B3 Chapter 13 - Fragment

Nobody was there to contest the moon fragment this time. This one was on the smaller end; city-sized, not state or country. It was large enough to have a gravitational pull of its own, but it was much lighter than even the last one they’d gone on.

From here, the three magicians sitting down for the Gates had a much better view of the world beneath them. Visual clarity had decreased a lot back on Earth—the amount of debris exploding from even successful fragment conflicts had covered the atmosphere in dirt, ash, and more exotic pollutants. Fragment impacts were visible as flaming meteorites in the otherwise chokingly clogged sky, but only just. Even the sun was barely visible at day.

Past the edge of the atmosphere, it was easy to understand just how close Earth was to oblivion. As far as the eye could see, the sky was littered with massive chunks of lunar rock, each of them constantly spilling out debris and magical runoff, raining them down on the planet down below. Each individual one was large enough to cause the end of the human race as they currently knew it. There were so many of them that it would be practically impossible to launch a mission into deep space without risking hitting one.

“I wonder how many others have people on them right now,” Uriel said, looking off into the distance.

“All of them, I should think,” Bianca replied. “Every nation on Earth wants to mine this place. Even if they have nothing to learn, the machines have made enough of a home to transmute a chunk of the fragments. There are rare earth metals and all manner of machinery that they can use.”

Incarnate had some interest in doing the same. In lieu of specific equipment for the Gate delve, the shuttle they’d taken was laden with automatic mining equipment.

One of the greatest fears of post-Taiwan Earth had been intelligent machines. With how devastating they had been then, any research that had gone past the most basic automation had been stopped in its tracks, funding cut and research burned.

Incarnate had been one of a number of organizations that had ignored any and all regulations. While they hadn’t sought to create an artificial intelligence of their own, there was a reason they seemed to be so effective despite having a headcount lower than that of the janitorial staff at most major national engineering institutes.

Behind Syl, Uriel, and Bianca, their equipment spread out, two magicians monitoring from the ship. They weren’t going to be able to do much if the machines decided to start attacking, but they could at least provide information to the powerhouses at hand if something became necessary.

Jennifer: I have eyes up on my end. Uriel, link whenever you’re ready.

Uriel: Copy. You’re sure you’re ready for this?

Jennifer didn’t have the combat experience to come with them, but thanks to her flux sensitivity, her analysis was on a par that even Syl couldn’t meet. As such, she’d decided to join this one by using a specially designed FCD of her own make to share Uriel’s vision with hers, essentially linking their visual data for the time being. Back in the militarized zone formerly known as Auria, Jennifer resided in a sensory deprivation pod, seeing and experiencing the world through Uriel’s eyes.

One of the many problems associated with this was the sheer amount of magic in the area around them. Syl counted no less than twenty Gates all facing them within a couple kilometers with even more of them opening further. There was terrain blocking their direct sight, but camera drones and perception spells were enough to prove just how many of them there were in the area. Jennifer had predicted being overwhelmed, hence the sensory pod, but this was on another level.

These weren’t the chaotic, unseemly Gates that tended to open on Earth, either. There was a clear difference between the artificially and naturally formed ones, with the ones around them a clear example of the former. They weren’t uniform, but they were all neat. Circles, door-like rectangles with too-perfect corners, more complex polygons—it was noticeably different from the last set.

This was a demonstration.

They knew who they were dealing with. That in itself wasn’t surprising; the fact that the Aurian king had been able to interface with them and even use an AI-manufactured weapon had been enough of a clue that the machines had intelligence on Earth.

Jennifer: Uplink secure. Enter whenever you’re ready. We’ll see if the extender works there.

The three magicians reached a silent agreement and chose the nearest Gate.

The transition was nearly seamless. Unlike the turbulent sensation that accompanied any other Gate they’d been in, this one was more like just stepping in through the door of a house.

It was also noticeably different on the inside. Rather than the factory-like setting of the last Gate they’d entered, this one was less developed. It was still nothing like a regular instance of these, but it felt newer somehow.

Other than a small, artificially constructed platform around the gate proper, there was nowhere to step. Underneath the magicians was a vast chasm somewhere around a kilometer in depth. There was no visible ceiling, and perception spells failed to catch anything past the black void above.

Jennifer: I’m recieving. Are you?

The message came through. A signal extender working through the chaos of a Gate wasn’t rare, but it was always a crapshoot.

Bianca: Yes.

Jennifer: Excellent. Uriel, I’m going to give you a few directions for intel gathering. Anything else is up to you.

Syl jumped off the platform as Uriel started looking up and around them, Bianca following shortly after. None of them had taken off their pressure suits—there was atmosphere in the air, but it wasn’t oxygen.

“They hollowed this place out,” Bianca murmured. “They’re still alive in here.”

The chasm walls and boundaries of the place were alive. Similar in design to the grey goo self-replicating weapon that the Aurian king had unleashed but not so much that they were overwhelming the Gate, tiny machines crept through the walls, consuming the material there and replicating themselves. Whereas the grey goo had only sought to devour and recreate, this process was clearly more technical.

“The space isn’t isolated,” Syl said. “Signals are coming in and out, which means the machine’s signals are the same. Anything we do in here will be transmitted to the greater whole.”

Jennifer: There’s enough new information here to fuel three decades of experimentation. Kind of weird, though… they’re missing out on a lot of progress from our end. I’m looking at this and, well, my understanding isn’t quite as nuanced as Syl’s, but I can tell that there are some mistakes in here that we stopped making a decade and a half ago.

That was interesting. It implied that their intelligence on Earth wasn’t as powerful as Syl had been assuming it was, and it also meant that they had been largely cut off from contact from current developments. At the very least, it meant that security. Measures there were working.

It also meant that they weren’t the invincible bogeyman that many had been building them up to be. As to why… that remained unknown.

“I’m going to look around more,” Syl said. “There were other entrances last time. Jennifer, status on observation?”

Jennifer: If you’re asking whether or not I have enough information, I can honestly tell you that I could look at this for a year and still be learning more. I have enough recorded to glean a lot of data from, though. I don’t think I can find the mechanism they’re making Gates with, though. A sample would go a long way.

“Got it,” Syl said. “Then let’s execute.”

He and Bianca both sent out Arcane Eyes, Syl’s going for general coverage while Bianca sent out twelve of the master-class perception-type spell, scanning the area for other Gate entrances.

They ended up finding three more, all of them surrounded by artificial platforms composed entirely out of inactive machines. Few of the machines in here seemed to notice them specifically, though there were a few monitoring that were likely sending data to the outside.

Once they identified every gate, Bianca spun into action. With the number of spell processes she could keep going at any one time, all it took was some borrowed flux from Syl’s pool purified through her own to cast.

It was one spell magnified many times. Last semester—a time that had been mere months ago but now felt like it’d been a taste of a different life—Cascadian-sponsored terrorists had trapped them in a Gate with a master-class spell, True Seal. When both of them had been hiding their true strength, neither had made an effort to break the spell down.

The veil was gone now, every one of their reasons to remain hidden leaving with it.

Without breaking a sweat, Bianca casually cast four instances of True Seal simultaneously. While Syl could do so in short succession, he simply didn’t have the spell processes to manage them all. Bianca, however, could have created a dozen more and still been fine.

They went up with no delay between them, cutting off the signal all at once. The machines within didn’t freeze up, but there was a notable change in the signals passing between them as they processed that external instructions were no longer coming.

It was important to remember that the machines were not creatures of only flux. In their original form, they had been created through the last remaining functional advanced electronics plants on the planet. Unless they had completely changed, they were likely still electronic in some way.

For this, Syl had prepared something similar to what Waylan had tried to use on Uriel earlier. His weapon, however, was a much larger scale version, and it didn’t discriminate in directionality.

“Shields up, Uriel,” Syl said.

She cast a simple shielding spell as Syl popped the electromagnetic pulse. That flux shield alone would have done nothing against the weapon, but he’d added enough of a spell twist to this pulse to avoid allies with a certain spell encoding.

The machines weren’t stupid even without access to their central intelligence. They immediately tried to follow suit, flux-capable robots analyzing and copying the spell pattern Uriel had managed in record time.

In all his time as a magician, Syl had recognized that one critical factor that contributed to the fall of innumerable talented individuals that might have even held a candle against him. Predictability.

So far, the machines hadn’t really been that way. There was a great deal of internal commnunication that he couldn’t decode, their actual motives were opaque, and they’d had decades of setup to plot.

Here and now, though, when they were forced to adapt on the fly, he could read them. They weren’t used to hiding their communications—after all, nobody had even tried to intercept them, and other than Syl and perhaps a scant handful of others, there were none who could even come close to decoding what they were saying to each other.

In this limited space, with their comms as open and visible to the naked eye as they were, Syl had seen their counterattack planned from a mile away. He counter-cast their shields, a single burst of flux propagating out of him towards every single critical machine.

The second the burst was over, Uriel and Syl followed up with further spells. They didn’t need everything in here intact—they just needed it. Uriel hit huge chunks of them with the master-class Antimagic Railgun spell, ensuring that they’d stay down even if having their electrical components knocked out didn’t put them out of commision.

Syl simply identified threats and put them down. It was simple, neatly executed, and went entirely uncommunicated outside of the Gate. By the time they were done, nothing remained online.

“Reopen the seals,” Syl ordered once he’d determined that they were mostly done. “Have them transfer the ship over.”

Bianca did as he said.

Syl: Task complete. Sort out logistics. I have one more area to explore.

“Be careful out there,” Uriel said.

“We will,” Syl said.

“We?”

Bianca levitated, following Syl as he approached a Gate—just not the one they’d come in from.

“I was stuck on the other side of the planet from him during the war,” Bianca said. “I’d much prefer that doesn’t happen again.”

Uriel looked between the two of them slowly, then shrugged. “Contact us when you get back. If you don’t return within the hour, we’re taking off.”

“Don’t mind us,” Syl said. “We can make it back to the surface ourselves.”

With little fanfare, they parted.

Syl and Bianca passed through the Gate. This part was substantially riskier, since none of them had attempted this, their drones having been near-instantly destroyed when they’d tried that.

They emerged into a hellscape. It was nearly impossible to see anything thanks to the craggy, rocky landscape around them, the shimmering heat in the air, and the dust storm so thick that even perception-class spells were stymied by it.

The flux felt different too. Measurably so. While Syl wasn’t familiar with the entire world’s flux, he knew that magic felt different at lower altitudes, deep underwater, and obviously when it was artificially generated by the machines.

This was nothing like any of this.

“Atmosphere check?” Syl asked. “Something feels off.”

“Checking now,” Bianca said, casting a diagnostic spell. “Sixty percent sulfur. Twenty percent carbon. Ten percent helium. Ten percent… everything else. Less than one percent oxygen.”

Syl’s first assumption, which he promptly discarded, was that they had emerged into one of the active warzones in Asia somehow. That couldn’t be right, though—they’d just established that it was unlikely that the machines had much of a foothold on Earth, let alone the ability to open a Gate there.

Then the only logical second conclusion…

“This is another planet,” he and Bianca said, almost in unison.

Footsteps and flux spikes alerted them to a third presence.

“Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Syl recognized that voice.

Zero.