15 – Bunker

When the dust settled it revealed a single sphere of black metal at the centre of the explosion. All around there were the scattered pieces of the monstrosities, immobile. After a moment the sphere, barely big enough to contain the crouching shape of a man, slowly opened up, dissolving as the nanites it was made of fell in chunks to the ground.

“Thirty seconds, let’s make them count.” Edmund’s voice emerged from the cocoon before his body was even visible.

As his head appeared to view, he stared at the stunned women. “Come on,” he clapped his hands twice, “They are stunned. We have 28 seconds, let’s go! We need to find the exit.”

The trio looked around frantically. The room was brightly lit from the scattered light sources: the magelight from Toora, the glowing super-hot pieces of broken nanites, the deep and bright sets of eyes on the immobilized nanite constructs’ faces. There also seemed to come a glow from the very walls, something that only now was entering the aware part of Edmund’s mind but that surely was present before as well.

“There!”

There was a small opening, a dark hole into an even darker corridor in the stone. The opening was closing quickly, a web of nanomachines converging towards it and fusing together into the same rock of the room the team was in. They were moving much slower than usual, but there were lots of them, crawling from the walls all around and creating a thin film of liquid shiny metal.

“It’s closing!”

“We can make it! Run!”

They ran through it, destroying the weak film of metal, and Edmund checked the clock in his heads-up display.

“10 seconds. Let’s go!”

Two lights appeared as both he and Toora used their magic again.

“What is that?” The mage asked, pointing ahead.

“Looks like a door.” Lisa said.

Edmund’s eyes lit up. “A blast door! Come!”

He ran towards the door and slammed it open. -19 Humes. 3H left. A part of his mind kept count.

The rest of the team followed suit, and then he closed the door behind him. When it closed, unlike when it opened the door hissed, and a series of mechanisms locked it closed.

“Zero.” He said just as his clock ticked the last second away, and a huge boom could be heard, muffled, through the reinforced steel and concrete of the thick door.

“Are we safe?” the mage asked.

“Yes. This door can keep out an army. Also did you see that there was no trace of nanites outside that room? I think that even if they wanted, they couldn’t follow us through the tunnel.”

“Then why did you close the door behind us so fast?”

“Better safe than sorry. I have learned to play it safe and not trust my own assumptions too much in this changed world.”

Toora nodded. “What did you do, how did you stop them?”

“I used the molten nanites to piggyback a signal through the Pylon’s AI and into the nanites in the room.”

She looked at him for a moment. “Can you do it again?”

He shook his head.

“Okay. Now what?”

“If what I’m seeing is true, we should be in some sort of bunker-lab. We used to have thousands of these scattered everywhere on Earth and beyond, for all kinds of things we needed to do away from the public eye, and away from any potential danger. Especially after… well. Anyway. The issue is that whatever restructured the whole planet also affected this place. Look there.”

He pointed at a sign. It was a rusted plate of metal loosely hanging from the ceiling, with bloated paint that threatened to fall down in chunks at the touch. White letters were written on a blue background, now barely recognizable. Behind it, on the wall, other words were painted in green. They looked out of place and odd, their crusty old paint not matching the immaculate concrete below.

“That sign says Biolab, right? However, the words painted on the wall say that there’s a reactor module that way. And if my hunch is correct, neither of the two signs is accurate.”

“So, whatever remade the world also affected these structures?”

He sighed. “Yeah. They weren’t protected by an Axiom field like the Pylons were.”

“But there must be a logic to all this. Nobody can tell that the world has been remade, right? Only you can, because you remember how it used to be. This means that whatever remade the world, did so in a way that is consistent with the laws of nature.” She argued.

Edmund tapped his chin. “Probably with the new laws, including magic. That would make sense: the world was remade into something that was consistent with what could have been if it formed naturally.” He said thoughtfully.

They took a moment to rest after the battle. Edmund made use of this time to fiddle with the small console by the door. It was a simple touch screen, but he hoped that he could use it to gain some sort of information about this place. Toora only watched, studying both him and the alien design of the place. There were wires, pipes and tubes on the walls and circular ceiling. She didn’t know what they were for, with her being from an age where technology wasn’t as advanced, but she noticed how they all connected to each other seamlessly.

“Is it possible that the bunker has been remade only using other bunker parts?” She said.

Edmund hummed. “I think so, yes. I managed to give this console power for just a moment and the systems seem to at least work. Which means that it’s not all just haphazardly mashed together like in a blender.”

“Do you think that there was an intelligent design behind the breaking and remaking?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. If there was, why keep these places intact for me to find? I think what happened was more like machine learning. They observed and mimicked. Which works in our favour in this case, because it means that despite the randomization, the place will still follow the basic common rules of how we used to build our bunkers.”

“Do we have a direction?” Lisa asked suddenly.

He stared, eyebrows rising to his forehead. “We can try a couple possible ways, I think?”

Lisa shot to her feet. “Good. Better than staying here and doing nothing.”

“Huh. Grumpy.”

She shook her head and exhaled. She took off with heavy footsteps into one of the side tunnels. They were dark, circular corridors of concrete, but the light from Toora’s magelight was enough to show the way. They followed her, Edmund only giving some directions here and there where he thought he knew the way.

“It’s dark.” Edmund grumbled. “If only I could find the reactor, we could restore power.”

“We are going in the direction of the sign that said reactor, right?”

He nodded.

“Although I have no idea what it is, and what power it is supposed to give you.”

“Right,” he chuckled, “it’s some sort of machine power, you know, like when water makes a mill turn?”

They kept talking about power and electricity, with Edmund taking his time to explain how power and technology used to work back in his day. Toora was very interested, asking questions and explanations about what she struggled to understand. She showed, on top of a great interest in how the world was, a great ability to understand and grasp the foreign concepts rather easily, which surprised Edmund. He knew she was smart, but he thought that it would take longer to explain a concept such as electricity to someone who had never seen it.

They passed through corridors and rooms. It reminded him of how the layout of the Pylon had changed and was constantly shifting, and even now as he pulled up a display in his vision he saw that it was changing in real time. However, what happened here was different. For starters it only happened once, and after that it never changed again. Secondly, the rooms were not mostly empty save for the important ones like in the Pylon. All were full of things, random memorabilia from whoever lived there in the past, and tools. And, most importantly, the layout was somewhat predictable, which he could use to navigate.

They passed through bedrooms with photos and personal items, a canteen full of rotted away food and still set tables, hallways with cabinets full of unreadable papers and broken laptops and dark screen on the walls. Edmund knew that they were inching ever closer to someplace important, although he didn’t know what he would find there.

While the structure had survived well the passing of time, the things inside had not. They had not been built to last. The chairs had rusted, and their leather broken down. Same went for the tables, cabinets and potted plants. There was a thick layer of dust on every surface and suspended in the darkness was the smell of dry stale air.

They came into a room full of consoles, arranged in a semi-circle around a central cylindrical shape of metal. On the far side, where all the chairs were turned to, was a wall of screens and a giant black table. Once upon a time that table would have been projecting holograms that could be interacted with as if solid, but now it was just dark, lifeless.

Edmund smiled.

“Jackpot.”

He approached the central cylinder and forced his fingers into the metal where the plates were welded together. He ripped the metal apart with superhuman strength, and it groaned and strained until it bent and snapped. -22H, 15H left. Inside, his personal light revealed a small space with five neatly stacked canisters. They were cylindrical tubes of metal, composed of two halves that connected to a central reinforced plexiglass window, where a small hypercube was set inside a passive containment field. They were the same as the ones he used to repair the Pylon, and deal with what he thought were invaders back then. The thought that he had a person in stasis in his teleport buffer, waiting to be saved from madness, crossed his mind briefly.

“Five canisters!?” he said with satisfaction and surprise clearly visible in his voice. He bent down to examine them and pulled them out one by one. “One of them has a collapsed reality field… it’s useless. This one is collapsing as well. Worth a fifth of the total if I can save it. The other three are perfect. Praetor?”

“I do not have the passwords or designs of any proprietary technology outside of this Pylon”

He must have made a face, because Toora was looking at him.

“Is there an issue Edmund?”

It was the first time she had called him by name like this, he noted. “Yeah… I forgot the passwords.” He said, embarrassed. “These canisters are basically a portable refill of Humes for me. They were supposed to be a fail-safe, exactly for a situation like this one… but I don’t remember the designs well enough to hack them. I’ll need your help to brute force them.”

Lisa scoffed. “Sounds like a bad failsafe to me.”

He felt the blood rush to his face.

“Yeah, well, they were… I had to make sure only I could operate them, you know?” Why am I explaining myself to her? “You have to understand that back then my mind and body… weren’t like this. So… human. Forgetting things was not in my vocabulary. I’m still getting used to all these limitations of an unaugmented body. Hopefully the nanites will help fix some of the issues, assuming I can control them.”

She nodded. “Whatever. You do your thing.”

Edmund felt something bubble up from within him. He kind of wanted to smack her, but also felt embarrassed to have failed like this in front of her. For some reason, he wasn’t feeling the same with Toora. He knew that she could understand why the situation was like this, and that she wasn’t judging him unfairly. Lisa, on the other hand…

He felt as if the progress he made with her over the last few days had just evaporated. As if him being the one who saved them all from the nanites didn’t matter. She seemed to like that hammer…