Their sparrows streaked across the rocky terrain as they made their way towards the abandoned city. Trails of bluish flame followed behind them, marking them as three anomalous individuals amidst the jungle-and-rock landscape. Within a minute or so, they had reached the first buildings. Vines, leaves, and other plant-life almost completely enveloped the area, making it appear to be some kind of botany experiment gone wrong.
With the whining sound of the sparrows' engines slowing to a halt, they came to a resting point near the building cluster's boundary. Several cars that were crushed and rusted over many years were clogging the streets, making it nearly impossible to successfully navigate the road with sparrows in any efficient manner.
Scorch stepped off of her vehicle, Dawn and Eager following suit. She looked around at the surrounding buildings and noticed an old paved path that led a bit to the right. She motioned for them to follow her, and set off along the newfound road to see where it led.
After stepping around several cars and large blocks of debris that were scattered around, Scorch came to an open area. Ahead was a slight incline that had been caused by a rupture in the ground. She jogged over to the crack, and was surprised to find that there was a broken down building to the left; one that, after climbing a few steps to reach it, appeared to have a massive hole in its side with the floor collapsing to the sub level below.
"Spectre? According to our maps, where does that lead?"
The Ghost paused for a moment before saying, "To the Ishtar Academy. From several old scouts' reports, this cave-in is the only current possible way to reach it."
Eager and Dawn came up behind her as she gestured towards the ominous entrance. "Then that's where we need to go. Dawn said earlier that this place is important somehow, we're gonna find out in what way." She made her way across the pavement, her companions trailing slightly behind and next to her on either side.
The hole in the building wasn't the only collapsed piece of architecture. Moving deeper in, they found that the ground had completely sunk in years before, and led down to a waterlogged passage filled with the blue glow of some form of plant. With careful footing, they walked down the path and into the water.
Support columns were sticking up from the water and connecting to what would have been the floor above them. This suggested that they were within the foundation that the building was set upon. As they trekked through the water, their boots making schloop sounds as they were pulled out of mud each time they took a step, Spectre provided some insight into the history behind the place.
"I remember people talking about this place. Apparently, some of the greatest minds in the solar system would travel to Venus just to contribute to the Ishtar Academy's knowledge. They did everything from study Vex minds to developing weapons based on Vex technology. As you can probably tell, a lot of the stuff was about Vex. Probably because of the unbearable abundance of them here."
He continued to search through information as they waded through the muck. "There have been almost no Guardians here since the Heroes' first journey to Venus."
"The Heroes came to Venus before their disappearance?" asked Scorch incredulously.
This time, Eager answered her; "Yeah, actually. It was where they first met the Stranger, the one who used to be called the Assassin. She sent them on a journey to kill the Black Garden and save the Traveler, a journey which they thankfully succeeded in. The Battle for the Traveler was only a single component in the quest."
Scorch drank in all this information with genuine curiosity taking control over her mind. She never knew too much about her saviors, only that they were some of the most revered Guardians known to the city. It was interesting, to say the least, for her to discover this much more about them. "What happened then?"
"Well, they told the Vanguard that after journeying to the Awoken, they were given a key to the Black Garden and destroyed it. It no longer exists as a part of reality thanks to them, and the Traveler has been healing for several years now." Eager stepped over a particularly deep hole in the ground. "It may not be back up to full strength yet, but it's been communicating more frequently with the Speaker in recent times, and has been more than capable of replenishing its light now."
They finally came around a bend, and reached an end to the passage. Here, concrete rubble formed a path that led upwards into an open-spaced area of sorts. In the center of the room stood a statue, likely the goddess of the planet's namesake; Venus. The sides of the room were two stories tall, and held bookshelves on each. For Scorch, that was a lot of reading, but if there were supposed to be geniuses that lived here, perhaps it was a bit more understandable.
Something caught her eye. Littered around the ground were the eroding remains of Vex. They were a number of years old, as rust and plant growth had slowly begun to cover them. But they couldn't be older than a few years as they were still in the relatively early stages. When sparrow parts got old, they could still be salvaged assuming that they hadn't been wasting away for too long. This level of decay was about even with her several junkyard experiences.
"If the Heroes were the only people to come to Venus in a long time, then these bodies must have been left by them," she remarked aloud.
Spectre flew a few feet in front of her. "Unfortunately, the Vanguard are a little bit ahead of you there. This is one of the places they searched, and they already found the bodies. They even found some footprints which should be a little ways over toward the back of the room. It was chalked up to when they first came here and fought the Vex for the first time." Scorch looked around, and sure enough found the sets of footprints that had lain undisturbed in the dusty floor for years.
"Well, maybe this line of thinking is a bust then. Not sure why you thought this place was so important," said Eager, motioning at Dawn, "but I'm not seeing anything that corresponds with that."
Dawn looked around, her voice sounding disappointed as well. "I thought for sure that this place held answers. I don't know why I had such a strong feeling-"
"Hold up." She fell silent as Scorch raised her hand to ask for a ceasing of noise. She walked a few short steps over to something odd she noticed about the footprints. "Spectre, look at these here. They look to be about the same size, right?"
He pondered silently for a moment, then turned to her. "Well, I suppose so. But what about it? There could have been two members with similar sized feet."
She shook her head. "No, because there are two more sets of footprints over there, each of them slightly smaller. Scan these ones, and run through a database of boots that could have made these imprints."
Spectre vibrated for a moment, then narrowed his eye a tad. "Well, these ones here would belong to the 'Stratus' class of Hunter boots, a model that was sold quite a few years ago. That would line up with the timeline for the Heroes' first visit here." He moved slightly towards the second set of prints. "These ones though, they would have to have been made by the model known as 'Aspriet', a model of boots that only came around relatively recently in the last few years."
He looked at her. "What's more, Aspriet is also a Hunter class model of boots."
"Which means that they returned here, but for what?" Scorch narrowed her eyes, then let her gaze follow the Aspriet footprints path. They led towards the back of the room, but there was nothing but a sealed wall there-
Maybe not. She saw that two other sets of prints kept pace with the Aspriets, and they all ended at the edge of the back wall. On a whim, she drew her standard Hunter's blade, and began dragging it sideways across the wall with its point pushing into the structure. If what she thought was here was here, then that would make things a whole lot more-
The tip of the knife sank in slightly, and met resistance. Bingo. She examined where the knife had dipped into the wall and saw that there was a nearly invisible seam, maybe a few hairs thickness in width. It would be almost unseen to the naked eye. If there was a seam, then that meant that whatever this was, it could open. And if it could open, then there wasn't a wall here, but-
"A door," she whispered.
Dawn looked at her questioningly. "What?" Scorch ignored her for the moment, and spoke to Spectre again.
"Ping the wall here with some echolocation. Tell me what feedback you get."
Spectre emitted a small blue pulse from his center, and waited a few seconds. When he had finished, he spun back towards her and spoke with a smug sort of tone.
"The wall is hollow behind it. And since you found that seam there, I can only assume that you are correct in assuming it can be opened." He moved close to it, and shot a few blue beams into it. Instead of simply focusing on one component of the mechanism, however, he scanned the entire door to search for an access point. After several seconds, a ker-chunk sound emanated from behind the newfound entrance, and a rumbling could be heard as it began to push the two panels that created the seam forward, and to each side.
As they slid away from each other, they revealed an open hallway that looked as though it hadn't been touched in many years. And there in the dust on the floor were three sets of footprints, including the Aspriet's. "Well, this is just a hunch, but I think we're gonna follow these for a bit." Scorch entered, tracking the footprints for where they needed to go.
The passage turned out to be just one in a series of hallways they had to traverse. As they walked, each of them formulated theories on why the Heroes had come here. "You said that some Academy members tried to make weapons using Vex tech? Maybe that's what they were after, finding something for the city to use against the Darkness."
Dawn shook her head at Eager's suggestion. "He said 'tried'. Doesn't mean that they actually succeeded."
Scorch racked her brain for what they could have possibly wanted. "Maybe they were after more research on the Vex? Looking for other ways to fight them?"
This time, it was Spectre who rejected the idea. "That can't be it, or at least not just research. Before pulling out of Venus, the city's scouts grabbed all the possibly useful information that they could. We've got just about every bit of research imaginable that was performed on the Vex, though I'll admit it apparently didn't amount to much. They're just too vast and unknown."
They finally came into a circular room, one which had an exit that led outside. Upon walking through said exit, they found themselves in a large quad. There were buildings surrounding the area, and large trees that grew around the exterior, stretching up with their branches and leaves effectively shielding most of the site from view. "These are the Ishtar Commons," muttered Spectre, "I thought that this place had supposedly been lost to the Fallen long ago."
"Perhaps at one point, it had been. Look," said Eager, pointing at the building on their left. The structure was circular, and it had several entrances in the front, large walkways with roofing above them. Near the walkways were groups of bodies lying around. They jogged over to the bodies to find that they were the skeletal corpses of several Fallen Vandals and Dregs, nearly completely decomposed from the exposure of air and various wild-life such as insects and bacteria.
Eager reached his hand through one's exposed ribcage to push through the long-since rotten flesh inside. When he retracted it, he now held a bullet between his fingers.
"It's definitely a few years old, and human made. From the looks of it, probably fired from a hand cannon." Scorch heard this, and turned to Spectre. "Hey, you've analyzed the Hawkmoon, right? Can you project a small holographic image of what kind of rounds it would fire?"
The Ghost silently pulsed for a moment, before a grid-like beam emitted from his eye. There in the air was a replica of the Hawkmoon's bullets, and Eager held the round he'd found up to it for comparison. Aside from some erosion and wear, they were a match.
"Alright, so we know they've been through here." Scorch pointed into the building. "They likely killed these bastards here to get inside, so whatever it was they were after was probably pretty important to whatever they were doing." Marching on, the trio entered through one of the openings.
Spectre looked around as they walked. "I'm having to pull up some old, and I mean old maps for this. According to one, this leads to an area they called the 'Hall of Whispers'."
Eager looked at him curiously. "What kind of a name is that?"
"Well apparently, most of the top-secret research was done in this facility, the Ishtar Archive. Obviously, scientists had to keep a bit hush-hush about it, hence the 'whisper' part. I can only imagine at what they were working on down here." Spectre's voice sounded a bit uneasy, and that put Scorch on edge. Slowly, she drew the Last Word from its holster at her side, and held it carefully. She was no stranger to guns, as she'd had a very open experience on the streets.
As Spectre had said, they came to a room that was quite a bit larger than they's expected. In front of them was a staircase that led up to a second story, and to their left was just a quicker route to their destination. Taking the ground-route, they found themselves walking into a room that appeared to be a dead end. On the right was a computer console, and directly in front of them was a wall that appeared to incline in an upward direction away from them, almost like a ramp. From what they could see, it was almost entirely covered in plant-growth.
Spectre hovered over to the console. After a few quick scans, he turned back to them. "Alright, so that diagonal wall there is not a wall, but a door. A lot of hidden doors today, huh?" The snarky Ghost accessed the console, and the inclined wall, one that they now knew was a door, began to open. It split in the middle, each side of it moving into their respective walls. The plants were shoved off by the incoming edge, and when the doors were finally open, the ground was littered with green leaves and plant-growth.
A rush of cold air, air that had been sealed in here for years came out and blew through them. The air became chilly, almost a presage of what might have occurred down in the Ishtar Archive's depths. But something nagged at her, something… She felt as though it were right to go down. Her feeling that propelled her was definitely there, urging her to make her way into the darkness of the Ishtar Archive, but it was almost reluctant; as though it wanted her to do it, but it was afraid at something it knew was down there.
She shook her head to clear her mind. If the Heroes had been down here, there might be important clues to find, clues that could lead her to them. Gathering her courage, she began to carefully enter the room.
The immediate area behind the door was an open room, illuminated by artificial light on the left side. Directly in front of her was the way down into the rest of the Archive, a large staircase that led into the deeper sections. She noticed some objects casting several shadows in her peripheral vision over to the far left of the room, and she focused her vision on them to see what they were. As the sound of Dawn and Eager's footsteps came up behind her, she held her hand up to where her mouth would have been, had she not been wearing a helmet.
"God…"
In the corner was a group of skeletons. Scorch walked over to them with Spectre, intent on investigating them. There were four of them, with one laying on the ground near the others, one sitting hunched against the wall, and two of them hugging each other on the floor. She wondered who they'd been. She heard Eager ask tentatively from behind her, "You don't think… that's them, do you?" She was about to respond that perhaps some of them were, before she stopped herself. Something clicked. "Hang on… they can't be. Firstly, because one of them, Ash, is an Exo," she said, turning and pointing at Dawn. "That already rules out that possibility."
She looked back at the bones. "Plus, there's four of them here. There are only three Heroes, that's just basic math. And besides, only five years for full decomposition in a sealed vault? Decomposition that would not only have to eliminate their flesh, but also their clothing and armor? No, these are different people." Eager fell silent, probably feeling slightly embarrassed that he'd suggested such a possibility without even checking basic facts. She looked them over, searching for any form of identification.
Finally, near the skeleton sitting against the wall, she found a laminated ID card; no name, but it did have a bar code and a series of numbers for security access. The barcode had faded considerably and would likely not be valid, but the numbers were still legible.
"7-012-6," she muttered.
"What?" asked Dawn from behind her. She stood up, and gave a small salute to the skeletons out of respect for whoever they'd been. Then, she turned to Dawn and Eager.
"One of the people had an access code on them when they died. It-" As she looked at it carefully, an idea dawned on her. "Spectre, could you scan this for fingerprints please?"
The Ghost looked it over, vibrated slightly, and faced her. "Well, there are quite a few undamaged marks from a human's phalanges. But there are also a few prints that don't have any identifying ridges, almost as though they were made by-"
"Gloves," Scorch interrupted. "Can you guess at what kind of gloves, specifically if they'd been made by Guardians?" He vibrated in the air again, struggling to make such an estimate. "If I had to guess, I would say by a female Warlock. The prints are slimmer than the readable fingerprints, and Warlocks tend to use different materials for their armor than Titans or Hunters. They're more classy, more… uniform."
Scorch smiled. "They were here. They came here, and they picked up this card, which means that they may have needed it. Let's go." Without further explanation, the Seekers continued on down the spiraling staircase they'd seen before.
It was quite some time before they reached the end of the stairs. Evidently, people had believed that the experiments done here were dangerous enough to warrant security in the form being buried hundreds of meters below ground and rock. When they did arrive, they all had a small intake of breath at the sight which awaited them.
The room which they now stood in was evidently a lab of some sort. Inside were catwalks and structures that had been built inside the cave, keeping people from falling into the water below. Large generators and other devices were situated in the water and around the platforms, likely to have a constant source of power. None of them said anything, instead opting to stand in the cold chamber silently, waiting for something to happen.
"Well?" asked Dawn impatiently. "Are we just going to stand here, or…?" At times, Scorch forgot that she was the innocent-minded copy of the Warrior's personality. She probably wasn't nearly as uneasy as she and Eager were. Raising her gun, she slowly walked into the light created from the lamps in the ceiling high above.
"Welcome," came a feminine voice, loud and all around. Scorch tensed up, all of her muscles contracting from sudden surprise. "Please enter your security code to access systems." The voice was obviously automatic, and had likely just been triggered by movement in the lab.
Easing up a bit, Scorch relaxed, and stood up straight. "Jesus, that scared me for a sec. Spectre, where can we put in that code?"
Spectre emitted a blue pulse, and waited to receive feedback. After a few moments, he turned towards an area in the back of the lab, and said, "This way."
The three Guardians and Ghost moved cautiously through the cave-facility, watching for any signs of a threat. Fortunately, none presented themselves. Their only accompanying stimuli came from the sound of water drops falling into the cavern's own mini-lake below, and the echoes of their footsteps against the metal catwalks.
After what seemed like an eternity of silence and waiting for something to jump out at them, they reached a large cylindrical terminal. Scorch glanced around, checking to be sure that their surroundings were secure. The light was dim though, and she could-
Suddenly, she noticed something on the floor, several meters away and nearly hidden in the shadowed lighting. She narrowed her eyes at it, attempting to see what it was. Figuring that something this small wasn't going to jump at her and kill her, she approached it. It was a bundle of fabric on the ground. And more specifically…
"A cloak." Scorch picked it up, and rotated it around. "This must have been the Hunter's. Matt's."
Dawn pointed at it excitedly. "I knew there was something about this place! I knew there was a connection!" Scorch analyzed the cloak further, and upon unfolding it, was surprised to find that there were several burn holes in the fabric, holes that appeared to have been made by weapons that simply singed through the cloth.
"No bullets could have made those marks," commented Eager. "Gotta be some kinda Fallen or Vex weaponry. Might have been attacked while they were down here."
"Attacked by what?" she asked, turning around to face him with the cloak still in her hand. "There aren't any bodies around here, what could have attacked them? I don't like this."
The Ghost became impatient, and presented himself. "Look, I get it. We know they were here. But in order to find out what for, I need to see what they accessed here." Spectre moved closer, and shot his blue beam into the controls. "7…012…6…" The Ghost muttered to himself as he accessed the machine.
There was a pause, and then the computer accepted the code he'd given it. "Thank you, Dr. Shim. Shall I bring up your most recent files?"
Spectre jerked backwards in the air for a moment. "Dr. Shim? Why is that name so familiar…?"
Scorch ignored the Ghost's odd behavior, and spoke to the machine. "Yes, bring up the top ten files accessed last and their dates."
"Of course Dr. Shim." The monitor of the console booted up for a moment, and then Scorch saw a line of folders and labels, waiting for her to select them. She found that she could use the monitor by dragging her fingers across it, a touch-screen. Stuff like that wasn't used much anymore, everything nowadays was holographic; which meant this facility was old. "Okay, this one here is way more than five years old… same… same… most of these are- oh! Got one!" She selected a file named, 'Anomalous Events'.
When it opened, she saw several contents, all of them log entries. She clicked on the first one, and began to read it aloud to Eager and Dawn.
"Alright…'There have been enough events as of now to warrant a protocol for recording them. It started small, a misperception here, a stray thought there. But now, things have progressed. I've noticed that as we study the mind, time seems to move more fluidly, as though it becomes more flexible. Gravity feels odd, somehow. Right now, we're unsure if this is just our exhaustion from researching this thing for so long, or… if it's somehow managing to shift reality a bit.' What?" Scorch stopped reading.
"Creepy," commented Eager. Ignoring him, she continued onto another log, one a bit farther on in the list.
" 'It's not us, it's definitely the mind. It's not just editing reality, it's literally creating a rift in time and space. Not a very big one, but enough to send a signal out through the time-stream. That's not even the worst news. Whatever it's sending out, something else is receiving. We're picking up activity in the rift from an unknown source, a source that likely is even more powerful than the mind-core we've currently got in our possession. It makes you wonder; when a child cries for its parent, does the mother or father not come running to help? I hope we can be done with the research quickly, and get the hell away from whatever might be coming.' "
"Jeez…" whispered Eager. "What the hell were those researchers working on here?"
Scorch swallowed, and skipped to the last entry. "This is the final one; 'It's over. We decided last night, we can't risk bringing a warmind here, even if it could save us. For all we know, we might very well be in the right reality, but if we aren't, then what would happen if the Vex did somehow manage to assimilate even some of the complex systems of the warming? Humanity's very survival could be at risk here, but not from an enemy we can just take up arms against. It'd be a war against a foe that could not be beat, one with not unlikely odds, but impossible odds. Everyone would be a slave to its torture, and we can't allow that. Chances are, we're not our originals, and we're just copies in the simulation. Whatever we do, we're screwed. We're going to seal the facility, and wait up near the entrance. If someone does come, we need to be able to warn them. To make them stay away. This place is not ours anymore; it belongs to the mind, to the conflux. And it is pissed.' "
Spectre was silent as she read. Once she had finished however, he spoke up. "I think I know what happened with those skeletons we saw," he said, his tone sounding quite grave. "First though, let's see what other files the Heroes accessed."
Moving back to the top ten files, Scorch scrolled through them and found a file with a peculiar name, the last file that had been opened.
"This is the most recent file opened; probably one that the Heroes accessed. But it's encrypted; think you can try cracking it, Spectre?"
The Ghost moved up to it and shot his blue beam into the computer, presumably accessing information. "This is definitely a tough one. I can get most things... but maybe this is a job for the Cryptarch." He issued a command into the computer, and after a few moments of it shaking slightly as it processed the command, a cylindrical drive popped out of a tray.
"Take that; you can give it to Master Rahool later. I guarantee that he'll be able to crack it."
Scorch held the data drive triumphantly in her fist. "Alright, great! We got what we came here for; a lead. Let's head back to Earth, and get this decrypted-"
"Before you celebrate just yet at our discovery, there is a very important and very deadly matter for us to discuss." All three Guardians faced Spectre, confused as to the concerned tone in the Ghost's voice.
"Like I said, I think that I know what happened to those skeletons. I had to search through quite a few archaic records to find some for Dr. Shim. The man was brilliant, if a little rude. In any case, he, along with the rest of his research group, Chioma Esi, Maya Sundaresh, and Duane-Mcniadh disappeared while working here in the Ishtar Archive. Nobody knew what happened to them, though I suppose with the Collapse happening around them, nobody really cared about four people going missing when millions were being slaughtered. They were never found in any case."
Scorch crossed her arms. "So?"
"So, I think that those skeletons we saw are them, or at least what happened to them. And I've managed to piece together clues from a combination of reading those logs and scanning around. See, there's something else in that console." He gestured to the monitor. "Something not human, something… powerful." They all fell silent as they listened to the Ghost, hanging onto every word.
"You see, what they were studying here was a Vex mind-core. Now, an individual Vex is just a leaf on a huge tree, part of the one shared mind that controls every unit simultaneously. But what happens when you take the roots of the tree, and plant them?"
Dawn answered, "It grows."
Spectre bobbed at her. "Exactly. They had no idea that while they were analyzing this thing, it was doing the exact same thing to them. And it learned, it inferred, it copied. Something happened that made escape for them impossible, and scanning this thing confirms my fears to be true."
"And those would be?" Eager seemed to be hanging onto every word, and just wanted the truth.
"As soon as this monitor was reactivated, so was the mind-core. This whole time we've been reading, it's been analyzing us, studying us. And now it's running simulations."
"Simulations?" asked Scorch. "What does that mean?"
"It means that right now, there is an artificial copy of us in its database, doing the exact same thing we're doing, saying the same things we're saying, and thinking the same things we're thinking."
Dawn crossed her arms. "So? They're just simulations, copies and imitations of us."
Spectre shook his body. "Not quite. They are simulations, yes, but the mind core has literally created virtual copies, complete with minds, personalities, memories, you name it. For all intents and purposes, they are alive."
Scorch shivered. "That's… disturbing. Can we help them?" Spectre looked at her.
"The real question is, can we help ourselves? See, I've looked at the number of copies it's created. It's well over two hundred already, running them all simultaneously, each of them acting just as the originals do. And each of them has a proper mind, an actual sense of being that makes them feel just as the originals do."
"Oh, God…" Eager moaned as he realized whatever Spectre was talking about. Meanwhile, Dawn and Scorch remained confused.
"What? What's wrong?"
He turned to them. "They feel just as the originals do, think like they do, act like they do, every single one of them. And there's over two hundred copies, but there will only ever be one reality. Think of the odds."
Scorch held her hand up to where her mouth would have been. "Oh, I think I'm gonna be sick…" He nodded. "Chances are, we aren't the originals. That we're one of the copies. And that means that we're in the Vex simulation right now, where it controls whatever happens to us. It could kill us, torture us for eternity, you name it."
"In the simulation," Scorch realized aloud, "it's playing God."