The angle of the planet's sun had shifted by the time you made it into your target, though the colours of the shade were just as intense as they'd been at the auditorium. A stand of trees had grown up around the ancient tower, hundreds of years into their maturity and yet youngsters compared to their companion. It had endured millions of years, somehow still intact despite seeming far less secure than the sprawling, lower complexes around it.
Here you found, on close approach, signs of once active maintenance systems that must have been the source of the tower's unbreached longevity. They were dark, now, the tower's generators cold and lifeless to your senses. And yet, not damaged. Exhausted, expended, certainly those words applied, pulsed from the place when you reached out to the place through the lens of your soul. But nothing about it felt broken.
"Well, that should make this rather simple then, I think," Mary said brightly, after you explained what you'd felt. Her mouth was curved into a broad smile, green eyes flashing with anticipation and excitement as she dug into the storage pack she'd brought along.
"What were you thinking?" You asked. In answer, she pulled a power cell from the pack, holding it up between you triumphantly. You blinked, your mind taking a moment to work it through. Then: "Oh."
"If nothing seems damaged," Mary said, "then all we need to do is find one of the external energy links." Her free hand tapped away at the virtual panel on her forearm, then drone footage spiralled out around her in a momentarily dizzying display, each one slotting into place until they formed a panorama of the structure. A moment later a search grid overlaid the imagery.
You knew where that led. Your friend would dive into the process, and likely find a solution given enough time. But just because the building's systems weren't broken didn't make your Focus useless.
"How about I go looking with my own senses?" you suggested, before she could actually begin. "This building is fine, but the power links to it, they aren't serving their proper purpose. I think I can use that."
"Anything that saves me from this." Mary waved a hand at the imagery around you. "Think you can do it faster, Mandy?"
"Well just give me this." You plucked the power pack out of her hand, smiling. "And give me a moment to check."
The connection between you and your Unison surged and shimmering silver-blue and aquamarine consumed your survival kit, your Aegis unleashed without any concealment. It had been, you realised, too long since you'd done this for simple exploration. With no grim purpose driving you.
Then you raised your free hand, one index finger extended, leashed Practice crackling around you. Mary was opening her mouth, a question in her eyes, but it could wait a moment. Only a moment, of course, but that was all you needed.
You tapped your finger in the air, and green-gold radiance flared to life around the outstretched digit. That selfsame light pulsed out from that point into the panorama around you, and you felt the invisible surge as it branched from the pictures to the building itself. Connected through the imagery, and yet contained to what they showed. That, you hoped, would dodge any chance of dangerously obvious Miracles.
For now, you reached through the energy crackling out around you and touched the power cell you'd taken from Mary to their channels. A power cell without something to provide was incomplete. To be incomplete could be seen as damaged. To be damaged meant that a thing could be mended. Not a complicated chain of logic, but one that stretched far more towards Harmony than your own Focus.
But that was the entire working, truthfully. Vega's teachings, refined to fit the prism of your own soul, something that only a handful of Potentials could truly do. Unisonbound possessed a measure of ability to widen or stretch the breadth of their Focus, of course. But only Vega and yourself had ever reached so far beyond the limits of your Practice, enough for your acts to be considered outside your souls' Focus.
Should it work, given everything you knew of Practice? Probably not. But your actions had been guided by instinct and something very like faith, that the power reflected through the prism of your soul truly could provide a better solution. And when had the instincts of your soul ever failed you?
That answer remained what it had always been.
Where Do You Belong?: 96 + Amanda Stats. What the hell. Take your autosuccess.
Miracle? 25 + 36 (Amanda Practice) - 20 (Learned Restraint) = 41. Nope, not today. Sorry not sorry @Baughn
Never.
A piece of the panorama flared in your perceptions, not incandescent but brighter, and in the same moment you felt yourself pulled towards the space it represented. A section of blank wall like all the others, bordered by the dark grass that whispered quietly at your steps. Nothing about it looked like a connection to the power grid, but looks could be deceiving. And hadn't the access points Iris had eventually used to access the Consolat Archive been just as hidden?
"They were," Mary admitted, after you asked the question aloud. The section wasn't far, even at a walk. And you'd missed the simple pleasure of walking through grass on a world full of life without a Masque, well, masking the full experience.
The systems were designed for seamless integration of experience, of course. But you knew how difficult, near-impossible really, it was to do that. Mary might have been the lead on your work to build a human-experience shell for your daughter, but you'd been part of the team as well. In the end, you'd needed Practice to smooth out the edges.
From there, the process of entry was relatively simple. Some small work was needed to adapt the power cell to the inputs you'd found, but that was what Trailblazer gear had been designed to do. And with the Sixth Secret, a universal interface for some things wasn't relegated to being a pipe dream. Competing standards might as well not exist, when the input or output could adapt to whatever it connected to.
It was, of course, a bit more complicated where data structures were concerned. Trailblazer gear had been designed to overcome those limitations, of course, but were left entirely outstripped by one of the brightest minds of all humanity. And yet it proved entirely unnecessary. The doors opened when you approached, once power was restored.
You shared a look with Mary, suddenly hesitant. Your friend's fingers danced along the virtual keys on her forearm, and a full spectrum scan washed out from her equipment.
"Should it really be that easy?" you asked, reaching out with your senses. They sharpened impossibly as you did so, prompting a thankful thought to Sidra, and yet neither you nor your Unison found anything waiting in the shadows. Only dust and stale air, in the shadow of slowly kindling points of light. And yet-
"Look." You followed Mary's pointing finger up, to where a section of wall was flowing back from a set of intakes. Here, Sidra's aid meant you saw the faint distortion in the air as ancient fans and air processors began to hum. Pollen-scented air poured into the building on an artificial breeze that set the teal and lavender leaves around it rustling, and the dust within dancing in the slowly rising illumination.
What greeted you as ancient darkness fell away was a vast atrium, a seamless ring of desks enclosing its centre. A dozen tall stories rose up through the building, visible in the soft glow of holographic light sources. Thick coatings of dust swirled in the sudden rush of fresh air, flowing up to newly active, and perhaps revealed, vents like the limbs of some impossible cephalopod.
It was oddly beautiful.
"I'm not picking up anything dangerous." Mary's voice was oddly loud against the scene waiting for you. You heard the question in it, though, and the concern.
"This was a civilian education facility," you said, as much a reminder to you as it was to your dark-haired friend. The words felt important, something hiding in them that you forced yourself to follow to their conclusion. "An Institute wouldn't have any more security than this, would it?"
Mary blinked, considering the question, then shook her head slowly. "No, it wouldn't," she agreed. "So, we go in?"
"Not going to find anything out here, are we?" And you stepped across the threshold. For all your bravado you held your Aegis close to the surface, ready to flare to life at the first sign of any threat. But none came, even as you took two, three, five steps before turning back to look at your friend.
She was only two steps behind you, the concern and hesitance in her eyes banished by sparks of brilliant curiosity. Would this place be able to satisfy that, you wondered, or would it just be another endless, and incomplete, funerary stone for the Consolat's death?
The dust was entirely gone by the time you reached the ring of desks at the centre of the building, and you reminded yourself to keep an eye on the charge of the power cell you'd connected to the building's systems. It should have enough power for months at least, but that was going off of known baselines. For all you knew, Consolat technology required far more energy to operate.
As you considered that, Mary leaned forward to examine the display that had sprung into existence the moment she came close enough to operate it. "Huh," she murmured, "that's interesting."
"The activation distance?" You asked.
"Yeah," she nodded. "Either the Consolat had a similar range of motion to us, or it's a dynamic system that scans whoever steps up."
"Could be both, no?"
She hummed a noncommittal agreement, then reached out to tap at the virtual display. It flickered for a few seconds when she did before the image stabilised, and Consolat word-glyphs appeared on the display, gentle greens on a grey background. They flowed like water for a moment as your translation software kicked in, Sidra overriding the real images with more familiar human text. Mary's implants would be doing the same thing.
Your friend's eyes widened as the translated text rendered. Her breath caught, and you saw her hands trembling slightly. "Mandy," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion, "this is... it's really..."
You stepped closer, peering over her shoulder at the display. Your heart raced as you took in the words, confirming what you'd both hoped and feared on coming here.
"A library catalogue," you breathed, a mix of awe and disbelief washing over you.
Mary nodded, her eyes glistening. "Not just any library. Look at the categories, the scope of it. It's not their entire collected knowledge, but it's all roughly analogous to university level subjects. But if all of these links work…" she trailed off, wiping her eyes.
A lump formed in your throat as the magnitude of the discovery truly hit you. Your fingers tingled when you reached out to touch the display, scrolling through the vast array of topics. "It's overwhelming," you admitted, your voice barely above a whisper. "All of-"
"Wait!" Mary snapped. You froze in place, adrenaline surging up for a moment, before Sidra wiped it away. Mary had finished clearing her gaze, and her green eyes were fixed on the display where your hand had stopped.
"That category," her voice filled with awe. "Is Sidra getting the same translation?"
You glanced back at the display. "Reality physics?"
Mary nodded fiercely. "It's what Pre-Sorrows humanity called early research into the Secrets. The technical name was Quantum Graph Theory, but that's not commonly known. The field was largely subsumed by study avenues opened through Practice, but the term is technically the same even today. What I've been doing with trying to unravel Practice and the Secrets, that's reality physics.
"We know the Consolat must have been masters of it to create the Secrets," she added. Not exactly new data, but a good reminder. "The question is which of the theories we've been putting together over the years are actually correct. And this, this could actually give us some of those answers"
Mary had a rather personal stake in that question, given how many of those theories she'd helped develop. And yet, as you stood here, the soft hum of the ancient systems surrounding you, it was hard to contemplate the reality that it might be possible.
"If the translation is correct," you pointed out. You would be the first to hope that it was, but even the best translators could lack context. And what the Consolat called reality physics might not be the same thing as your people had.
"Something we can look into," your friend agreed. "We'll need to dig into the archives, run searches and cross-reference what we can. But it's just staggering. Millennia of research... all preserved here, waiting for us to unlock it."
Was it, though? The thought had been growing steadily, insidiously, in the back of your mind. A catalogue was one thing, but had all the data behind it survived the aeons? You had to force yourself to ask. "Mary, how much of it is still here?"
Mary's brow furrowed at your question, the excitement in her eyes tempered by a sudden realisation. "You're right," she said, her voice low. "We can't assume that everything's intact. We need to... we need to check the system."
She turned back to the display, her fingers dancing across the interface with growing confidence. "There has to be some kind of diagnostic tool, something to verify the data integrity. The Consolat would have needed ways to manage their archives."
You watched as Mary navigated through the system, her expertise with alien interfaces evident in her fluid movements. "There," she muttered, more to herself than to you. "This looks promising."
As she worked, you found yourself holding your breath, the weight of potential discovery and possible disappointment hanging in the air. The soft hum of the ancient systems seemed to grow louder in the silence, as if the library itself matched your apprehension.
"I think I've found it," Mary said suddenly, a slight tremor in her voice. "It looks like some kind of system integrity check. If I'm reading this correctly, it should give us an overview of what's still accessible."
She turned to you, her hand hovering over what appeared to be an activation command. "Should I run it?"
You nodded, your throat tight with anticipation. "Do it," you said softly. "Whatever we find, at least we'll know what we're dealing with."
Mary took a deep breath and pressed the command. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a low whir that seemed to emanate from the very walls around you, the system began its check. A subtle change rippled through the atrium, and the air seemed to thicken, a faint scent of ozone tickling your nostrils. The soft ambient glow from the holographic displays intensified, casting dancing shadows across the dust-free surfaces.
"I do have potential good news," she noted, stepping back from the interface. In the corners of your vision, you caught glimpses of fleeting data streams, flickering across secondary displays that had suddenly come to life.
"Oh?" A low-frequency hum vibrated through the floor, barely perceptible but making the hairs on your arms stand on end. And the temperature dropped. Not enough to make you shiver, but one more little thing to mark the scale of activity the ancient facility was making.
"This looks to have been a multi-discipline institution, like the catalogue suggested," Mary explained. She seemed determined to fill the quiet. "But it specialised in two fields in particular. Reality physics was one, but it was a secondary specialisation. The other was artificial intelligence, which is what that ruined building the drones found was dedicated to."
You blinked. "Why is it so, um…exploded?"
"I have no idea." She shrugged, smiling faintly. "But look." Mary made an underhanded tossing motion, and an image flared into being next to you. Glyphs formed words, Sidra overriding their appearance with translation, as an oddly familiar outline of shapes took form.
"This is a map of the university." And there was why it seemed familiar. "The various sections are all labelled, and that server centre was the heart of their AI development efforts."
"That could be useful," you murmured, only to pause as your friend shook her head.
"Amanda, what little I've been able to grasp of Consolat culture and scientific culture is still settling in. I was going to go over this with the command staff later in the week. But when I say this was the heart of their AI development, I don't mean this university. Or even this planet."
You felt your breath catch as the implications of Mary's words sank in. "The heart of all Consolat AI development was... here?" Your voice was barely above a whisper, awe and disbelief mingling in your tone.
Mary nodded, her eyes bright with excitement. "If I'm interpreting everything correctly – and granted, there's still so much we don't understand – this place wasn't just a university. It was the centre for AI research across their entire civilization."
You found yourself pacing, your mind racing to process the magnitude of this discovery. "But why here?"
Mary shrugged, her gaze flickering between you and the holographic map. "Isolation, perhaps? Maybe they needed a controlled environment for their experiments. We might find answers as we dig deeper."
As you both contemplated the possibilities, the low hum of the integrity check continued in the background, a constant reminder of the wealth of knowledge potentially at your fingertips – and the uncertainty of its condition.
"What do you think we might find?" you asked, unable to stop yourself. "About their AI, I mean."
Mary's expression grew thoughtful. "It's hard to say. Given what we've seen of their level of advancement it may well be entirely beyond us for a time. Their system-guard AI makes Iris feel small, and they built that millions of years ago."
You nodded. "But the implications for us, for humanity..."
"Could be enormous," Mary finished your thought. Then she sighed, her tense expression softening. "But that's not the real question you're asking. You're asking what it could mean for Iris, If we can understand or adapt even a fraction of their knowledge."
"Yes." You grimaced, glancing down as you added, "The potential here for her to grow, what if it's too much?"
"Then it's her choice," Mary replied. You had to smile. It was a little strange, after all, to be debating parenting whilst surrounded by the silent promise of ancient knowledge. Mary seemed to get it, catching your hand with hers and squeezing gently. "It's possible that what we find here might not be properly compatible with ensouled AI, at least not in the way she is one. But I doubt that.
"Short term, it probably won't do an enormous amount. But even scraps of Consolat information on the topic could revolutionise our own understanding of AI technology. Not to mention potential insights into the Secrets."
"How much longer do you think the check will take?" you asked, glancing at the interface Mary had been using.
Your friend shook her head. "Hard to say. Their systems operate on principles I'm not sure we've even started to grasp. But given the scope of data we're dealing with..." She trailed off, her eyes distant as she made mental calculations.
A soft chime interrupted the process, and lines of glyphs scrolled out across the display Mary had activated. She spun back to it, and you took a step up beside her, waiting for the translation software to do its work. You hoped there would be just as much as you both were wishing for, but this didn't strike you as a military or even high-security facility. Millions of years of decay would almost certainly have taken its toll, despite the building's structure remaining intact.
Archive integrity: 92. You lucky little-
As the translated text appeared, you and Mary leaned in, eyes scanning the results eagerly.
"This is incredible," Mary breathed, her fingers tracing the air just above the holographic display. "The core data storage is mostly intact. There's some corruption, of course, but far less than I would have expected after all this time."
You nodded, a smile spreading across your face. "It looks like their preservation systems were even more advanced than we thought. But," you paused, your brow furrowing slightly, "there's still a lot of damage to the peripheral archives."
Mary hummed in agreement. "True, but the most crucial information doesn't seem to have been there. This is a lot more than we could have hoped for, Amanda."
As the reality of your success sank in, a new challenge presented itself. You glanced at your chronometer, then back at the vast array of data before you. "We've only got a few hours left before we need to head back to base. There's no way we can even scratch the surface of all this today."
Mary's excitement dimmed as she realised the same thing. "You're right. We need a plan. We can't just dive in haphazardly; there's too much at stake."
You took a deep breath, centering yourself. "Okay, let's think this through. What are our priorities?"
"Well," Mary began, her organisational mind kicking into gear, "we should definitely consider focusing on the AI research first. That was the primary specialisation here, and if we can figure out how their data structures worked, it might help when it comes time to try and repair the data we're going to be getting from the Archive."
You nodded. "We could look for any overview or summary documents? Something that might give us a broader picture of what's contained here, beyond the catalogue headers."
"Good idea," Mary said, already turning back to the interface. "We should also flag sections related to Reality Physics for future investigation. Even if we can't delve into it today, we'll want to come back to that."
You smiled, watching your friend work with practised efficiency. Despite the time constraints, hope filled you. This discovery was a doorway, to knowledge that could reshape humanity's future.
"You know," you said softly, "I never imagined we'd find something like this when we came here."
Mary paused her work for a moment, turning to meet your gaze. Her eyes shone with excitement, and an unyielding determination. "But we hoped, all the same. Now we have to make the most of it. For Iris, for humanity, for the future we're all working towards."
The library hummed around you, its long-dormant systems now alive with purpose once more. You'd have to rig more power cells up to the building before you left, but that could wait. And as you worked, you couldn't shake the hope that the long-gone Consolat scholars would have approved of your efforts to understand their legacy.
You have limited time available today and across the rest of the turn. But where did you start?
[] Focus on AI research data
[] Look for project overviews and summaries
[] Delve into the reality physics archives
[] Something else? Ping me with any write-ins.
Full facility map revealed. Primary data repositories intact. Research and Support agents available – further investigation of the University will roll two dice for each one assigned. Actions unlocked.
