B3 Chapter 7: Gate

“That was a stupid risk to take,” Waylan said. “That was a Polarian paragon. You know that, right?”

“Are you dense?” Vivian replied. “Of course he knows.”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Waylan snapped. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“I can tell that you’re still green, kid,” Vivian’s voice was measured in a way that Syl faintly remembered. He hadn’t worked with her in many years, and she’d definitely gotten more vocal in the time since. “It’s a world of sudden, violent death out there. You mouth off to the wrong person, challenge the wrong magician, and that’s it. There aren’t retries in life. The archmage knows that. So does the paragon.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You should take some note. As a statement of fact, I am twice the magician you are in our current states in terms of capacity and practical capability. I wouldn’t even think of trying to challenge the archmage, even in his current state.”

Syl: Chill out, both of you. The situation is handled. It was a calculated risk, and it worked out. You can bicker after we’ve done our analysis.

Aaron was handling the bulk of data collection. While he wasn’t much for combat even with his weapon setup and battle FCD, he provided value in reconaissance. His specialty was in drones and perception-type spells, both of which would be critical here. Now that they had formal permission to ransack the place, he’d deployed his drones across the Polarian station.

Since there was a limit to how far machine intelligence could be taken without the ability to mass produce semiconductors due to the principle of flux circuits simply crowding each other out with power interference above a certain level of complexity, they were all manually controlled. The bulk of the modifications to the shuttle had been specifically to facilitate the inclusion and protection of the delicate multi-monitor interface Aaron had needed to control so many at once.

He had been probably the single most excited to participate. As an engineer whose primary focus was on workarounds for the lack of automation present in flux-based technology, it had only been natural for him to want to examine what true artificial intelligence had been able to manage.

While some of the drones remained behind in hidden places within the Polarian facilities to monitor the magicians there, the majority were at work taking samples, be it of technology or lunar regolith. There were a fair chunk of them just gathering data on their surroundings, examining the uniquely artificial flux in the thin atmosphere of this fragment.

“Status update,” Aaron drawled from the cockpit. “Got a wave of drillers going down. Should get results in a few. Most of the interesting stuff came from whatever mechanism they used to detonate the moon, so I can’t be sure of whether or not there’s anything volatile down there. Stay sharp.”

Syl: Roger that. Place the signal extenders outside the closest Gate.

The mechanism by which the Gates were created was the first or second most interesting thing about this area in Syl’s eyes so far.

There had been attempts to artificially provoke Gates before, none of which had succeeded, and there had been a handful of isolated attempts to create an artifical flux environment outside of the areas where it usually existed—in other words, the deepest depths of Earth’s oceans as well as anything past the lower atmosphere. Some of those had created temporary areas where certain flux-based technologies could be used, but they were all on such limited timespans and cost so much that they hadn’t really occurred that often.

Had these Gates naturally spawned in thanks to the flux they’d established? Or was the relationship reversed, such that they had artificially created Gates, which were the ones emitting flux themselves? Syl hadn’t found any mechanism in the immediate area that he recognized as something that might be used to make a Gate, though there was some very ingenious tech that he was certainly going to replicate and modify once they went back down.

For the time being, he was fairly certain that there wasn’t any single device mounted to the Gates that was spawning them. If there was a machine doing so, it was likely elsewhere.

As such, the next step was to see what was in there. Previous observation of the falling moon fragments indicated that the machines living within were capable of releasing monsters from them seemingly at will to interfere with humans trying to stop it. This fragment had been stopped, but none were coming out. Whether that was because the machines hadn’t initiated the same process here or if there just weren’t any active AI on this fragment or some entirely different reason altogether was still yet to be seen.

Cross-referencing Polarian information revealed that they had yet to send a living expedition in. Every single drone they’d sent in had also been destroyed immediately.

Syl: Status check.

“Staying behind,” Vivian said. “Going to keep an eye on the extenders and make sure nothing funny happens. We don’t know how these Gates are going to work, so in the case the signal extenders don’t work, I’ll come in and notify you if they make a move.”

“Ready for deploy,” Uriel said. She’d been quiet for a while. 

Though she wasn’t an engineer, she was still someone who was very aware of magical history. Being inside the territory of a race of living ghosts not days after learning one of her close allies was a Sinner had stunned most of her words out of her. Syl could tell that she was absorbing information, too. Uriel had been one of the few magicians willing to take the steps to move beyond what an unmodified mortal frame could offer. It was little surprise she wanted to learn how she could adapt to this, too.

“Ready whenever the rest of y’all are,” Waylan said shortly.

He, on the other hand, was quickly looking to become a problem. Syl had his eye on the duelist. Though he was ostensibly a friend of a friend, the Red had showed enough active dissonance with their shared movement that he was considering expelling him. It wasn’t a real problem, but Pride was particularly suspect to irritants.

“Ready for deploy,” Avery said. 

Syl didn’t have a read on him. He was quiet, deferring to others when it came to making decisions. Most of his communication was probably with Jennifer, who was monitoring this situation with a few seconds of delay from Earth. She hadn’t contacted Syl during this time, which meant that the Incarnate-Viridian alliance probably hadn’t suffered any major attacks.

One slight benefit of most major Aurian factions abruptly breaking up, it seemed. While other countries were busy using their healthy militaries to fight each other, Auria’s were all so focused on maintaining their own territory and expanding into more intact lands that they weren’t really fighting for the salted earth present across most of the now bombed-out nation. With people dying in droves and all infrastructure grinding to a halt, there were few people who actively wanted to take over a part of Auria that had been at the epicenter of one of the attacks.

“Ready for deploy,” Bianca echoed.

Together, they stepped into the Gate.

#

Syl was no stranger to Gate clearing. An average military magician, even one on standby, could expect to be called any number of times to clear potential threats before they could spill over into baseline reality. That had gone double for him. Over the course of his career, he’d cleared easily triple-digit numbers of Gates, including two of the twelve paragon-class emergences in the last decade.

There was always a pattern to them. They tended to reflect the surrounding environment that they were created in. Gates that formed over water tended to be at least partially submerged, ones in cave systems were often labyrinthine complexes, ones in jungles tended to have alien greenery, and so forth. The monsters present within were also typically somewhat familiar, usually variations on Earth animals with additional abilities that wouldn’t have been found on animals on Earth.

Furthermore, there was only ever one entrance into the environment of a given Gate. While there were repeating ones that opened towards the same area every time they were cleared as well as Gates near each other that pathed into similar-looking ones, two Gates never opened into the same place. 

On top of that, there had never been a successful breach of a Gate’s boundaries—even if the material it was made out of was breakable, any attempts at trying to mine or otherwise expand the confines of one had resulted in failure, often explosively. As a matter of fact, Gate-bombing was actually a semi-popular terrorist tactic by some; digging too far resulted almost universally in a Gate spewing out its contents into the surrounding area.

More extensive, long-term Gate research was also impossible. The longest-lasting Gate on record had lasted for a total of 78 days before it had destabilized beyond use.

All this was to say that the AI had broken every known law when it came to Gates. Syl—and everyone else with him—had been expecting a regular delve. Reflecting the environment where it’d been placed, it was likely that there would be thin or no atmosphere as well as a surface composed of mostly lunar regolith or something similar.

That wasn’t even close to the case. Instead, they walked into what looked like the ground floor of a pristine factory. Each of them had come in with defensive spells at the ready, prepared to counter whatever had been killing the Polarian drones, but that proved to be unnecessary. Nothing was attacking them.

Around them, heavy machinery operated itself, processing pallets of compressed lunar rock into other material and machining it into small, delicate pieces. Mechanical arms, conveyor belts, and twisting clusters of cables pulsing with flux covered the entire warehouse-sized area. It was chaos, but an organized one. The arrangment was familiar to Syl.

Machines didn’t operate by the same rules that humans did. What might look like a mess to his eyes could very possibly the setup that allowed for the quickest, fastest return with minimum power spent.

This was a scene he’d seen the afterimage of before. The ghosts of the Taiwanese AI writ large and restored to life, processing, building, expanding.

The longer he spent in here, the stranger it felt. It was vast, which shouldn’t have been possible. This had given off readings of a B-class Gate, which had hard limits on recorded sizes—yet dozens of aircraft could be lined up side-by-side and still not scrape the walls on either side.

“What the fuck,” Waylan said, voicing a sentiment each of them held.

Syl: Comms test.

“Receiving you loud and clear,” Vivian said from the outside. “That’s strange. I thought everything that went in there went down, tech-wise.”

“I’ll try a diagnostic,” Avery said. “Jennifer has one I can run.”

Syl stopped in his tracks, his senses alerting him to fluctuations in the area around him. That wasn’t just flux, but also slight changes in color, air pressure, machine speeds.

Communication.

Syl: No. Don’t cast anything. The suits are pushing it already.

“What?” Avery asked. “Okay. Confirming. Canceling cast.”

“What do you see?” Uriel asked. “Other than the obvious. This… this was the apocalypse, right?”

“It was,” Waylan said. Even he seemed lost for words for once. “Is, maybe. Machines upon machines.”

“One machine,” Uriel corrected. “A million minds, all part of the same whole.”

“It’s speaking,” Bianca said quietly.

Syl hadn’t had the time to educate other people in the way the AI perceived flux, perceived the world. It had taken him years of slowed-down time to process the nuances of its language, and explaining them all was a mostly futile endeavor in their current situation.

Still, Bianca was so closely linked to him that they could draw from each others’ flux pools. She had understood enough to read the patterns in the area around them.

Syl: It is. The system through which it does is nonconventional. Let me try to transcribe it.

The only communication they had received from the AI up till this point had painted it as a semi-hostile figure. It hadn’t actively been trying to kill humanity by the looks of it, just push its own goals upon it.

That said, it had also thrown the moon at Earth.

Syl hadn’t prepared a specific method to communicate with the machines, but he had ways to do so. The machines probably understood English, but what they were communicating indicated that it expected a response in kind. He moved free-form flux in ways no human would have thought of doing, carving specific grooves in the air at precise intervals, repeating, twisting, modifying.

The result was a simultaneous exchange of information, both parties adapting to the other as they spoke. Syl’s understanding of the AI’s language had been incomplete, based off of a decades-old ruin that didn’t have any living samples to reply to him. He could tell the machine was deliberately testing him to see how much he could comprehend and reply to, but whether or not he could fully understand, it was good data.

“What the hell are you doing?” Waylan asked.

“Shut up,” Bianca told him.

The conversation proceeded for the better part of a minute before abruptly stopping.

Syl: A full transcription of the information exchanged will take a while to make. I’ll type up a short one for the time being. While I’m doing that, you should be safe to run diagnostics. Nothing invasive.

Without exaggeration, the machines had upended everything Syl had thought he knew about Gates.

“There’s… more of them,” Uriel said. “This isn’t the only Gate in and out of this place.”

Without exaggeration, this upended everything Syl knew about Gates. The implications from that alone… if he’d had the flux to do it, he would have cast his custom paragon-class spell again to spend years here, but he was still recovering.

There was one thing he didn’t mention in the transcription he was typing up. The AI had referred to him as “one prophet amongst a hallowed few.” Disregarding the religious implication, it was clear that there were a small handful of others capable of communicating with the machines.

At a guess, those included Zero and the Aurian king. Maybe not the latter, given the lack of Aurian hegemony, but Syl could never be sure.

One thing he was certain of was that the majority of the others contesting for the moon fragments weren’t.

The world as current magicians knew it was coming to an end. The fourth world war had begun, and Syl intended to remain standing when it was over.

With this fragment, it would be easy.

To think there was a time when I thought I would get peace.