning to glisten and melt. "So, we need a map."

There is only white static through my HUD. We race along the single corridor at an incline, at least headed Inward, our feet clacking out a hasty drumbeat. I try to raise So again and again, but there is only the faint drifting. We reach another five-way crossroads, and down the Eastward tunnel I think I catch a glimpse of the sphincter's nictating mouth, worming closer.

Doe sparks her light and holds it to the cannon-fuse, but I clap her on the shoulder.

"Just run," I say. "Upward."

She leads at a gallop, up through the metal which sags like it is some thin plastic-sheeting over water. We begin to slip, as we pass through an increasing number of intersections, every one of them five-way or more.

"Inward," I call at every one, and we climb. The thump-thump of the lips gets stronger with every mossy step we take, and I catch faint snatches of it down the increasingly shifting, undulous tunnels to either side. This place is a honeycomb, and it is getting closer.

"So!" I shout through blood-mic, "So, in the name of La, help us!"

Still nothing comes but a hiss and static. Perhaps we are too deep, too far gone. I pull up the three-dimensional map So last provided and spin it, searching earnestly for the path we're on now, but I can't find it. There is no section as cross-branched and asymmetric as the interlinked network of nodes we're sprinting through now.

Up ahead Doe stops to let fire with the cannon. BOOM rings the retort, and the walls around us pulsate and contract. Clear liquid swims down a rivulet underfoot, as the metal cleaves to heaving gray flesh. In flashes to either side I see two sets of lips racing us, smacking, closer with every junction.

50 yards.

30 yards.

10 yards, and we are just running, running, running.

"So!" I shout.

The lips to my left dive, and close around my leg. The pain is white-hot and visceral, and only worsens as the lips circle and begin to suck, slurping me in like a wet noodle. I am tossed to my back and my other leg is sucked in, and worse than the pain is the sheer horror of this eyeless, dark, lipless thing, about to consume me, swallow me into darkness and gone.

BOOM

says the cannon, and a splattering gout flies off the thing's side, but that doesn't stop it. Ray and Far fall upon it with their musket bayonets, driving the blades deep then firing once inside. I feel the tremor as the creature shudders, but still it sucks me in, up past my waist, up to my chest.

"So!" I cry into blood-mic, "please."

The second slithering sphincter closes on Far, and sucks him down to the neck in a second.

I spin the memory of La like a projectile in my mind, and hurl it at the beast's shining intestinal side. It sags flat and its grip on Far weakens, as though dosed with some narcotic. Ray tears him out, but the champing mouth holding me isn't slackened at all, and the image of Ray staring back at me with disgust and disbelief are the last thing I can see, before the pain of digestion begins all around me, and thought is driven from my mind.

"Ven," I manage to gasp through blood-mic, before the pain short-circuits me completely. "Use Ven."

A burst of light, and Ray and Doe are hauling me up and out of something. I am dizzy and weak, disoriented in this mucal chamber. Behind me is a long snaking trail of shriveled organic mass like a snake, a lipless head cut off to its side. Another one is to my right, also beheaded.

Silver tooth-loops gleam in Ray's wide grin.

"Not yet, buddy," he says. Blood is all over him, and there is the flash of silver beneath the dark ichor on his musket bayonet. Doe is holding Far. Are we alive?

I remember, and remember that I have forgotten. There are two holes now, or three. Still, I am the captain. Already another thump-thump is building, from far-off but racing closer incredibly fast, and we have to run.

"Me," comes the faintest hiss through my blood-mic.

"So," I answer, as I gesture for us to run. We run. "So, we need a map. Nothing matches anymore."

"I know," she says, fainter than ever, so quiet I have to boost the gain on her crackly voice over the thump of our footfalls. "I'm having trouble focusing. Are you really there, Me? I can't remember things well. How did I get here?"

"So, I'm sorry, I want to help you but the mission comes first. Please, can you get us a new map."

"I have one," she says, forlorn. "I understand, Me. I understand. But I feel like there's something important I've forgotten. Some part of me."

I know how she feels, but there is no time. "The map, So."

She slings it, another three-dimensional sphere but this one completely different from the previous one. Where that was a rotation with some degree of symmetry, this is a labyrinthine mess of thousands of intersections, lumpish nodes, and scraggly lines. There is a flashing red dot in the thick of a cortex halfway to the heart of the Solid Core, and a faint red line leading up to one of the ovoid nodes.

"What the hell happened?" I ask. "Where's the old map?"

"You went the wrong way," says So. "I had to recalculate."

Ahead Doe takes the first turning on our new path. It leads us West instead of Inward, toward the thump-thumping of the Solid Core-snake.

"But this is nothing like the rotational models from before. How did it get so complex?"

"Oh," says So, a little sigh like I've disappointed her. "You're right. It's not a rotational maze anymore, Me. It's more involved than that. I converted the old flat map to a mathematical set, then extrapolated it through a series of organic Mandelbrot iterations, to map onto what you're seeing now. And it's still growing. Every moment you're there longer, it gets denser, replicating itself inward in slightly different variations. There are islands around you where the whole Solid Core is repeated, and within those Solid Cores there are more islands where the whole Solid Core is repeated again, and on and on. If you stray off the path into one of those fractal offshoots, you'll be trapped and you'll never escape. Even if you reach the middle of that island, it'll be the wrong middle. Can you understand that? And even if you follow the path I've given you and avoid all the fractal islands, I still don't know if you'll be able to reach the true middle before even that path balloons too." 

It sounds like wind and madness to my ears. "I don't understand," I shout back.

"Me, listen," she whispers intently. "The Solid Core is getting informationally denser. What looks like a full-sized path now might only be one eight of a path, or one sixteenth, or one thousandth, and you
can't know by looking
! It's getting denser, or perhaps it was always like this, but you're getting lighter. I don't know, it looks to be nearly infinite already, and there's only one path through. I can't make the equation tell me if you'll have enough mass to reach the center or not."

I don't know what to say to that.

"Where am I, Me?" So asks abruptly, her fervent tone gone again. Now she sounds like a lost little girl. "Don't give me up too, please."

I can't think about that. "So, listen to me. We have to make it. There must be a route that is certain."

I think she's crying now, it's hard to distinguish her uneven breathing through the white noise. "Don't give me up, please."

"I won't" I answer, even as I know that I will, if I have to.

Thump-thump.

"Here," cries Doe. She stops, and I hustle to reach her. She is standing before a sludgy purple cave-hole, stopped up with a giant gumball-looking clot. "The map leads through here.

We heave together, and the ball pops out with a slopping spit of ooze. Inside is another plate-metal room, and another giant book. I usher Far in, and Ray, then Doe and I tie an elasteel rope around the gumball. We climb through through the orifice one after the other, then pull the throttling ball with us.

It jams satisfyingly back into its slot, exuding disgusting farting sounds as liquid and gas compress and froth out. The thump-thump of the duodenums outside falters.

I look at the remnants of my chord. Four of us here, and one lost behind. Is it right that there should only be five? The number seven seems more fit to me, for a second or two, before the new reality takes hold.

We are all slathered in blood and gore. Far's tree-bark armor has been shredded, as has been mine. Perhaps it saved us. The boy is shivering and pale-faced.

"I can't do this," he murmurs, repeatedly, to himself.

"You have to," I say. Ray frowns at me, but I don't care. Every second we waste, the maze is elongating, like we're a ship approaching light speed. Those last few fractions will stretch out forever.

The huge book's title is-

YOUNG RITRY

I wedge open the cover, the others help, then I stand atop this time and begin to read.

My first memory is of the second family to host me, and the first time they almost killed me. My best memory is the day I killed them all.

The first family I later heard gave up, calling me some kind of demonseed. They were the tailings of the godly creed, barely eking out a life in a world that had turned against their god in one almighty wave. They had wanted to test their faith with me, a vat-born baby.

Was I as much a living soul and everlasting flame in his earthly creation as they, or was I less? Was I as much human as I was animal, was I truly descended from apes, or from their holy spirit?

They held in their heads that from the instant of conception, gestated interior to a woman's body or not, I was a soul. But they soon came to hold in their hearts that I was something else. I was not godly as they were, whatever that could mean. I was alien in the most alarming way. I was false. The way I looked at them, the way I remembered things, the way I gurgled out my first few words was never right.

I put it down now to the alternate architecture of my mind, the seven tone structure engrained by the artificial womb. They of course put it down to the devil, and gave me up.

The second family tried to kill me a hundred different ways. They were as far from religious as the melting ice packs, but equally as craven. They were stone-cold scientists, a family commune of three, two men and a women who served each other however they saw fit. While they must have put a warm and fuzzy front to the disinterested organization that held me up for adoption until I reached skirmish-ready age, they were anything but.

They were graysmith divers, all three, and encephalologists.  Their specialty was the neonatal brain and its gradual uncurling from blastocyte through various organogenesis and musculogenesis, through the curling up of neural tubes like tongues fitting into grooves, to form the earliest stages of the brain.

My brain was one of a few thousand like it, and invaluable, but poorly valued. There were other concerns, as whole populations continued to shift away from the planet's fat hot middle, as the skirmishes began in earnest. I was born into war, and I was spoils of war as a child.

They dove me repeatedly. Before I had gained any real sense of self, they dove me in concert, one after the other, scratching away samples of thought and pulling them out on long sticky threads, further rupturing and altering my development.  They dove me day after day, sinking deeper to the source of my tones, seeking answers which they sprayed out in a rainbow blast of experimental papers that no coalition cared enough to explore the ethics of.

They were the early days of graysmithing, as it suborned torture amongst the hard men of the skirmish-fringe, grown out of engram-injection and natural massage. It was frontier science, and with everything they discovered from my freakish mind, my adoptive parents helped push the barriers out.

The first memory is of an orange rattle, hanging above me. It shakes, and there is a smiling face.

Then the rattle is gone. I have forgotten it, because unbeknownst to me, it has been stolen.

The same rattle appears again, and now it is my second first clear memory, written over the memetic scar where the first memory had been. This makes it deeper, but fundamentally unsound. My simple developing mind, that of a two-year old, perhaps, mistrusts it.

It too is stolen, then replaced.

It was a simple experiment, and they repeated it in shifts, hundreds of times, each one a reset button, sucking up vast quantities of my fledgling concentration. The scar tissue built up thick like mounding kelp, tottering like a top-heavy tower, threatening to crush everything around it.

It must have been fascinating to them, how the lattices of neurons shaped and reshaped themselves in new and alarming ways. My gray was not plastic like most children, it was fluid. Where a normal womb-built infant would have its neural tubes reach a log-jam at some point, after which unconsciousness or a total blind spot for orange rattles would develop, my mind did not.

The seven note-architecture allowed my mind to flow continuously, which meant there was no escape, and an almost endless capacity for this game. So my earliest memory is of an orange rattle, again and again, again and again, again and again.

I was helpless. They published papers. She had a shaven head and strange pink glasses that looked like an extension of her pink skin. The two men wore thick beards, as if to hide behind them, and held clipboards. I spent my days and nights in an EMR-machine crib, looking at orange rattles.