The Trilisk Ruins (12 page)

Joe realized something was wrong. He
entered a room that he thought was the fire control station, but
somehow he had gotten turned around and found himself in a complex
room filled with twisting pipes and air ducts. He turned back to
figure out where he had made a wrong turn. He searched for several
more minutes until he was sure he had rechecked every door in the
area, but he still could not relocate the fire control
station.

Joe stopped in a corridor and kicked
the wall in frustration. “This is bullshit! Where the hell am
I?”

Somehow the walls around him kept
shifting, changing. Whenever he left an area, things moved,
including walls and doorways. Most importantly, the exit had moved.
Was it waiting for him someplace else, or had it disappeared
altogether?

Joe knew that a virtual environment
could feel almost exactly like the real thing. But he hadn’t
connected to any equipment that could be feeding his senses a fake
complex like this. He wondered if the UNSF scientists had completed
a remote projector that could seamlessly put someone into a virtual
environment without their consent or knowledge.

“
That stupid black disc,
maybe...”

What if the black portal had rendered
him unconscious? Then he could have been hooked up to a virtual
reality system before he awakened. Except that the robot had
returned through the portal and reported the corridor
beyond.

“
Okay, is this some kind of
experiment?” he asked loudly. “I’m supposed to figure my way out of
here?”

He’d heard rumors of experiments
conducted on space force grunts, unscrupulous biological and
sociological trials that had sounded creepy and brutal. But he’d
always discounted them as bullshit stories, crap that soldiers told
each other over poker games to see if they could get anyone to
believe them. Now he wasn’t so sure. The idea that he had somehow
been put into a virtual environment could explain a lot of what
he’d seen.

He checked his link’s VR timer. The
timer had been designed to track people’s time in virtual
environments and notify the authorities if the user spent too much
time there. It was meant to be a control to keep cyber junkies from
dropping out of society, spending all their time in fantasy worlds.
Joe’s timer said he hadn’t spent even a minute in a VR
today.

The link interface was supposed to be
too closely interlaced with the human brain to be replaced by a
virtual imposter, but Joe supposed that the UNSF probably had ways
around that. For that matter, even a rich civilian could probably
get around the timers. Most people of meager means like Joe
believed the VR time limits didn’t apply to the super rich and
powerful.

Joe took a deep breath and decided to
keep trying to find the exit, real or not. Even if the exit moved
around, he couldn’t find it by just remaining stationary. As best
as he could tell, he never saw anything changing while he
watched.

Up ahead, Joe saw another sphere of
plants. He walked up slowly. This time the anomaly dominated the
center of the corridor. It was the same size as the previous one.
He approached slowly. An orange creature crawled amongst the
foliage.

“
What the hell?” Joe asked
himself.

He looked at the creature. It was the
same size as the other one. Was it the same thing he saw
before?

“
Time for a little
experiment,” he announced to himself.

Joe opened his pack and searched
through it. He brought out a tin of food and opened it up. Working
carefully, he held the tin over the orange creature as it crawled
about. He dumped some of the soup out onto the shell of the small
thing. Part of the back of its carapace was dark with the liquid,
and a few chunks of vegetables stuck onto its back. Then Joe walked
around to the far side of the sphere and set the tin onto the
floor.

“
If I see you again, I’ll
recognize you,” Joe said to the creature. It continued to crawl
around the edge of the vegetation, looking for shelter. Joe turned
back the way he had come, leaving the crab-thing and his tin of
soup behind.

He made a point of keeping the wall on
his right and followed the corridors carefully, without opening any
doors. After moving through three or four connecting hallways, he
turned back and retraced his steps. The hallways had remained
stable, although he swore that some of the doors had already
disappeared.

When he came back to the corridor where
the sphere had been, he saw that the room had changed. The little
section of plants was gone. He started opening doors and searching
around. He didn’t have any luck at first, but he kept trying,
swinging back and forth and rapidly checking hallways and
rooms.

At last Joe came across a small area of
plants again. They were growing out from under a table in the
center of what looked like a mess hall adjoining a large kitchen.
Joe ran up and moved the table aside to get a better view. Once
again he saw a brightly colored creature crawling around in the
plants.

Joe kneeled closer and examined the
creature. A dark stain and a smashed carrot chunk marked the side
of the armor.

“
Aha! You
are
the same one. And
somehow your environment follows you around!”

The creature crawled out of the plants
and moved towards the wall along the smooth floor. It headed into a
corner, turned around, and headed back the other
direction.

“
It follows you around when
I’m not here,” Joe corrected himself.

Joe stood up and looked around the
dining room. He felt like a bug under a magnifying
glass.

“
Shit. And mine follows me
around too.”

Chapter
Nine

Telisa opened her eyes. The bar no
longer surrounded her. Fear rose in her chest and stirred her heart
to a rapid beat. She was lying on a flat spot in an irregular cave
with light brown clusters sticking out of the walls. She saw that
the clusters were made of reddish blocks with green sticks
protruding from them. Some of the blocks glowed as if they were
hot, casting weak light on the scene.

Magnus lay just a few feet from her,
unmoving. Suddenly an irrational fear, born of a memory from years
ago, gripped her.

“
Magnus, wake up!” Telisa
demanded. “Please, please be alive!”

Magnus started awake. Like her, he
stared in surprise at the surroundings.

“
How did we...?”

Telisa almost sobbed in relief. He
wasn’t dead.

“
I don’t know. I just woke
up and we were here, and I thought... I thought it was happening
again.”

“
Then we’re back in the lair
of whatever killed Jack and Thomas.” Magnus cautiously stood up and
swung his slug thrower in a slow arc, ready for anything. “What is
that shit? It reminds me of something.”

“
Project blox,” Telisa said.
“More project blox caves.”

“
Yeah, it’s those green
spikes. They remind me of the sticks that hold the project blox
together.”

Telisa looked at the floor. “Oh my god.
Look at the floor, where we were sleeping!”

The floor beneath each of them was
perfectly flat. Smooth turquoise tiles were intact in the shape of
their prone bodies. Telisa remembered the color and pattern as
identical to what had been behind the bar.

“
Uh, whatever’s going on
here is even weirder than I suspected,” Magnus said. “Either we got
moved here with the tile by some sort of transport mechanism that
we didn’t feel, or the whole rest of the room melted
away.”

“
I remember that ledge we
were on before, and the light in the ceiling was sheared in the
middle, like it just melted away.”

Magnus nodded. “I bet that’s why there
aren’t any UNSF people here. Their complex is slowly changing into
this... whatever it is.”

“
And the computer network is
probably damaged in the same way,” Telisa said. “But we didn’t get
melted or changed or whatever it is.”

“
What did you mean just
know, about it happening again? You mean someone dying?”

Telisa looked away for a moment.
“It’s... it’s dumb, I know, but one time, years ago, a boyfriend
and I snuck into some maintenance tunnels to steal some extra VR
time. We were at our quotas but we thought the rules were stupid
and he knew a way to hook us in without being charged. We had a
good time too, until later when I jacked out and found that he’d
been killed right there next to me in the tunnel, run over by an
automated maintenance vehicle.”

Magnus absorbed her story for a moment.
“I’m sorry to hear that. So it reminded you of that time, waking up
next to me just now, and you thought I was dead.”

Telisa nodded. “At first, I blamed
myself for his death. We had been reckless for sneaking in there
and cutting off all our senses to the real world. But a part of me
blamed the government and their laws. I couldn’t help it. I just
thought we would never have had to go there in secret if people
were in control of their own lives. I don’t think I still hold that
grudge, but it was the start of my resistance to the ideology of
the world government. And of the rift between me and my
father.”

Magnus stood up and held out a hand for
her. She accepted his boost up to her feet.

“
Well, we’re both still
alive, and I intend to keep us that way. Let’s see if we can find
any of the regular unmelted place.”

Telisa liked the sound of that. Being
back in the alien cavern reminded her of what happened to the
others. It had occurred so quickly, with no warning. Telisa feared
one of them would explode and die at any second. She had never
imagined such an awful feeling before. She took a deep breath and
tried to quit shaking.

“
Magnus, I just realized.
This must be what you went through for months, in the war. Knowing
that you could die from an orbital strike at any second, and you
wouldn’t even know what hit you.”

Magnus nodded. “Yes, it’s a sinister
feeling. But we got used to it. You’d be amazed what people can
live with, given time.” Magnus took a deep breath. “Although I’d
forgotten a little, what it was like.”

Telisa realized that his hands were
shaking too. “My god, Magnus. Are you having some kind of... you’re
shaking as much as I am.”

Magnus sighed. “It’s my neck. I’m
really feeling the burns.”

“
Oh no. We don’t have the
real medical pack. It was with the others. I have some minor stuff,
though.” Telisa felt foolish for not offering the first aid
earlier. Somehow she had just fallen asleep without thinking to
help him.

“
There’s nothing that can be
done,” he said.

Telisa broke out a can of artificial
skin. Without thinking, she tried her link to read the instructions
from the manufacturer, but they didn’t come through.

“
Damn, I forgot our links
are hosed here. I guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned
way.” Telisa brought out the plastic packaging and searched for
written instructions.

“
Says here there’s an
embedded analgesic,” she said.

“
Sounds good. Just spray
some on and let’s get going,” Magnus suggested.

Telisa applied the spray over Magnus’
angry red skin. The weeping burns had bled in spots, forming scabs.
The artificial skin covered it with a smooth protective
layer.

Magnus sighed. “Thanks.”

“
I’d say we should go back
and get the pack... if I knew where that was,” Telisa
said.

“
Yeah. Let’s just keep
looking for the exit.”

Magnus led the way into an adjoining
cavern. It seemed like just another gloomy cave until Telisa
noticed brighter light coming from another tunnel. She saw what
looked like a human-built set of metal cabinets in the
distance.

“
Look, there’s a part of the
human complex,” Telisa said. They moved over into the next cavern.
One side of the area was a normal-looking locker room, with about a
dozen lockers against the far wall, and a door. Half the floor was
natural stone and the other half was bathroom tile.

“
Just like before,” Telisa
said.

“
And the other side is
safer, unless it was coincidence that we were attacked when we came
upon the caverns before,” Magnus said.

“
Well, safer or not, I’d
rather wander through the old installation part. These caves are
too dark.”

“
The spot we came in from is
in that part too.”

“
Unless it melted away to
become a cave.”

“
If we search the whole
complex and don’t find a way out, then we can check the
caves.”

“
Okay. This is just another
storage room or maybe the gym lockers,” Telisa said. “I hope we’re
about to stumble across the exit.”

Magnus shrugged. “The place must be
enormous. I tried the computer again, but it’s still almost
useless.”

Telisa came to the other door and
opened it slowly, holding her stunner out before her.