The Trilisk Ruins (13 page)

“
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 know 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.

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

“
This is bullshit. 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 wasn’t. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to
create this illusion that simply didn’t 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 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
towards 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, without any knowledge of their
physiology.”

Telisa considered that. Magnus was
right. The theory sounded perfect at first, but it didn’t hold
up.

“
We’ve got to keep thinking.
We’ll hit on it,” she said. “The Trilisks were amazingly advanced.
Maybe they did 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 going to assume
that dead is dead, until we prove that this isn’t real. It’d be a
major bummer to make that assumption and find out that we were
wrong.”

“
Yeah, a major bummer,”
Telisa agreed.

Chapter
Ten

Kirizzo flashed through room after room
at high speed. His attention played across the caverns briefly,
always returning to a small cube cluster he carried with him. The
cluster relayed the image of a room directly into one of his
brains. It was the only thing that protected his hoard of collected
parts.

There. The alien detected just the
piece he sought. The complex had finally provided it for him as it
generated the faux environment. He approached the bank of cubes
embedded in the wall and removed what he needed. With this piece,
he would be able to complete another sensor station.

The golden, many-legged alien twitched
slightly as he worked over his prize. The spasm originated from his
ordeal with the Bel Klaven war machines that had chased him into
the complex. Many cycles had passed since that memory had been
imprinted.

Kirizzo had gone through the dark
entrance and fled through familiar caverns. The machines had
followed after him, relentless. A deadly game of cat and mouse had
ensued. Hunters and hunted had several short, brutal encounters.
Each time Kirizzo narrowly escaped with his life. One of the
particularly nasty episodes had resulted in a bit of nerve damage
on his right rear side.

The Bel Klaven constructs created
symmetrical empty spaces in the complex of staggering geometrical
complexity. Kirizzo supposed that the pseudo-intelligent machines
didn’t have thoughts and memories that translated well to the
mechanism that created environments inside the Trilisk
installation.

Slowly Kirizzo had obtained clues as to
how the place worked and started to adapt himself. But the Bel
Klaven machines wouldn’t significantly alter their behavior. They
remained inflexible. Kirizzo had been able to trick and defeat the
enemies by using the properties of the complex against them. He
lured the machines into areas where he had a defensive advantage,
collected supplies from the environments produced by the complex,
and even made clever traps that would confuse the enemy and render
them vulnerable.

One by one the machines died, until
finally one day Kirizzo found himself alone. Only then had he had
time to select another primary goal: escape.

Ever practical, Kirizzo did not dwell
on his injury but instead channeled his irritation at the twitch to
increase his motivation. Once home, the nerve damage could be
repaired. He would stick to the plan, a plan which included escape
and eventual rejuvenation. Lamenting the damage would not help to
correct it.

Once Kirizzo retrieved the valuable
component, he headed back to his cache, the room he monitored
through his remote sensor cluster. He reached the room after a
minute or two, encountering tunnels and caves that looked different
than the ones he had taken on the way out. It was a cavern that
Kirizzo had hollowed out to be much larger than the ones the
complex typically generated.

A mound of sophisticated cube clusters
sat in the center, stacked together in an intricate pattern. They
held the possibility of escape from the trap of the installation.
Each cluster of cubes could encode its surroundings into a data
stream and transmit the data back to one of Kirizzo’s brains where
he could monitor it. Those clusters were Kirizzo’s only way of
expanding his sphere of control and stabilizing the environment
well beyond the range of his natural senses.

Kirizzo pondered the visitors, aliens
who shared his little prison with him. They unknowingly helped his
cause by pinning down extra sections of the facility, but at the
same time they threatened all his work. If they continued to be
hostile, they might destroy the stations if they discovered them.
They had no reason to, but they might destroy them out of
ignorance, fueled by raw aggression. Kirizzo knew very little about
their behavioral range. Kirizzo considered strategies for
protecting his investment.

He could continue to guard the devices
for the time being, although when he tried to deploy them they
would be dispersed too widely for him to protect. Besides, most of
his attention would be needed to watch the data and keep the
stations from being subsumed by the installation. He could detach
some of his personal defense modules and assign them to individual
stations, but each one of the precious spheres that he went without
increased his own chances of being killed by the next projectile
that came his way.

Kirizzo embarked on a calculated risk.
He set one of the monitors aside and activated it. The data flowed
into his mind, allowing him to see himself and the clusters in the
superfluous sensory channel. He gathered up the other devices in
his many limbs and proceeded through the caverns ahead. He moved
slowly, keeping the view from his device under intense scrutiny. As
long as Kirizzo monitored it, the room he left behind would be
stable.

Kirizzo picked his way painstakingly,
always watching the streams from his observer modules and slowly
moving forward to place another. Kirizzo was placing his fourth
module when he noticed that an alien had wandered into one of the
rooms monitored by a sensor station. He watched it through the
sensor cluster, concerned that they might recognize the equipment
and damage it.

As the Gorgala monitored the intrusion,
he considered extermination of the aliens. This sounded promising
on the surface, but might be shortsighted. If Kirizzo couldn’t
overcome the base on his own, they might be needed. Like any living
creature, they stabilized areas of the installation, drawing on the
facility’s power supply. In essence they made Kirizzo’s task
easier. He decided to risk leaving them alive. He hoped that they
would stay away now that he had shown his ability to defend himself
with lethal force if necessary on two separate occasions. If the
things were truly intelligent, surely they would now give him a
wide berth.

After a few moments the aliens moved
on, apparently oblivious to his devices. To the slow, sparsely
limbed creatures, his modules were probably almost
indistinguishable from the other items in the caverns. Kirizzo
returned to his task of placing and monitoring the
sensors.

As Kirizzo placed the seventh module,
he began to feel the mental strain of monitoring so many different
places at once. He placed an eighth and hesitated, seeing that the
cavern wall around his fourth had wavered and changed shape when he
neglected to watch it for a few seconds. His consciousness arose as
an amalgam of all the processes of the nerve clusters along his
central nervous cord. As they became loaded with other work, his
concentration suffered, which caused the sub-tasks to become
forgotten as his primitive mind took over, seizing control of the
nerve bundles to re-establish itself.