"Connecting Artifact #08 to Artifact #05, via Artifact #19."
'—Using extreme caution,' Shu-Qi thought, but didn't say. Caution was a given.
Artifact #19 was a cable. Judging by the size, simple plug structure and asymmetry, probably a power cable. Using that as an assumption, artifact #08 might just be a power source or battery. Artifact #05 was the small dish that he had picked up weeks ago, and had the opposite socket from #08.
The sockets were radially symmetric, and made to twist into place. There was no obvious retaining element, but earlier tests had shown that, once in place, it took a large amount of force to disconnect the plug.
"Beginning the test… now."
The cable jerked as he used remote manipulators to twist it into place on #08, and he felt his mouth drying a little. It hadn't done that for any other device. Despite this being the third time he saw the reaction, moving poison was still moving poison, even if it was a machine. That was also why they were watching this from half a continent away, and why there were self-destruct devices in the base. Just in case.
So far, so good, but they'd gone this far before. The real test would be…
As carefully as he could, he moved the other end of the cable towards the dish, which was itself pointed towards a detector array on the nearby wall.
Nothing happened when the cable touched the socket on the dish.
Nothing kept happening, even as they twisted it into place. Slowly, but not too slowly; even a hard-light projection couldn't remain coherent inside the Poison's containment field for very long. Idly, he wondered if cable-twisting was the right way to turn the devices on. Almost certainly not, but if there was a power switch on either one, they hadn't found it. They'd have to hope that it'd do something without such commands.
The cable clicked into place, jumping the last few degrees just like it had for the possible power source, and—
"There's a response," a red-plumed female said sharply. En… Enz… maddeningly, he couldn't recall her name, but he put it aside to focus on the dish. It hummed very faintly, keeping it up for a few seconds before stopping. Just as they were starting to worry that it had been damaged, or the battery had already run out of power, it started humming again, continuing without pause for nearly a minute.
Then it stopped. Then it started again, continuing for random intervals of silence and sound.
"Assuming it's a transmitter…"
It might be running a pre-programmed pattern. It might be failing, due to damage. The battery might be faulty, the cable might be shorting out, or there could be any number of other problems. Though they had guessed at the cable's purpose, they could not detect any power flow. They wouldn't know what to look for.
Shu-Qi glanced at the sensor readings. "At the moment we're not picking anything up."
It might not be transmitting anything they could detect. It might actually be a receiver. It might be inactive; connecting a power supply had been enough to make it do something, but a low hum did not guarantee that it was using what-they-assumed-was-an-antenna at all. That was what they could all think of in the first five seconds, but the truth might be something very different.
"Let's take a step back," a muscular Chozo said. "The Poison does not operate under our native mechanics. Whatever the device is transmitting, if it is transmitting, might well be the equivalent of dark energy to us."
There were scattered sighs. Shu-Qi discreetly triggered his AR overlay; the base computers informed him that he was looking at Kohinoor, of the Nutau lineage, a group that in days past had made up much of the now-defunct warrior caste. He might have known.
However, stating the obvious was sometimes useful. In fact, Shu-Qi had a strong suspicion that Kohinoor had done that on purpose. He wouldn't have invited the male in the first place if he didn't have the credentials. If they looked at the devices, not as alien technology or conglomerations of the Poison, but as intrusions of dark matter into the visible universe, then it opened a few possibilities.
Their standard model of physics—the known universe—was made up of seventeen different fundamental particles and their interactions. That included all visible matter, as well as light and other forms of energy, but when you summed it all up, and looked at the galaxy, you'd notice it was spinning too fast; its mass was too large. In short, over nine-tenths of the universe's energy was invisible.
Early Chozo scientists had thought there was a vast quantity of 'dark matter', particles which interacted very weakly with those they could see, as well as each other. Encounters with the Poison had put paid to that theory, proving that the particle families that embodied dark matter were, if anything, even more complex than their own, but they had always assumed that the Poison itself was a creation of some long-lost species in their own universe.
That was an assumption they'd made in the middle of war, during the final decline of their civilization. It seemed like a safe one, as the Poison's alterations to the firmament stabilized its own existence as much as it destabilized normal matter. Life could not possibly evolve under such restrictions; dark matter, they thought, would have remained little but loose gas without the influence of its creators. The Poison's field shifted the interactions between different particles, and they'd always assumed that dark matter, on its own, did not form into molecules.
If the Alimbics still existed he would have considered giving them a call, as they had actually done more research into the field of dark-matter physics than the Chozo. Unfortunate, that. He would have liked to learn about their findings, even without the pressing need to save civilization from certain destruction.
"I suppose the scope of our research is going to expand a tad."
Not that he really minded that.
——————
"Test number, um… three. I'm going to check what happens if I set this on fire."
Hana looked askance at the strip of bark, still contained in a bubble of warped space from her earlier test. She hadn't opened it since she started test number two, and it wouldn't let anything in or out without her say-so. Did that mean she was still on number two? She hoped not.
Number two had involved heating it without her input, by making the sphere reflect heat and waiting for the sunlight to do its thing. The bark had reacted to that by curling up a little, letting off some sort of gas (water vapor?), and getting a little browner. Interestingly, it had also gotten very slightly heavier in the process. Well, the sphere had; she was pretty sure that the bark, as such, had gotten lighter.
She wished she had a lab-coat, and not just normal (if dirty) clothes. She was doing this wrong, and grabbing a piece of bark off a random vine-covered tree wasn't science at all. There were supposed to be… beakers and stuff, and clean benches, but hopefully it'd still tell her something.
She glared spitefully at the bark, willing it to burst into flames. It obligingly did so.
The flames were, admittedly, pretty. Kind of yellowish-red, with green highlights, although the sphere was quickly getting choked up with smoke. They flickered and faded after only a few seconds.
"Okay. Test three results…"
Who was she talking to?
There was no-one around, but pretending there was made her feel a little less alone. Anyway, she knew she was supposed to record her results. The only recorder around was herself—and her memory was normally perfect, which had started to hold true again a day ago—but she didn't really question it. This was how it was supposed to happen.
Her voice trailed off, as she tried to take in what had happened to the bark and its sphere. Or rather, what hadn't. This was supposed to have been a simple test, to confirm things she already knew.
The sphere had filled with smoke, yes. And the flames had looked like flames, although they had the same not-quite-there appearance as the starlight. The inside had gotten much hotter; the bark was still glowing dully. She reached out one hand to touch it, then blanched, pulling back right as she started to feel suction from the sphere of warped space. That would have hurt!
The smoldering bark obstinately refused to be anything but smoldering bark.
She reached out once more, hesitating for a moment before cutting the power. The bark fell down into her cupped hands, bursting into flame again as it did so.
Again, nothing. She wasn't getting any radiation other than the expected amount of light and heat.
She frowned, and tapped her fingers against her side, consciously emulating the way Mom tended to act. Inwardly, she was excited. This was odd, and new, and… she already had three or four theories as to why, but she couldn't just go look it up. She got to be the first one to figure it out.
It beat thinking about what she'd seen from the top of the mountain, namely nothing.
——————
A week after her experiments with setting bark on fire, and two after she'd gotten here, the forest she'd arrived in had acquired a few new features.
Hana looked at the small, wooden shelter with satisfaction. It had taken her a little experimentation to make it stick together, but clever use of her wave barrier had let her cut notches enough to turn a bunch of tree trunks into an overly-large jigsaw puzzle. The bark, she'd peeled off with her bare hands in order to make a very nearly watertight roof, and she'd turned a few more trees—cut in half, lengthwise—into flooring.
It was the sort of thing she'd always wanted to try, before… before. Some of the older kids had their own tree-house, but she hadn't wanted to hurt the forest. She didn't care so much here. Having somewhere to stay out of the rain was great, almost worth it on its own, but it also gave her somewhere to put her things.
A small fireplace, ringed in stone. Not that she needed to stay warm, or to stay out of the rain, but she enjoyed having it.
A few rocks, ones she'd chosen for their pretty shape and glossy feel rather than any practical reason.
And her experiments, such as they were. A bowl full of black powder, made by heating wood in the absence of air. A greasy, glue-like substance she'd gotten from squeezing the wood. And various types of fungus, one of which killed any grass she smeared it on if she heated it first. It was all made from wood, in one way or another, but that was what she had to work with.
She'd figured out that if she crushed some of the heavier rocks, then heated the rock dust until it melted, she could make a reasonable approximation to glass. The melted stone-soup was hot enough that it actually hurt to touch, but she'd quickly gotten adept at using her barrier to shape it. The resulting foggy, breakable almost-glass was good enough to hold the few bits of… stuff… that she didn't want to risk losing.
She occasionally wandered off in search of something more interesting, or in hopes of finding someone, but she kept coming back here. This was where she'd first woken up, so it was still her best hope of someday escaping.
—————
It had been over a month, by her calendar, since she'd first woken up on this planet. She was completely certain that "planet" was the correct term for how far her current location was from home. The days were much shorter and the gravity was weaker. Something was also weird about the way gravity felt to her, though aside from being weaker she couldn't pin down how. Along with the solar spectrum having chunks of it missing that made it look artificial and everything around her lacking any distinct taste or smell, it was another oddity that just drove home how far away from home she had to be.
Over the last few weeks, Hana had amassed a very large collection of things. She had rocks, pieces of metal she'd found in the bottoms of rivers and streams, samples from many different plants, and a bunch of the things she'd made from her experiments. She'd figured out how to separate metals from rocks by melting them, which led to her wondering what all this stuff was made of. She figured that was really important, and spent a lot her time working on it. It had taken a lot of trial and error and a good deal of guesswork, but she now felt she had a decent idea of what chemistry was like here.
Substances seemed to break down only to a certain point. She couldn't make a specific kind of metal turn into anything else no matter how hot she made it, even if she made it flash into vapor and then allowed it to condense. The same was true for that black stuff she made whenever she heated wood or plants without any air present. From this, she learned that matter had fundamental components that wouldn't change into something else, or at least she couldn't make them change with the means she had available to her. From that, she had an idea of what she was looking for.
Soon enough she had a list. It was only numbered because she didn't know what to name any of these things. Each fundamental substance she identified was kept in a possibly-glass bottle and labeled. She'd learned to categorize each item by its absolute mass after discovering that equal volumes of different things had different weights. This lead her to realize her list had gaps where some other substance between the weight of two others could fit.
"Can I make any predictions about what these… uh… what do I call this stuff? Fundamentals?" Hana wondered about that for a moment, staring at a bottle of a small yellow crystal she'd made by squeezing the black stuff really, really hard with her barrier. "Eh. I'll figure it out later. Maybe I can predict what their properties could be from what comes before them?"
She still hadn't figured out how to do that. If there was any pattern, it definitely wasn't based on increasing absolute mass. Two substances very close to each other in mass often had very different properties. It was really starting to frustrate her. She wanted it to make sense in a simple and logical way, but she didn't see it.
Since that wasn't working out, she was spending some time testing light. Once she noticed the sun wasn't producing a complete spectrum, she also noticed that different material would reflect their own unique signature of light. She wanted to know why that happened and put a lot of different things under magnified sunlight to figure it out.
It was all so exciting and new. She almost didn't notice that she wasn't remembering her own life as fast as she did the first few days. She did notice, though, and it was starting to worry her. Memories came back less frequently every day, and they were shorter each time. For a while she was afraid that there wasn't actually anything more to remember, or that the memories were completely gone and she would never get them back. So much of her was broken, she couldn't know anything for sure.
That hurt. That fear really hurt, and it kept her up almost every night as she worried that she would never fully recall her mother's face, never pull up the names of all the people she cared about, never get back all the precious moments she'd shared with her family...
Never get home. Never hear Mom sing for her again. Never, ever hug her sister. Never enjoy the doting attentions of Dad when she did something silly that got her clothes and hair messy. Never play with Walnut, as frustrating as she made their games sometimes with her extreme directness.
She had to keep working, keep doing something that might someday be useful, because if she didn't there was a bottomless abyss of bad thoughts waiting for her.
And she was going home someday.
Days turned into weeks, which turned into months. There wasn't much to tell time by, other than the movement of the sun, but she soon realised that she was heading into summer in an already warm jungle.
Sometimes she worked on her experiments, hammering away to improve her understanding of this world. She was slowing down, in a way, but only because every question answered opened half a dozen more, some of them quite unanswerable. For example, why was this planet so uncannily similar to her own, when the physics decidedly wasn't? She didn't remember most of her lessons on the subject, but she recalled enough to know that this wasn't how it was supposed to work.
That was something her mother would have asked. Hana, she decided, was a more practical person. Which was why, shortly after isolating one of the metals—a greyish one, which turned red on contact with air, and which the rocks nearby had a lot of—she built a closed vessel from it, then filled it with water and turned up the heat.
The resulting explosion blew a couple of trees apart, embedding one piece of metal millimeters into her chin, but it also taught her a lot. For example, don't boil water if there's nowhere for the steam to go. And be very careful about the quality of your metal.
Shortly thereafter, however, she had a steam-powered ceiling fan in her hut, and a good source of hot water for her bath. The heat couldn't really make her sweat, but she enjoyed sitting under it while working in the stifling warmth.
Sometimes, she spent days trying to remember.
Occasionally that bore fruit. More and more often, however, she'd sit there for a day only to realize at the end that she'd remembered nothing. Even when she did recover a memory, sometimes that memory came with a seizure. She'd be reminiscing about her family, idly watching the birds play around her hut, then from one moment to the next whole minutes would pass.
For both of those reasons, she slowly started spending less time thinking of her past.