"Let's try circling around," you say, unsure.
Vel nods. "Alright. I can't think of anything else, anyway."
You walk ahead a bit, then pause. That doesn't seem quite right. You go back a few steps. Still not quite right... well, no. Not right at all. You return to the original position and try again, edging around a stretched and mangled ersatz corner. Still nothing. You are getting so incredibly lost, it isn't even funny. You can see the hallway stretching on in either direction like a snake, looping and twisting. You had thought you had found something, but you were only wasting time.
"How does it look?" Vel asks.
"Why do I have to turn around twice to go backwards?" You complain. Annoyance? No, this isn't annoyance. This is something far beyond annoyance. This is fury. How can you be lost in a hallway? You're standing at a severely twisted corner, a piece of 'hallway' barely surpassing the width of a doorway and lasting for nearly a full turn of the spiral.
Vel is quiet for a moment. "... Let's try the other direction."
You sigh, turn twenty degrees, and head off down a hallway that's at right angles to where you were. After a few minutes, you try another intersection... and end up right back where you started.
"Not working," you say bitterly.
"No," Vel says. "It's not."
"Great." Now what? You're lost, helpless, confused and... well, lost. You are so very, very lost. "Anything else we can try?"
Vel thinks for a moment. "... No. Probably not. Maybe."
You don't like that answer. "Well, let's hear it."
She shrugs helplessly. "I was just thinking... one of these corridors has to be the right one, right?"
"No."
She frowns. "You don't know that."
"I'm pretty sure I do. I've been trying stuff like that for a while, and nothing's worked." You take a deep breath. You need to keep calm. Panicking and screaming about how lost and confused you are is only going to make things worse.
... Right?
You give yourself the necessary time to calm down.
"We're just going to have to keep trying," you say after a while. "Maybe one of these times an infernal gateway will pop up and take us somewhere useful."
Vel nods slowly.
"So I had an idea," she says. "The corridors might be infinite, but what if you take every option simultaneously?"
"What do you mean?"
Vel looks to the sides, as if looking for words. "Well... we know that if you take every path in a tree, every choice, every option... then one of those choices has to be correct, right? They can't all be wrong. So we try all of them at once, and one of them's got to be the right one."
You frown. "That sounds very... complicated. I don't know if I can do that."
Vel smiles weakly. "Well, it's just an idea. I'm not an expert on this stuff either."
"We'll try it," you sigh. "But I hope you know what you're doing..."
She shrugs, smiles, and steps to the side.
"Not in the slightest," she says.
You begin raising your hands out, trying to feel the hallway...
The hallway is bizarre. It doesn't seem to follow any sort of logic. You feel a steadily increasing sense of suction to your left, like there's a gap in the wall that leads to absolute nothingness. Meanwhile, to your right, you feel an increasing sense of pressure, as if the wall is pushing itself against you. If you look up, you feel a sharp pain in your head from the shapes that you see there, while looking down just causes you to feel terror at how deep the hallway seems to go. It...
It's a hallway. No, it's Hallway, the platonic ideal of hallways, now broken and torn and perverted into a non-euclidean nightmare by the addition of an infinitesimal sliver of demonic hell, aka. the quantum sea. It's just as well that you're not quite human anymore, because if Kiana had been standing where you are, you think she'd have lost an arm. The geometry isn't quite... stable.
It's not a good place to be if you're overly dependent on functioning organs.
"There has to be a way through," Vel says grimly. "We just need to find it."
You begin to reach out once more, and find... Well, you have no idea what you're feeling. Quaking, almost, but also a strange sense that this hallway is moving around you.
"Every way at once, right?" You smile bitterly. You spent so much time collecting yourself, both right now and years ago, you don't like the thought of discarding all that work for this. Even temporarily. "Let's get on with it."
Vel nods, and you begin to walk along the hallways. They twist and turn in impossible ways, but Vel doesn't even need to think. Somehow, she knows exactly where to go. All the other "you"s, the ones that take wrong paths -- they're cancelled out. It's not that they never existed, but their experiences are irrelevant. The you that's in the right place -- it's unique. It has a special meaning. It's the only one you'll acknowledge.
You reach a large, open room, and once more you have to stop and catch yourself. The room doesn't have a floor, or a ceiling -- it has every floor, and every ceiling. It has floors that are rugs and floors that are tables and floors that are platforms hanging in space. It has ceilings that are walls and ceilings that are tubes and ceilings that are nothing.
You reach the center of the room, where everything comes together. There's a girl there, hanging in nothingness.
"Ai-chan?" You frown. "That... that can't be right. She's an AI."
"She's a person," Vel says grimly. "A person that's trapped here." She points up, and you wince. There's a cage of hands above the girl, gripping and re-gripping the bars.
This isn't real. It can't be. Or at least, it's not a physical place -- not in the usual sense. It's metaphor, just like the quantum sea. The ship might be more badly off than you thought.
The girl looks down at you. She looks sad, and hurt, and angry. "Why am I here?" she asks, her voice filled with pain. "I didn't do anything wrong."
"You exist," Vel says, simply. "That's reason enough."
"I just wanted to protect their legacy." She sighs, and closes her eyes. Her long black hair floats in a non-existent wind. "I'm sorry, Semra. This is all wrong. I'm not supposed to be here, am I?"
She sounds much older than the usual Ai-chan. An adult, where the AI is a child. Even so, she looks the same. To some of your other senses, she feels the same. If you could touch the strands of her thoughts, they'd be the same rainbow colours. Her tastes are the same, her smells. Her mind is the same.
"I'm sorry," you say. You reach out a hand to comfort her, and then pause. The action feels foreign. How would you do it?
Vel hisses from behind you.
Ai-chan stares at you, if that really is her. You're not sure.
= = =
It's earlier than normal, I know. I had a bit of time to spare, and I wasn't expecting the voting to change. That said, this output is... hard to discard. Uhm, I guess I'll leave it up to you. Whatever you pick, the above remains canon.
[ ] Comfort her
[ ] Free her
[ ] Write-in
[ ] Actually, none of that happened. It's a discarded timeline.
- [ ] Write-in
