Day 11
Fascinating.
Very fascinating.
As it would turn out, he'd been completely mistaken – or rather, the contemporary Fabronians had been, regarding their own ancestors. Perhaps the stories had been dismissed as too wild, or there had been misunderstandings, or the wars had really been that devastating; Knowing wars, and knowing what he had just found, he didn't find it difficult to believe, and neither was it hard to see that he had been wrong.
This civilization had turned out to be much, much more extraordinary than he expected, at least for some definitions thereof –
They had left their galaxy, in their glory days, they had ventured far and wide, to Earth and even beyond, and, they had created miracles, again, for some definition –
The splendor of the city, the fancy decadent pleasures of the eye, everything, except perhaps the sturdy construction of the dome itself... all of that was worthless compared to what he'd found down here, in the caves beneath the temple.
What had he found? Well, for one thing there were caves, natural ones at first, at least in part. There was definitely some blueish, whitish chalk like stone reflecting the blue lights from the crystal; The stairs led down the equivalent of several stories in what seemed like a straight path at first but then curved into a cylindrical structure with a spiral staircase inside, going all the way to a chamber, where there were several door-arches leading into the walls, and more stairs – judging by the engravings, they lead to maintenance-related facilities and if the door had been open, the place was probably used and maintained by the elusive residents – it were the stairs that held his attention the most, so he followed them, further and further down, until solid, bluish crystal gave way to glass-like steps with a subtle cellophan-ish rainbow shimmer, leading along the walls with the help of a safety railing. So far, it could be seen as a fancy "sufficiently advanced technology" equivalent of an industrial staircase, the sort that would be a tin ladder or metal scaffolding stairs back on 21st century Earth –
Oh, but when he got down.
What he found put the surface to shame in terms of being dreamlike, perhaps because it was distilled and unprofaned by everyday pride, mythical and respected even by the Fabronians themselves, or, perhaps, the difference was apparent only because he was uniquely situated to know what it was, or, at least, to recognize it eventually as his many senses took it in.
What was it, well, it was hard to describe, but it became easier if one merely focused on the visuals as if they were all there was – The walls gave way to a large artificial cavern with clear, temple-like structures visible on the walls, filled with three dimensional structures that resembled antique buildings or scaffolding, a web of columns, walls and platforms connected by stairs with no clear symmetry, just simple forms repeated in endless combinations of infinite potential, like a child's pure, unspoiled imagination constructing nonsensical structures out of a few basic shapes and no imposed function or limitation beyond that.
Everything was engraved with writing and mathematical symbols, a zesty cursive as individual and irregular as handwriting, as if it were there to show off the capability of the material with the way it clashed with the otherwise regular geometric shapes that made up the building-block like constructions.
The stairs he'd come in on detached from the cavern walls and seemed to float autonomously in the air, leading to one of the platforms, a square of bluish-white opaque crystal connected to multiple walkways columns and stairs, some leading up, some down.
At its seams lapped not-quite-waves-not-quite-vapors of a very transparent, liquid-like material that glittered with a slight rainbow reflection, like the skin of a soap bubble, or a swirl of oil on water.
The structure of platforms and columns continued somewhat above and far below it; Despite being submerged, there was hardly any decrease in visibility if one peered down at the structures that grew stranger the further one peered down, housing rooms and glass-like pillars, sideways ziggurats and an impossible labyrinth of stair wells, walls covered in writing, pictogram or tile-like patterns, some of them resembling checkerboards and underwater towers;
It was a little like diving under the surface of a large swimming pool with water goggles, and observing the three-dimensional structures of the pool that one had never consciously paid attention to, including to pyramid-like drops toward where the deep end was or the jumping boards stood.
He walked up to the seemingly immaterial liquid, scanned it, and understood: Not only was it breathable, it was part of the interface, for what one might describe as a computer – If he could trust what he'd read, the Fabronians simply called it a machine, sometimes the machine, or the sacred machine for the sentimental types – it was quite an unique contraption deserving of the definite article, but there was likely a psychic component to this contraption that the term 'machine' didn't fully cover, a slightly living quality that he could feel all around him, a resonance exuding from the crystal –
So much here was crystal, the same crystal used or those personalized keys and ultra-durable power relays, but on a much larger, more sophisticated scale, a flowing metamaterial as a vessel for thoughts, a network that pondered, daydreamed while it waited for its masters to return, almost but not quite the presence of an entity –
The experience of walking down these stairs, crossing the structures and wandering to the 'shore' was much more deserving of the term 'numinous' than anything the temple above had to offer, it felt closer to treading on a graveyard than everything in the entire empty city had, and more like a haunted mansion than most places afflicted with either a reputation is superstition or suspicious alien activity.
There was something real here, not quite as ridiculous as lovecraftian ancient whispers, but a subtler, less cartoonish equivalent one might metaphorically compare to such, a suggestion of thoughts, a slight affecting of focus and emphasis, no mystical visions but diffuse and conceptual mental images that could have been artistic rendition of this sparkly, solitary cave, had they not 'stylized' all other senses too, even the sensation of cool, fresh air that flowed into the sparkles in synesthesia, and though there was, without doubt, real sparkliness to be found here, it seemed intensified somehow, in a way that ebbed and flowed alongside a certain heavy, ceremonial feeling, more and more so the closer he came to the water.
Everything looked brighter, sharper, more defined, like ramping up the resolution of an image, or rather, his ability to perceive it – Details that would have eluded him normally, by virtue of his being all up in his head and having learned to watch for a small selection of the most indicative tidbits were crisp and clear, things he couldn't have focused on all at once just seemed to surround him casually, and curious, telling minutiae were to be glimpsed wherever he happened to look –
It was not just that the colors were more intense or that the lights seemed brighter – An equivalent of this was true for all senses, for sound and smell, even the brushing of his clothing against his skin, to the point that it all seemed equally bright and the notion seemed inescapable that what he thought to be separate indicators were just pieces of the same continum, that sound and sight and even understanding were, on some level, fundamentally the same – concepts in his head, presumably.
We all only perceive the world through the simulations built by our brains, after all, and for once, he felt strongly reminded of that, especially since this occurred in a place as remarkable and intricate at all – It was almost overwhelming at times, a chill of sudden change making its way up its spine like a surge of feeling just before one could discern it enough to label it as good or bad, euphoria or dysphoria; It was just stimulation, and a lot of it.
He almost felt tempted to close his eyes, ward off further perception until he could make heads or tails of the right now, but yet, he felt like retreating to process things would be cutting of the stream of magnificence – he knew he'd have all the time in the world to think about it later, but what his deliberations would or would not be able to turn up all depended on the available input, that is, on the rapid streams of consciousness he could only live through right now.
He'd experienced quite a lot of things in his time, but sights like this were still rare enough that he felt tempted to sit down and take some time to adjust, though he did not, simply pausing in his steps where another flight of stairs continued straight down into the liquid.
It would have been an overstatement to compare it to the matrix; If the idea occurred to him at all, then because even with all his travels, it was impossible to completely unbind himself from his own culture as a frame of reference, but, few humanoids peoples came this close to something similar – now this down here really was an eternal city, if the poetic flourish were pardoned; If it was ever forgiveable in any context, this was probably one of them.
The presence felt heavy in his mind, enough to set chills of anxiety down his spine, though he told himself that it was a mere reflexive reaction to stimulus and that he'd previously dealt with creatures and places that could induce them regardless of the onlooker's experience. Fear was, after all, all too closely related to excitement, it was all just an excitation of nerves that a disciplined mind should be able to recontextualize; He could allow it to stall him, or use it as fuel to plunge ahead, and that was what he chose to do – How could he waver, when he understood all too well what a treasure lay here before him?
He needn't confirm it, he just knew, or rather, he experienced it as an ineffable, non-debatable qualia, as fundamental as seeing the color red – all that was left for his mind to do was to recognize it and act accordingly, continuing to step forward onto the stairs even as he felt dizzy with the steadily increasing load of stimulus; The 'liquid' didn't really feel like one, becoming drenched in it was a light, soapy sensation. It occurred to him too late that he would also drench his beloved clothing and that he'd probably missed his chance to pick up suitable equipment at the last junction, but there was no turning back now.
He still figured that these skin-hugging overalls the Fabronians sometimes wore would have been rather practical here, but just kept on his way; It was too late now and he certainly didn't feel like turning back so close to the wealth of knowledge that lay buried here.
He didn't have to fight his reflexes too badly as he stepped through the surface, the discomfort was almost entirely on a psychological level; Precisely because of that, he'd have thought that it would be harder to overcome not just one, but two layers of instinctive reactions urging him first not to breathe in a liquid and second to trigger his respiratory bypass system, but the smooth, swirly texture of the cellophane glitter around him was barely beyond a particularly gelatinous gust of wind, and
His suspicious about the interface were confirmed when the intensity of the... phenomenon increased abruptly the moment he submerged his head past the surface. Before, it seemed merely to have intensified his perception of existing things, but now, there was something else, something more.
At first, it seemed only like meaningless, static noise, an interference produced by trying to 'look' at his physical surroundings and the 'view' presented by the machine at the same time, or that was his theory – There were simple, noise-like things, an overlay of rainbow colors, traces of afterimages of things moved through his field of vision, fluid, breathing motion in a land of sharp angles, things that were easily dismissed as simply 'errors'.
But then, as he stumbled down the stairs in liquid suspension, he began to grasp the true extent of what this ingenious creation of the Fabronians was capable of – The first indication was when the visions somewhat solidified, becoming more concrete – trying to keep his balance, he glanced at a wall, and of all sudden, the blank rounded shapes of the pillar next to it was covered in writing – once he caught himself, placing his arms on his things for support, he looked around, and saw that there was faintly shimmering rainbow writing on every surface – That, and math symbols, too, plusses and minuses and underlines mingled with the loops of cursive 'gs' and 'l's.
It wasn't machine writing or even any sort of orderly, presentable text, but chaotic, sideways writing, your classic "mad mathematician", "room full of crazy" type of look, frantic scribble designed to merely retain a multitude of ideas generated in a burst of inspiration, not to sell them.
Except, of course, that for most languages and mathematical formulas, he'd probably been
He could see the individual letters, but he couldn't make out the whole , as much as that plagued his curiosity – He might have had some kind of mythical source code of the world before his eyes, perhaps a text from the machine interface or some interpretation of what he saw, but some far-flung intuition told him that he may not have gone deep enough to fully see its meaning.
Of course, he knew that there might be no meaning: The shape of symbols and language and their meaning could be quite disparate things for the brain, there'd been cases of brain damaged patients speaking in grammatically correct sentences made of actual worlds that were completely nonsensical. He might just be overwhelmed or unaccustomed to thins and reacting with mild halucinations, a wild outside triggering of brain regions that did not involve the one for meaning, even though the assortment of letters and math symbols was of correct shapes.
It was frustrating, though, that it seemed like there was a puzzle to decipher, but no answer. It was that frustrated thought that led his attention away from the attempt to focus on the words to the writing itself, and the realization that it was his handwriting.
He couldn't say if it had always been his handwriting, but it had assumed this state once he cared to focus, as if it were some Schroedingeresque radioisotope.
It was sort of sloppy and dissapointing in a way, but then again, this was his mind interpreting what this machine sent it, what else would be the 'font' used by his brain? Comic Sans perhaps? He should not expect anything fancier than he could imagine – at least when it came to the illusions. They occupied him so much, he may have missed a more essential detail; The outside world in its conventional sense, the world in which he was walking down a flight of stairs, seemed increasingly harder to focus on with all these other channels of consciousness and perception opening up, and so, it took him a while to notice the obvious...
The writing – not the visual overlay, the actual writing in the walls – It had changed, all of it had changed, and unlike with its psychic equivalent, he was sure that it had once been a different handwriting, a more elegant cursive rather than his own hurried script.
The machine was already responding to him, physically adapting, no, connecting... Indeed, here was where the machine's construction revealed its true genius: While a classic computer was something that solved problems for you after receiving your input – no matter how complicated the problems or how seamless the man/machine interface – this one was different: Not only did it solve the tasks the users posed for it while relying on their supervision for orders and input, it formed a two-way conduit in which it also aided and supervised the thinking of the user – and in that way, it was truly distinct from the kind of device one would commonly call a 'computer' – The Doctor felt this enhancement quite distinctly, indeed, it was than what he could control, there were gentle suggestion lines as to where to direct his attentions, and he noted a flow of thought outside of the usual patterns – memories he hadn't reviewed in years were being called before his mind's eye because they were related to the trail of his thoughts, indeed, his momentary awareness seemed to jump around like a bouncing rubber ball in the network of ideas, emotions, memories and reaction patterns that constituted his greater self, outside the normal procedure of having to access one memory through another associated with it, like links in a chain.
Everything was experienced through a concept in his head, so everything was available to him – and yet more, further networks, nodes of alien thought and knowledge that increasingly became as available as his own memories – he had to note the ingenuity, your usual humanoid brain wouldn't be able to stand it if all this information was dumped into it at once, or I they were even forced to process it, sort through it – He might be able to stand it, but he'd be redendered quite occupied and unproductive by the exercise, and most humans certainly wouldn't – he wasn't even sure about Fabronians.
But using this? This natural manner of accessing stored, structured thought? Child's play! One would only access the information one needed or wanted without an uncontrolled flooding and yet, one would have it in mere moments, and feel most natural doing it.
If Intuition was defined as a process where multiple parts of the brain communicated with each other and functioned together despite their generally disparate tasks, then the Fabronians could be said to have built a bionic answer to it that worked better than the original, though the system was, at was, at its heart, an easy search data structure – a simplification that, to him, bolstered its brilliance rather than diminishing it. He could already discern from the databanks that his case wasn't an average one, that there had once been Priests (or perhaps one should call them 'Operators' or 'Technicians') working all over this complex, who would receive a few weeks of gradual training and at times even be given chemicals to boost their natural abilities, much like the psychic soldiers were.
With training, one could control and work with ones physical body in the real world, and, in parallel, access the vast sea of information inside the machine, and unpleasant side effects would quickly be reduced to a minimum.
He, of course, hadn't experienced such a careful introduction to this place; He had to jump in head first, didn't he? He wasn't prepared for the sensation of losing touch of his physical body – if he were, he would have been able to move it without problems or loss of control while still being relatively detached from it and moving about in the vault-like mindspace of the machine, but as it was, he struggled to walk forward and kept touching his own limbs and face to assure himself that they were still there by means of the resulting feedback.
His arms and legs seemed to dissolve into a tingly feelings, almost as if they ceased to be there until he moved them in a shockingly normal manner; It was as if his mind may be left behind as a naked figure of light, unburdened by flesh – it also distorted his perception of time as it passed, in theory, a brilliant arrangement – always operating at that split-second choice slowed-down eternal moment pace would be supremely impractical in real life, apart from the rare moments where such a thing was activated by instinct – But in the machine, thought would be free to move as fast as the brain would let it, and still be slower than what the hardware could keep up with, running long strings of calculations and thought-trains while their physical body executed its much slower motions, effectively, giving the operators almost perfect freedom in cyberspace, limited only by their brains themselves, or, the brains when they were supported by the machine's help in guiding their systems. –
But right now, that same fancy invention was making it very hard to walk and keep his balance while doing it – He'd reach out on a far-flung trail of thought and questioning and then, suddenly, some aspect of his physicality would summon him back to the here and now, to begin the next movement necessary for walking – At first, he thought he could turn his motions into an useful, grounding mechanism, but his attempts at climbing down the stairs became increasingly uncoordinated, he simply could not settle on a rhythm with his perception this distorted – In the time it took for his heel to touch the ground after his toes had made contact, he'd have gotten distracted, forgotten what he was doing and needed to recall it all again before he could move.
This, however, did not mean that the state he was in was wholly akin to a prophetic fervor or numbing intoxication – In some ways, his sober analytic mind was still working, it just wasn't operating at the normal speed of the physical plane anymore – His skepticism wasn't impaired, he was quite capable of doubting his however wild perceptions, separating emotions and impressions from fact and maintaining a dispassionate, analytical perspective –
He could even tell he was staggering, but his attempts to do something about it didn't quite come through, or did so only with lags or delays – And it was getting progressively harder to focus on the physical world as his field of vision was increasingly overtaken by the interface – almost like in a broken monitor, large rounded parts of it were just completely... well, not blacked out, but replaced by visuals he couldn't even make sense of, at least not any more than the writing he'd seen before – they looked like fractals, or mandalas, or stained-glass windows, vibrant, unreal colors of living jewel, and he knew, he just knew where great parts of the lower city had taken their inspiration from – increasingly, his mind was taken by flashes in which the room seemed to shift and change, where basic shapes and shadows received reassigned meanings in which, for example, doorways could briefly become windows in a strange shadowy palace, or dots of colorful light melted into flower petals, or shadows that became outstretched hands welcomning him home.
Then, of course, he lost his footing, perhaps because of his reaction to that realization, and he couldn't even say if he'd fallen off the stairs or rolled down because at this point, the external world completely vanished, and geometric surrealist messes took his field of vision for themselves; Were he of the superstitious sort, he might call this an 'out of body experience' – There was no sensation by which to define his own outline, nothing but a possibly unwarranted sense of falling, falling, falling which then too seemed to fade into the distance, leaving him to his much-enhanced thoughts and the contents of that remarkable machine.
At long last, what he'd thought to be the back of his mind was kicked open like a stubborn jammed hatch, and this bizarre osmosis settled into a kind of equilibrium at long last;
All around him, lights and symbols fired off and there were presences that almost seemed familiar, like a chorus of chanting voices of probing hands whose thousand-fold touches seemed to welcome him, drawing him deeper and deeper into the now completed link as they told him the entire story of their city's founding all the way to the present day in a multitude of fashions, from raw individual life stories, poetic archetypical distillations to dry and technical descriptions of the overall factual occurrences; A million shimmering fragments of images glittered around him, pictures full of fire, strife and ancient secrets, until finally, he began to see the meaning behind every single of the bizarre sights and sensations he had experienced, the higher-dimensional lining of significance imparted on what first seemed like simple geometric shapes and colorful rosettes.
Deeper still, he found the basic conceptual networks of the machine, and, reflected within them, those of his own mind; He found himself intensely aware of the connections and equivalences he personally struck behind all things, and the network-machinery of reasons behind all his feelings, intuitions and perceptions, and met with the architects that had designed his visions for him, at the same time being lucid enough to recognize how much this was a simplification of his own mind, in which he was talking to no one but himself and this machine, and with both these perspectives combined and finally reaching a harmonic overlay at long, long last, he could see the purpose and utility in the patterns he'd first seen as a glittering light show and read the elusive writing on the walls, and here, he found what to a being with any less experience, must have been seemed like a faithful simulacrum of enlightenment.
That was almost two days ago.
Though it was still easier to keep his eyes closed, he could now open them when he chose to and perceive the outer world without much difficulty, complete with an added overlay of luminous writing annotating what he saw – on the few occasions that he did, he'd see crystal-like structured both pearly and transparent, both sharp-angled and cylindrical, everywhere columns, platforms, a labyrinth or walls or geometric shapes.
Physically, he'd done little more over the past few days than to float suspended in the interface liquid, drifting aimlessly through the megastructure, aware that one advantage offered by flooding the whole place with interface liquid instead of using enclosed chambers and capsules as it had been done in the early stages of the technology was how the entire area could be utilized in a three-dimensional manner, allowing operators to move around in length, breadth and depth.
Before he stepped inside this chamber, he hadn't known that – information about this place hadn't been too forthcoming in the public archives, at least not in a manner that would have allowed him to piece together the true nature of this place beyond simply being a special place of ritual importance that could be accessed from beneath the temple – Now, he could access that knowledge as easy as his own memories, and even playfully wander onto further knowledge like on an immeasurably more sophisticated internet search, for example, he could glimpse that besides the temple, the central buildings of the parliament, high court and several elected government buildings had an access port leading down here, as did at least two of the historic personal palaces once owned by aristocratic families and some scientific institutions.
Though his physicality had rested idly, his mind had not rested for a single moment, his brain a buzzing hive of relentless activity – as it would turn out, there was as vast a labyrinth in here as in the city above, not in terms of physical space (the cavern was hardly impressive after one had seen the lentil-shaped dome whose very bottom housed it), but in terms of the depth present in the cyberspace – And even his two-day long wanderings amounted to little more than a casual wiki-walk through virtual halls as majestic and ancient as the virtual ones.
Metaphorical halls, that is, the interface made full use of its disembodied nature and, like much Fabronian engineering, didn't waste much time mimicking natural affairs while still remaining amenable to humanoid intuition.
Much like the city above, it was a stratified monument cataloging the contributions of countless generations, in a manner that almost resembled the natural growth of a tree or the sediment layers in a mountain –
Already remarkable at the point of its inception, the Machine had been in use for a long time and refined its function through learning alghorithms this entire time, to the point that it outperformed other prototypes with newer software through sheer 'experience', a trait that seemed oddly more like it would describe a person with intrinsic value, not the rapidly modernizing forward grind of technology – Similar structures, often intertwined with other, specific functions, had at time been erected on colony worlds and he even suspected (no, looked up: There barely seemed to be difference between the two in this state) that the structure that had become of key importance in the Time War had been of Fabronian make, a novel energy source made possible by unique features of that particular star system and its local spacetime – The link between the device and space itself had also been responsible for the vastness of the resulting destruction.
Even now, he was surprised at the way his thoughts and speculations would dart forward in their usual, imprecise way, only for the pathways of the machine to apply supplemental information as if they were further illuminating or adding detail to a partially finished image, filling out the unexplored blackness like in a strategy video game.
In part because of that, he understood that this was a two-way process, too: The machine learned from the patterns of access and movement of the interfacing minds, using the 'smaller' networks that made up the individual minds as examples to refine its own pathways through a similar method of strengthening or weakening patterns – In a sense, every individual operator who had worked here however briefly had left a slight impression of themselves behind, not enough to leave an individual touch, but sufficient to imbue the Machine with basic fragments of sparks that, in this network, could conglomerate into a greater whole, a touchable afterimage of Fabronian thinking, and the thinking of the machine's users in particular – as in all professions, there ought to have been certain personality profiles that were more common in the job of a priest or operator, perhaps conflicting ones, that would have build overall reactivity 'profile' of the superstructure, though some specks from outliers and the occasional politician must be in here as well –
Overall, the many voices melded into an indistinct chorus, but one exception were those individuals who had remained here after the evacuation, for there had been no one here to offset them and the bias introduced by their small number, and due to their frequent but exclusive use, they had left a more holistic imprint – and he knew now that it was small indeed, there was nobody here but the same two individuals who'd had tea in the Gallery as he'd been napping. At least, nobody else had accessed the machine.
He still did not know their names, nor had he ever met them, but just from the traces of their activities within the machine, his idea of them became much sharper, and took the distinct shapes of a Madam and a Prince, with all the connotations and associations one would attribute to those words.
He was certain now that it was the Prince whose room he had stepped foot in, not because it was recorded somewhere, but because the manner in which he moved through conceptual space was much reminiscent of his carelessly thrown belongings; Just by thinking back to the room, ambiguities in its meanings were clarified for him by a machine that knew what the place looked like from his very own perspective – What his choice of words also denoted was that the pair was of aristocratic origin, of this, he was certain, and everything else he had seen fit in all around it – who else would refuse to leave the city and instead favor haughty isolation, who else would find in themselves the hybris to "rule" over a kingdom with no people, but someone who did not care?
He also knew that this second person was a male, not so much by his own tracks but by how the Lady referred to him in her own movements; It was apparent now that it was her collection of clothing he had spotted, her dress he had seen laid out, and her choice to pick the theater to live in – by the looks of it, the boy didn't much care either way.
He knew also that it had been her handwriting – regal and cursive – which had adorned the walls until right before he fully connected and inadvertently replaced it with his own, making her the last individual to have used it.
His odds of ever meeting them were still rather low, but if he did, they would be not exactly acquaintances, but not complete strangers, either – Nor would he be able to look at Xalax, or indeed, Fabron the same way as he did before. When he got out of here and continued his journey, he would no longer be exploring unknown lands, nor something he held mostly abstract knowledge of, but rather, confirming for himself and forming his own opinion of something he was hardly a stranger to – This virtual experience by proxy could not replicate the very own, intimate knowledge he had of places like Earth's London, Trenzalore's Christmas Town, Gallifrey's Citadel or the wilds around his home village, but even so, Xalax would from now on be a little more than a place he'd visited just one, and seeing the rest of it would feel more like seeing the capital of one's home country, already knowing everything about it's history and associations, or, like spotting a constellation after knowing the names and natures of most its stars, which ones were red dwarfs, blue giants and so on – Should he ever find his way to Fabron again, perhaps accompanied by a friend or two, there would be some good opportunities for some serious showing off.
Even so, he couldn't hope to learn all the Machine could teach him in such a short time, but he could learn enough, as its means of imparting knowledge were rather holistic – it took time to learn all the details, ins and outs of a given topic, but it was shocking just how quickly he could gain a broad enough overview, basic principle or salient intuition, to the point that he felt he could independently deduce some of the things he didn't know yet.
So, he remained adrift, motionless, simply not present in his physicality, as his mind continued his prior wanderings independently on his flesh.
Objectively, his stay in the Machine had only taken up a fraction of his time in Xalax, and though he'd been overwhelmed, his time-related sensed were not so impaired that he couldn't tell that. But on a subjective level, in direct contradiction to all rationality and his better knowledge, it still felt somehow that he'd spent a long, long time inside here, longer than his overall stay on this planet, long enough that it surprised him that he didn't feel the need for food or rest, and why would he, if what felt like hours had merely been minutes as far as his body was concerned?
It was a strange kind of liberation, incomplete and illusory as it may have been – Though the interface liquid was engineered to have hydrating and revitalizing properties, he knew that the needs of the flesh would have forced him to stop eventually should he attempt to continue this indefinitely.
But at least for now, he reveled in the expanse of data and knowledge, taking precise inventory of how far the Fabronians had come in terms of scientific knowledge and studying in detail the blueprints that made their impressive technology possible, all the while listening for the echoes of both current and long gone residents – He had a couple of field days here, during which his body lay forgotten in the sands of time, drifting through the surreal structures of the machine without grazing the realm of relevancy –
He only remembered where it was when he felt the connection waning, swiftly deducing that he must be moving out of the range in which full scale connection was possible.
But before he could gather up his body and open his eyes to do something about it, the fill effects of the disconnection process set in, and they proved just as overwhelming as the initial connection – His reaction speed in corporeal reality, as honed as it was from years of experience, now seemed to him to be unbelievably sluggish, the light semi-liquid feeling as viscous as jelly and returning to his fixed patterns in thought as they had been without the machine's support was a paralyzing shock that left him confused and ineffectual – He never got a concrete impression or perception of the physical area he was in when it happened. He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn't even tell whether he ever got them open, and if he did, it was beyond him to process what he saw.
The image of the world as constructed by his brain was distorted and interrupted as the connection snapped, and it was, to him, as if in a reverse of the expansion and intensification he'd experienced before, everything he could perceive felt distant and attenuated, so unreal and far away that though it was there, it didn't seem to matter enough to perceive, or so it was at first – before he knew it, in the process of feebly realizing that he'd have to expend the necessary willpower to force himself to focus on his surroundings no matter how unreal they felt, it was as if he had no connection to his senses at all, no sight, no touch, not even a sense of position or balance, only a plunge into a deep, dark hole, his numbed consciousness a meteor in the absolute dark tumbling down total freefall.
As such, it was hard to determine if he'd been unconscious or merely unaware, but the sensation of coming to much resembled that of coming out of a dream, and the networks he could easily access just moments before took the place of the elusive memory of dreams and the way they would rapidly fade away if one didn't scramble to hold onto it – What he'd deliberately sought out and taken a conscious look at was still there and would stay with him forever, but that was but a tiny fraction of all that had been free for the taking within the machine.
But even so, even without the full extent of its knowledge, he'd seen enough, at least in regards to some concerns that he could only look beyond because he could now estimate just how much he was still ignorant off.
He was not the slightest bit surprised when he came to wind that he'd been washed up on something resembling a shoreline, where the rainbow-liquid was tinted in oranges and reds by an ambiguous luminescence that shone onto it and the fine, crystalline sand its waves lapped onto, a finer variant of salt or glitter powder that he found himself laying on, facing upwards, his body placed alongside the subterranean shore.
His eyes opened slowly and somberly, fully expecting to find a golf-ball-like artificial dome stretching over him, a rounded canopy topped off with multiple round blotches possessed of an ambiguous reddish luminescence of possibly biological origin.
In silence, he sat up, already knowing full well where he was, that is, to the extent that anyone did: Not even the Fabronians knew who had built this cavern, only that they'd stumbled upon it during the excavations necessary to construct the lower supports of the dome, and that they weren't seeing it for the first time – a similar, but not identical dark twin of it had been known to the colonists from the outer system, the same ones whose reconquest of Xalax had heralded the second florescence – indeed, at least as far its material went, the Xalaxian dome had been inspired by that other structure, itself long lost after having been co-opted as a base by one faction, destroyed not by bombs, but the powerful psychics that the outer system's settlers had created.
It followed that it had not held whatever it was that had given their augmentation experiments the sudden edge that had eventually won them the war – the relation was, in fact, the other way around – telepaths and clairvoyants had discovered both these spheres guided by some diffuse intuition. That was the common story among those in the know, and what he'd read of the personal memoirs written by the leading elites, their generals and their soldiers seemed to promt those same construction.
He could see in his minds eye the remaining images of the other lost structure, a completely different technological aesthetics of blocky edges, minimalism and black-and-white lines. He couldn't be sure without inspecting it himself, but he'd wager that it had once been some sort of control panel – what for, he couldn't say, but he already knew that this cavern had been different.
After rising to his feet, he could see more of the "beach" and saw, first and foremost, a clashing of industry and monument that made one wonder which of the two had been allowed to be there in spite of the other's importance.
He'd come from an opening in the side of the spherical structure that lead to the machine's chambers and had been broken open when It had first been discovered.
From that opening, a multitude of industrial tubes proceeded into the cavern, some of them thick as motorway tunnels, but finer ones, too.
They passed over his head, all labeled with various red symbols roughly where they passed the shore line, continuing inwards.
As for the 'shore' itself, it continued at length to both sides but was broken at times by small 'creeks' of rainbow-shimmering fluid that seemed to be coming from further inland, to wherever the tubes were leading.
And they weren't the only features along the 'beach': It was dotted by simple black grave markers, uncharacteristically unadorned for anything of Fabronian make.
He knew whose they were, of course – They were buried here, at the heart and source of the Fabronians' Fearsome power because it was here where their reminder was most needed – The study dome had enabled the city's inhabitants to survive the onslaught that 'sank' them, but though it had spared them the brunt of the radiation, leading to their not-being-vaporized-on-the-spot, it was, as all technology, imperfect.
A lot of the damage resulting from the irradiation could be healed, the bleedings, anemia and cancers could usually be stopped and if not, the ones so afflicted always had the option of discarding their flesh for part-mechanical bodies which, at this point in Xalax' technological development, could offer them all amenities of the flesh save one: Procreation.
All other malfunctions could be compensating for, but like a hard drive that had been corrupted, the information in their scrambled genes was gone for good.
Cut off from the world, the survivors eventually realized that they would have to bring children into their dark prison if their culture was to survive, and even after suffering the shame of humbling defeat, they were to proud to let it go, so those who still had the gonads they were born with after they were done renovating their bodies attempted to conceive. For many, it was fruitless, and even the artificial methods that were eventually employed had a limited rate of success, resulting in many stillbirths and fatally malformed mutant children – they, rather than the rather few casualties of the sinking itself were honored here.
It was the descendants of their more viable brothers and sisters that had eventually carried on their legacy and gone on to build the structures outside the ring gates – so perhaps, at a time, this had been a place intended to honor the sacrifice, the ashes from which the Xalaxians had then arisen once those resilient enough not to be buried here had brought forth a newer, stronger people – but in hindsight it seemed more like a prologue of this world's eventual fate, especially since even they with their bountiful paradise and awesome might had never stopped to use and rely upon a power even they did not fully understand;
Even the graves of the innocent small ones lay in the shadow of the focal point that all vapour-like streams and enormous tubes were leading to, a mass the size of a small mountain, the most surreal sight of all.
Its central parts were so motionless that it could have been thought to be a grotesque statue, perhaps a nightmarish impression of the dead goddess that was supposed to lay here, but the twitching of its periphery assured him that it was very much a creature, an enormous, titanic mound of white, chalk-like flesh, in places soft and in others calcified and rigid, barely distinguishable from limestone, but still resembling an avalanche of fat and skin in its form, except where the crumpled edges of it touched the enormous tubes that pierced its central mass, firmly embedded there though rivulets of fluid leaked from its margins, minuscule compared to the body and the tubes, but still forming creeks and brooks that rolled off to the shore because of both their titanic sizes.
It was an uncanny sight that evoked primal revulsion, though there was nothing inherently monstrous about it; It was made up completely out of familiar shapes that were simply misplaced and rearranged, a flurried sea of noses, mouths, ribs and unseeing eyes, its outskirts formed by a multitude of progressively smaller humanoid arms and legs that poked out of its periphery and, indeed, each other, the smallest of them usually human-sized though even smaller protrusions could be seen here and there, and some, particularly closer to the inner mass, were lined with eyes and mouths in places where they clearly not belonged, swirls of breasts, organs and facial featured adorning the fat folds of its central mass, some kind of obscenely bloated, massive belly lined at its edges with petal-like protrusions one would not find on an average humanoid, in places warped and twisted, but still recognizable as angelic wings, specks of beauty amid a mess of protruding spider-veins, legs poking out of mouths and tongues lolling out of eyelids.
Had he encountered it before his time in the machine, he would have been mighty bewildered and would have stood there gaping, mighty eyebrows furrowed.
Now, of course, he knew what it was, too, and faced its sight with an expression of solemn understanding and sober detachment.
The sight before him may well have been called an atrocity, but at this point, there wasn't really anything to be done anymore, and no more misery left to end.
The sprawling mass before him constituted the remains of a creature with immense regenerative capacities, able to regrow and replenish its body whenever it was sliced, but its brain had been extinguished for a very long time – the periphery of its still-pulsing cadaver kept trying to mend itself, but without a central organization or any image according to which to rebuild itself, it kept sprouting body parts with little sense or order.
One of the large tubes that pierced it was delivering feed and hydration to sustain the increase in mass, but without that, it would at most remain static. It was like a carcass on life support whose heart was kept beating by artificial means, except that in this case, much of the life support was composed of its own body.
It wasn't quite clear how this being had gotten here; Perhaps this artificial cavern and its twin had been part of burial rite, or they were a ship that had crash-landed here eons ago? Had the being been dead all along when the Fabronians first found it, or did they kill it when it was weak and dormant, finishing it off before it could revive?
The ancients had taken all this to their graves, but the Fabronian were certain that both this cavern found on their own world and the similar one found on a moon of an outer gas giant must be incredibly ancient itself, dating back to long before Fabron was home to any kind of civilization.
It had once been close to humanoid, but once the Xalaxian researchers began their prodding, the cuts they made to dissect the alien had only succeeded in spawning chaotic appendages in mindless, automatized attempts at self-repair. Later, it had been cut many times on purpose, to encourage these disordered growths and ultimately increase its mass to the hideous abomination it was now, so that more of its ichor could be harvested – see, the Xalaxians found it to have a number of useful properties, and indeed, it was to become the base ingredient of wondrous things like the machine's interface liquid and the key crystal material that was used throughout the city – there was so much of it and all of it was the product of this unsightly travesty, euphemistically known as the 'main crystal plant'.
No wonder that all the literature had been so taciturn about just where those things had come from.