The core of your focus in the days ahead could be nothing but Mary. The interaction of energies around your brilliant friend's soul was too complex to simply leave alone, and far too dangerous to ignore. But that didn't mean it needed all of your focus.
What Iris and Lea had started to discover in the Animus Project lab had drawn your attention in a way that normally would have been impossible to ignore. As it stood today, though? That curiosity was the least of your reasons for joining them there. Before the work of investigating, repairing and then fortifying the infrastructure around Mary's soul began.
Iris was as much Mary's daughter as she was yours, perhaps even more so in some ways. And sure, she trusted you to find a way to heal her mother, because you'd never once failed to do just that. But that couldn't completely remove the fear. So what time you could spare, time that Vega had been adamant to give you, you chose to spend with the young woman you'd helped raise.
The lab block set aside for the Consolat Project Animus had been one of those that had still had power even millions of years after it was last accessed. On breaching the outer security layer of the building, Iris and Lea had found a microcosm of Consolat existence, preserved in the moments before their species had ceased. And here, more than anywhere else, you found signs of how sudden that must have been.
Dataslates and other items were scattered across desks and tables, other devices having fallen to the floor, never to be retrieved. Some of it had been carefully moved, at least to clear the floor of any obstructions. But much still remained as it must have been, all those endless cycles past. Containers of what might have been beverages sat beside complex equipment, their contents long since evaporated to dust. Chairs remained pulled out at odd angles, as if their occupants had just stepped away for a moment. Holographic displays flickered weakly here and there, their last actions a waypoint to a moment long lost in time, like insects in amber.
The air felt thick with memory, heavy with abandoned experiments and unfinished thoughts. A neat stack of personal effects in one corner spoke of someone who'd made this sterile space their home. The soft hum of functioning equipment created an unsettling backdrop, as if the lab refused to acknowledge its creators' absence.
It had a presence, that clutter, thick with memory and the weight of unfinished thoughts. The last moments of a collection of brilliant minds, still dedicated to the creation of a mind to serve a purpose as yet unknown. But that was the part of you, of your soul and Focus, that had found its way closer to Harmony. The Mender in you felt something else.
"Can you feel it?" Lea asked quietly. She didn't need to say what 'it' was and, at some level, that was answer enough. But you nodded, nonetheless. The truth deserved nothing less.
"It took me a while, but I think I do," you said, equally quietly. You traced a hand across one of the inactive datapads on the desk in front of you, your fingers leaving clear trails in the dust that covered it. Somewhere wrapped around the echo of what had once been was the pain of an ancient wound long dried of blood, yet never healed.
"Whatever the Consolat were trying to build here, they were very close," you added, your lips drawn into a thin line. "I just wish we knew what that was."
Something special, clearly. The Consolat had long-since perfected general-purpose intelligence, to support them in all the manifold ways such creations could. To have to work to create something specialised, that implied something new.
"You know you don't actually have to be quiet to let me work, right?" Iris asked from beside you. Your daughter had chosen dark blonde hair today, something close to a mix between yours and Mary's tones. She'd reconfigured one of her hands to interface with the desk terminal, and her eyes were lidded as she worked her way steadily through the layers of firewalls and other security protocols that secured the interior of the lab.
"We do," you admitted cheerily, though still without much volume. "It's force of habit, I think. I know you don't need us to hush, but it's how we were raised. Quiet for focus. You know that."
"Doesn't mean I can't poke at it," your daughter said, rolling her eyes. "Not my fault none of you know how to multitask properly." She stuck her tongue out at that, the childish expression making you smile, and robbing her words of any heat.
"I suppose that's true," you replied, speaking more naturally this time. "Though I do remember a few occasions…"
You let the sentence trail off meaningfully, only to laugh as Iris chose blowing a raspberry at you as her reply. It was good to see the confidence, but part of you missed the girl who would have whined to you about being so unfair. But that girl had been left behind by the Third Battle of Sol and your daughter's part in it. Killing several thousand sentients, for all they'd been coming to kill her too, would have that effect.
You'd know.
"And on the matter of what they were doing," Iris added, brushing off the moment with her typical ease, "we might be about to get ourselves an answer." The silver flickers that had driven lines through her eyes tightened down to single lines, and you held your breath despite yourself. Of all the tells your daughter had, that was the most obvious.
You felt it in the air around you, too, a tension as tangible as the furniture around you, as your daughter faced the last lines of defence between her and total system access for the unit. Some came through your Focus, particularly the widened aspects of it. Most, though, came from your shared connection to the lab's datasphere, courtesy of Sidra. It wasn't something you could visualise, not like your old Security Minister, but the feeling of forces in opposition translated seamlessly.
Every time Iris had done this, you'd wanted to ask how it was going. Each time, you'd restrained yourself. For all the truth in her assessment of biological multitasking capacity, she had limits too. And for this she'd want all of her focus directed to the task at hand.
"Almost there," she whispered, worrying on her lower lip. You didn't think she knew she'd spoken, but you kept your silence still. Until air hissed in past suddenly clenched teeth, and you watched your daughter's face turn deathly pale through suddenly syruplike perceptions. The world slowed to a crawl in an example of the truest strength of a Unisonbound; mental acceleration at a level even the most advanced hardware accelerators could barely match. Meanwhile, the physical expression of it, your Aegis, you crackled just below the veil of sight.
Then your daughter's lips curled into a tight, vicious smile.
"Got you." She hissed.
And, all around you, the lab surged back to life with startling suddenness. The faint, static displays flared brilliant green-gold, the ancient calculations on them dissolving into streams of fresh data. And the low hum of background systems jumped several octaves as power flooded back through long-dormant circuits.
"Full access granted," Iris announced, her voice carrying an odd echo as she spread herself out across the lab's virtual architecture, the silver lines across her eyes bleeding back out across them, burning with fierce satisfaction. Stretching her legs. "Just... give me a moment. There's so much here to process."
You nodded, though your attention was caught by the wave of physical changes sweeping through the space. Sealed doorways whispered open, revealing the chambers beyond. Security fields that had been invisible until their deactivation flickered and died, their subtle distortions of air vanishing as if they'd never been.
It was fascinating to observe, but something else pulled at your true focus. What Lea had felt, and what you did too. Except the sensation was sharper now, more defined. You caught Lea's eye and saw the same recognition there. "You felt the change too?"
"Yes." Her usual caution was evident in her stance, but there was curiosity there too. "It's stronger now, coming from..." She gestured toward one of the newly revealed doorways, this one larger than the others. Flickering holotext resolved into a title that swam into readability. The development lab.
Of course, you chided yourself. Where else would it be?
"Take your time, Iris," you said, watching the systems continuing to reactivate around you. Banks of equipment hummed to life, status indicators painting the walls with points of coloured light. "We don't want to rush this."
"The security protocols were impressive," your daughter replied, still sounding slightly distracted. "But they were designed to protect against intrusion, not..." She paused. "Not whatever happened here. This wasn't an emergency lockdown, mo-Mandy; it was activity-based. Seems to have preserved almost everything."
More displays activated as she spoke, these ones larger, wrapping around workstations in graceful curves. They filled with Consolat script that your translation software quickly rendered readable, though the technical terminology remained challenging. Through it all, that sense of incompleteness pulled at you, stronger with each new system that came online.
You traded another look with Lea. Despite what you'd just said about caution, part of you wanted to just follow the draw of your Focus, that so rarely led you wrong.
"We can check the room, at least?" Lea suggested. How odd, for her to be pushing you forward as well. Usually she was one of the Heartcircle's anchors, holding you back from rash, or rasher, action. But, you noted absently, she'd been the one to feel what was missing in this place first.
"Iris?" You asked. The yearning to go was clear even to you, a match to the emotion surging from your fellow Mender. "Is it safe in there? The dev lab."
"It should be," your daughter replied, voice a single tone now. She blinked a few times, still integrating. "I'm not finding any active security measures now that I've cleared the activity lockdown. But everything I'm finding, the way they built life like me, it's incredible. I could learn so much."
"Try to stick to current priorities." It physically hurt to tell Iris that, but she didn't protest. "We'll check the dev lab for anything physical."
The all-encompassing presence of your daughter, felt through your connection to it courtesy of Sidra, compressed abruptly to a small portion of the infospace. And the soft whine of the systems around you ratcheted higher as she turned the full processing capacity of the lab to support her search. You and Lea, meanwhile, stepped through the door. And your breath caught.
The development lab was dominated by a ring of interconnected workstations, their displays alive with streams of data that your translation systems struggled to parse. But it was what hung suspended between them that drew the eye – a latticework of crystalline structures and microfilaments that bent light in ways that made your eyes water. The sense of incompleteness was strongest here, touched at the edges by a feeling of an ancient fire.
Even dormant, and clearly incomplete, you could feel the whisper of its purpose, a sensation as powerful as it was disturbingly familiar. You blinked a few times, examining the feeling, trying to remember where-
"My Void Crystal," you murmured. Lea glanced at you, a question clear in her eyes, and you nodded carefully at the creation at the centre of the room. Trying not to look at it too much, or too directly. "It feels like a Void Crystal. It's the same odd mix of harmony and…something more."
You grimaced. You hated to leave a description that vague, but it was the best you had. You'd created the first Void Crystal, and you'd helped the Makers learn to make more, but that didn't mean you knew how the Artefacts worked. Only that what they did suggested a mastery of reality physics so complex that it beggared belief.
And the Consolat had been deliberately building one. As a subsystem for the Animus AI.
What A Daughter Sees: 70 + 33 (Iris Learning) + 20 (Artificial Intelligence) + 10 (Echoes of Nabu) + 20 (Consolat Development Lab) = 153 vs 80. Solid Success
"The best translation I can get for what the Consolat called this was a Telaxion," Iris said through the lab's systems, her voice filled with wonder. "It's jargon, but I doubt the term 'dark matter transceiver' would make any more sense to the two of you."
"Accurate enough," you admitted, picking your way down through the tiered workstations that surrounded the central ring. "But jargon implies familiarity. As if they'd built these before."
Each of the semicircular stations seemed to have been dedicated to different aspects of the project. Some displayed what looked like neural mapping protocols, while others showed complex mathematical formulae and field diagrams. Physical components and testing apparatus lay carefully arranged on benches, tools set down mid-task millions of years ago.
"It does," Iris agreed, though it was a tentative one. "But this example was bleeding edge, even for the Consolat. As if they were trying to leapfrog entire generations of development in a single attempt."
"That's…" Lea shook her head. "That goes against every model we've been able to build from their cultural files. Even after they shifted the direction of their civilisation towards creating the Secrets, they planned everything, took their time. Trying to go this far all at once? It doesn't make sense."
"Unless something forced their hand." Your daughter's voice was very calm, enough that you could tell it was forced. "I've been looking at the files here, focusing my searches, and this isn't what they were meant to be building. They were doing incremental, steady development of Telaxion systems for decades. Something clearly changed.
"But it's more than that, too." You'd reached the centre of the lab now, and you reached out, keying access to the core systems. "I think I'm starting to understand what they were doing here. What Project Animus was actually for."
"Oh?"
"They were building this AI to do something that they'd never done before," Iris said, the words a definitive statement. "It's the only reason that it would be a development process, and the project had priority access to the university's AI development node."
"You mean the burnt out shell that Mary and I found?" You asked.
Iris hummed an affirmative. "When the Secrets took shape and the Consolat died, they tried to leave behind information in the Archive. Doing so damaged the systems there in ways I'm not sure I even want to understand. What happened here? I think it's the same thing. Feedback, on an utterly massive scale. Enough to make the entire dev node go up in smoke."
"Literally," Lea said, a touch darkly. It wasn't exactly a humorous thought. But something in the description set your thoughts tumbling down the path of realisation.
"But if that's the case," Iris continued, the steady tempo of her words starting to build towards a conclusion. "The only way that the AI node could suffer this sort of damage is if it was connected to the Consolat's gestalt in their final moments. And that would only have been the case if they had a reason for doing so."
The facts whirled and interlocked in your mind, clicking together as you found appropriate configurations. The damage, the…telaxion. An AI being built for a specific purpose. And how the place felt to you and Lea, to Menders. Something lost, just out of reach.
"They weren't just building an AI." You whispered the words just barely out of sync with your daughter, and she turned her avatar's head to smile at you. When had she moved it into the lab, though? Had you truly been so lost in thought?
"Animus." She said, tracing a finger across the display in front of her. "It's a strange word for the translation systems to grab onto. Archaic, even. But the archaic root of the word we know means spirit, or mind. I think Animus was an attempt to create something like that. An AI who could bridge multiple layers of reality, and access the Consolat's last gift to us all. The Secrets themselves."
"Wait," Lea said abruptly, her tone a little shaky. "You think-"
"Mary said already," you pointed out, very softly. "She didn't have proof then, but I agree with her. If I was creating a system that would change the very nature of our universe, I'd want a way to make sure nothing went wrong. Iris, you think we're looking at the remains of that?"
Iris shook her head. "Not the remains. What I'm finding here, it doesn't seem broken. It just seems-"
And Menders Feel: 62 + 47 (Lea + ½ Amanda Practice) + 15 (Call of Wounds Unseen) + 20 (Mender's Eye) + 15 (Sparks of Life) = 169 vs 80. Greater Success.
Control: 47 - 36 (Amanda Practice) + 40 (Harmonic Restraint) = 51. Bare Success.
Lea's voice blended into your own, as you both spoke a single word.
"Incomplete."
And, very suddenly, it all made sense.
This wasn't just an unfinished project – it was an unfinished being, caught forever on the cusp of a transformation that never came to be. The Consolat telaxion wasn't missing anything, either, not in the manner of something unfinished. It had been scorched in the last moments of Consolat existence, and the cry of those wounds as you recognised them properly was an almost physical thing.
What you were staring at, without trying to directly stare, was the link that they'd tried to forge to the Secrets themselves. A link that must have had something waiting for it, but had been swept aside in the searing expression of an entire race's sacrifice. It could still be there. It should still be there, even. And if you were right?
It could vindicate every wasted moment that you'd spent finding your way to this system.
All you had to do was make it whole.
:Mandy-: Sidra's voice was swept aside by a tsunami of impossible, irresistible power soaring up from your Focus. Next to you, Lea's soul erupted with the same strength, crackling energy arcing into the air around you, burning away the dust in an unmeant expression.
Iris cried out, and you felt her virtual presence slam the lab unit's interference shields to maximum. That was good, you knew. But at some level, it just didn't register as important.
This could change everything. And you could do it, if you acted together. Without Vega or Mir, the danger of discovery would be far higher. But you could feel the burning presence of a Miracle, held back only by force of will and the technique of Vega's creation. You could stop, pull back, let it fade. It would hurt to do so, to leave this place languishing, but it wouldn't do any harm that couldn't be smoothed away.
Yet to abandon this moment, born of the same flaring energy and clarity that had anchored the greatest of your acts upon reality, it felt wrong. You rarely denied your instincts when they spoke this loudly, and the results of that trust had almost always been exceptional.
And if you did stop, to return here with Vega, with Mir, you couldn't be certain that you'd be able to find this same, burning moment again. It was often hard to tell with Practice, and the roiling energy around you both only muddled the issue.
Another choice. Another weight upon your shoulders, laid there by past decisions.
You…
[] Embraced this burning moment - A Miracle shall invest this place, and much of Animus shall be made whole. You shall do all you can to restrain its output, but the risk will be considerable. And yet, so too the rewards.
[] Found in your will restraint - You can return with others of your Heartcircle, to do this more safely. But if you will find this moment a second time, who can say. With Vega, a Miracle would certainly be possible. But this specific Miracle?
