----- Chapter 9 : Revolution to the Origin -----
Glancing around at her surroundings she saw she was in a small corridor with the metal wall of the monitor room behind her and an imposing door made of what seemed like stone ahead. The door was covered with characters identical to those found on the three pillars. As she approached this new door she glanced down and spotted cables running between the two ends. She bent over and examined them, one was a power cable but other three were for data. Vol Opt had clearly served some purpose here, maybe to analyse what lay beyond. What did lie beyond? She captured images of the door and sent the data back to Calus.
While closely examining the door, she must have activated it, for it rolled upwards to the sound of stone grinding on stone. Glancing in she saw architecture that could not have possibly been conceived from the mind of anyone on Pioneer One. Ruins! Ancient ruins buried below the ground! The pillars the last remnants of a forgotten civilisation. But why the secrecy? Why had the government chosen to keep this all hidden away?
Right on cue, the familiar beep of the BEE system had chimed in to interrupt her train of thought. The message brought some more clarity but there was not enough to fully decode it.
"Light, darkness... a pair, no... exist, no exist... unlimited, seal... 'MUUT DITTS POUMN'...?"
The last line defied translation, like some kind of incantation and the mention of a seal, did it refer to these ruins? She knew that going back to the mines was no choice at all, besides the ever-deepening mystery was compulsion enough to enter the mysterious ruins.
Making her way through the labyrinthine corridors she had observed that the walls were scarred by photon weapons, most likely military, fights must have taken place everywhere. There were also indications that the army suffered considerable losses in some areas, broken equipment left wherever it had fallen. Soon enough it was her turn to meet the denizens of this place, terrible monsters that attacked without hesitation. Their grotesque appearance and terrifying behaviour befitting of the names she gave them. Taken from myths heard as a child and the insubstantial phantoms of nightmares past, they had become nightmares born in flesh. She realised just what the military had faced and why such a robot army had been amassed in the mines, if these things had ever escaped...
At one point, she had chanced upon a window that looked out and had marvelled at the vast size of the ruins, they stretched on for kilometres inside the hollowed out mountain that formed the rocky sky above. But even that sight paled in comparison to the hole that she found later. It must have been over two hundred metres in diameter, going down into the darkness and rising up to end in sunlight far above her head. Perhaps a blast-crater? Was this the source of the explosion that had claimed all the colonists?
She followed the trail blazed by the military before her to the lower levels. Here everything seemed to be alive with activity, machinery performing a function she could only guess at. Perhaps it was only working as a result of the power put in through the military's link. She started coming across more examples of the characters and dutifully snapped pictures of them which she sent on to Calus, not knowing if he could still receive them or not.
During this journey she found a set of computers interfaced with one of the crystalline monuments mounted high on a central platform in the middle of a large room. Examination of the computers revealed that they had once housed the third military Intelligence... Olga. Olga was no longer there, in place was one of its subroutines. The program seemed to be trying to communicate with the ruins themselves, a strange activity indeed. She could not see a way to access the data it might have accumulated directly but Calus might. She downloaded a copy from the system and sent it to Calus.
She was about to make her way back down when the reply from Calus arrived back. The message was short but she was relieved to receive anything.
"Light makes darkness, a pair exists, but it doesn't always exist. Reincarnation goes forever. The rule is here. It should be sealed. MUUT DITTS POUMN."