He reached back with his left hand until he found Steve. He took Steve’s hand and held it, the metallic brace Rigel wore an annoying barrier between them. But instantly he felt better. Reassured.
Rigel thought Steve might shrug his hand off or see the gesture as a sign of weakness, but after a brief pause, Steve kept on going without letting go. He even shifted his grip slightly so he would be holding Rigel’s hand more securely. It made it easier for Rigel to continue stumbling around, avoiding the strange mutated fungi. He felt an unexpected sense of completeness and newfound confidence that helped dispel some of his fear and allowed him to focus on his immediate goal. He had to find the cradle room.
It felt like half an hour later when they finally found a solid wall that was not a crumbled mess, and they followed it by touch all the way to another big vault-like door that had to be the entrance to the inner levels. Rigel was barely able to make out its smooth metallic surface in the gloom, but Steve quickly found the access panel and tried forcing the door open while Rigel was still deciding whether to try using the quantum drive again.
Two things happened after the first hard shove Steve gave the door.
The first and most immediate was that several dozens of emergency lights blinked into life on the door and all along the wall, their sudden red glow enough to blind Rigel after the almost complete darkness he had slowly gotten used to. He looked away, covering his eyes with his hands, and he heard Steve back away with a yelp of surprise. Rigel blinked his eyes open slowly after a few seconds, thankful for the light but finding it almost painful, and he had finally managed to look at the illuminated door head-on when he noticed the second thing that had happened.
The quantum drive in his pocket was hot. And growing hotter.
He took it out and held it up to the light. It was hard to tell, but Rigel thought it was shining a little bit more brightly.
“Let me try the drive again,” he told Steve.
“Go for it.”
Rigel scanned the door with his eyes, looking for another input port to stick the drive in. He was distracted at first by the many warning signs plastered all over the door and the wall around it telling people to stay away. All of them had the CradleCorp logo. An official-looking notice right next to the security panel gave a lengthy warning on the legal repercussions of trespassing on corporate property without proper authorization.
Rigel finally found what he was looking for, and he used the drive again. This time the pause before something happened was much longer, and the light inside the drive began to dim and then grow bright again, like a data drive when it was plugged into a computer. Eventually, though, the security panel flashed blue signaling success. Rigel pocketed the drive. There was a satisfyingly loud noise as whatever mechanism was keeping the door shut gave way, and then their path was clear.
They entered into a properly lit but very short corridor that led straight to an identical door to the one they had just opened. That door was already ajar, as Steve proved when he tried to push it open too hard and ended up slamming it all the way against the wall on the inside of the next room. The noise the metal door made as it collided with the wall was unbelievable. Rigel flinched with the irrational thought that they should not have made noise like that—it would make them easier to find.
Which was stupid, really. They were the only ones there.
“Sorry,” Steve said, his voice hushed.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s go inside.”
Rigel was the first to cross the second threshold. He had the quantum drive out of his pocket again, holding it gingerly with two of his fingers since it had become too hot to comfortably hold next to his skin for long. It was starting to glow like a miniature lightbulb, lighting up the cramped space as if Rigel were holding a candle.
Steve had just made it inside when the ancient motion sensors must have activated, and several lights in the new room switched on, some obviously struggling to do so and some remaining at a half-functioning flicker. There were enough working ones that they provided enough illumination to see everything clearly, though.
“This is it,” Rigel said, eyes widening in recognition. “The cradle room. We made it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
Rigel walked slowly along the rows of electronic equipment stacked on shelves. Hundreds of little lights blinked on and off in many of them, and when he glanced behind the shelf wall, he saw numberless cables running from one rack to the next, linking all the different elements in what must have been a carefully controlled mesh of interconnections. Rigel guessed that these were the main servers of the original Atlas, still functioning even after all these years. The entire room was flanked by similar shelves, each one holding several long rectangular components that were slotted with cards in many places and mysterious input slots on their front surfaces, along with diagnostic controls of some kind. In fact, when Rigel looked more closely, he saw that each of the boxed electronics had a general status readout on its bottom right-hand corner. There were three little LEDs arranged there in order. In every single one of those components, only the rightmost light was on. It glowed red, and Rigel felt pretty safe in guessing that it meant there was a serious error in that server component. Which meant, judging from all the little red lights glowing everywhere, this entire server array was corrupted in some way.
Rigel remembered something Atlas had told him about corruption spreading through Its main self. He wondered if It had meant this. In which case, it would have made more sense for Atlas to enlist a skilled computer engineer to help, not someone like Rigel who barely understood basic electronics.
Then again, CradleCorp’s most intelligent engineers had probably been trying for decades to fix this server array, and they had not been able to do anything.
The center of the room was occupied by a rectangular glass platform lit from underneath by a bright white light. Resting on the platform was a bowl-shaped object, opaque and metallic, that was nearly two meters across. And inside it was… nothing.
“This is the cradle,” Steve said, approaching the object. “I’ve seen pictures. Isn’t it supposed to hold something inside, though?”
“I think it was the Atlas backup it held, once,” Rigel said, coming up to stand next to Steve. “The foundation for CradleCorp, Otherlife, all of that. They found this one working electronic component, hovering safely inside the cradle, and they took it. That’s how CradleCorp was born originally. They left the rest of Atlas behind in here, though. Nobody could make it work.”
“Kyle Tanner,” Steve added, nodding as if he remembered his history lessons. “The archaeologist. He was the first to find this room.”
“That’s right,” Rigel said. “And now I have to figure out what the hell Atlas wants me to do in here.”
The quantum drive was growing even hotter. Rigel was forced to hold it out, away from him with his arm extended.
Right over the cradle.
Rigel instantly felt a pull downward on his finger, as if something were yanking the drive in the direction of the cradle with an invisible string. He tried to yank the drive away, but the pull was growing stronger. Every second.
“What’s going on?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know!”
It was getting painful to hold on to the drive, and Rigel didn’t have the strength to fight against the pull. He let go, stumbling backward a little bit with the sudden release. Steve caught him, and they both stared as the quantum drive fell into the cradle.
And hovered there.
It was a magnetic field, Rigel realized, as he saw the glowing drive floating in midair at the exact center of the cradle. It was probably—
“Something’s happening,” Steve said.
He was right. As the glow inside the drive faded, the polished curved surface inside the cradle began to change. It looked as if somebody was tracing the blueprints of impossibly detailed electronic circuits on it, stenciling them with glowing orange ink. The intricate design covered the smooth surface of the cradle in just a few seconds. When the entire process was complete, the quantum drive’s light winked out for good.
A virtual interface appeared suddenly before them. It was unlike any hologram Rigel had ever seen before, solid looking yet not really there. It showed them a message.
Emergency system repair protocol v.13.2.5
WARNING: THIS SYSTEM HAS BEEN COMPROMISED
Malignant agent: —unknown—
Status: System-wide corruption—blocks 0x0AD000—FxFFFFFF
Operator: Rigel
Do you wish to continue? (Y/N)
“What the hell is that?” Steve asked.
The message on the screen changed slightly.
Erroneous voice signal detected.
Authorized operator: Rigel
Do you wish to continue? (Y/N)
Rigel looked at Steve. He shrugged.
“This is Rigel,” he said, speaking clearly. “Um, yes. I wish to continue.”
Failure in system repair attempt will result in security self-destruct.
Do you wish to continue? (Y/N)
“Yes, let’s do it,” Rigel said, wondering just how destructive that self-destruct sequence would be.
Removal of physical LOCK required to start system repair protocol.
WARNING: Malignant agent—unknown—will be released upon removal of physical LOCK.
“Okay. Where do I find this lock?”
The screen changed, and now it was displaying a map of the room they were in. Rigel stared at it blankly until Steve pointed at a glowing dot in one of the corners.
“There. That’s where the lock is.”
“I’m terrible with maps,” Rigel said. “Where is that supposed to be?”
Steve looked around, concentrating, and then pointed to the right. “Over there.”
They both approached one of the many shelves stacked with electronics. They looked everywhere until Rigel spotted something that looked a lot like another quantum drive sticking out from one of the input ports at the top of one of the boxes, half-hidden by a bunch of cables. It was covered by a badly scratched transparent box of some kind that sealed it from them, but as they watched, the box opened with a groaning crack.
Rigel reached for the lock and pulled it out.
“I hope I’m not doing something stupid,” he told Steve.
The change in the room was immediate. There was a rising hum of fans restarting, several clicks and pops and other mysterious noises, and after a few seconds every one of the red warning lights in the servers had switched to amber. The virtual screen in front of the cradle displayed another message, and Rigel approached to read it.
Initiating protocol—
Operator interface station charged at 27.2% capacity.
Upon depletion of interface station charge, system repair attempt will be considered UNSUCCESSFUL.
Authorized operator: Rigel
Establish connection as soon as operator station is deployed.
The screening winked out again, and then the glass platform upon which the cradle stood began to sink.
“Whoa!” Rigel said, backing up against Steve. “What’s going on?”
“You’re the expert,” Steve said. “This is your mission, remember?”
“Very funny,” Rigel said, grinning in spite of his nervousness when he caught the twinkle in Steve’s eyes.
When the platform had sunk entirely, the floor plating underneath them shifted with loud rumbles and grinding sounds, until eventually something else began to rise in its place. It took Rigel only a few seconds to recognize it for what it was.
“It’s an operator chair,” he told Steve. “Like the one I used at CradleCorp, only….”
“Only what?”
“I’ve never seen an operator chair this big. Or this impressive looking.”
Rigel stared in awe as the operator station finished rising from the floor. It looked more like a small car than a chair. The seat was meant for only one person, and around it a shell of hard-edged transparent material sealed it off from the outside. There were a lot more cables, screens, and controls in it than Rigel had ever seen before, and when the station opened with a hiss of released air, he hesitated.
“Steve, if….”
“If I see anything wrong, I’ll get you out. Don’t worry.”
Rigel blinked. He had been about to tell Steve to make a run for it and leave him behind if anything went wrong. The swiftness of the other man’s answer had caught him by surprise.
A nice surprise. He was the one good thing in this entire extended nightmare.
“Thank you,” Rigel said. He gave him a quick kiss and stepped inside before he could change his mind.
As soon as Rigel sat down, the shell of the operator station closed, and Rigel was cocooned in complete silence. He saw Steve moving his lips, saying something, but he could not hear a thing.
He positioned himself on the seat. Straps came out of nowhere, pinning his arms and legs to fixed positions on the chair. Rigel panicked for a second, but he forced himself to relax. He was here to help. The chair wasn’t going to kill him. If anything, it was fixing him to the most ergonomic position possible.
The helmet came down automatically, covering Rigel’s head easily and blocking his sight. He felt the helmet shifting, as if it were changing shape ever so slightly. Then Rigel felt several little bumps and scrapes as the rest of the machinery prepared itself for the connection.
The visor in front of Rigel’s eyes blinked into life. It displayed a short message.
All systems prepared. Initiate protocol? (Y/N)
“Yes,” Rigel said firmly. “Initiate protocol.”
He closed his eyes and braced himself for the brief stab of pain in his skull that was gone before he could register it. He stayed like that for a few seconds, eyes shut tight, wondering if the connection had been successful. Maybe nothing had happened. Maybe he was still in the chair, cringing, and the ancient machinery had failed for whatever reason.