“That last one is the last entry of them all?” Serenity looked up at his father. “Is there anything else that talks about what the Event was, what caused it?”
Lex shook his head. “They didn’t know. That’s mentioned repeatedly; they know it was a great disaster that did something to the planet’s mana levels and stability and made them plummet, along with causing horrible weather. Some of the descriptions are fairly brutal; there were quite a few deaths on A’Atla in the first few days. This wasn’t the only journal I found, but no real answers to what caused it or even how long ago it was.”
Serenity nodded, but he was pretty certain he was still frowning. “No indication of how much magic they started with or how strong the strongest people were?”
Lex shook his head. “Some mentions of spellcasters that protected themselves or others until they could get inside A’Atla, but it looks like they depended on the ship for protection, at least in the long term. Does that help?”
Serenity shook his head. “Not without knowing what the ship was designed to take. I suspect A’Atla was intended to deal with everything they could think of and protect low-Tier people at the same time. Otherwise it probably wouldn’t be here, even in the shape it’s in now.” Serenity huffed. “I only know of two times when Earth’s magic probably went crazy, and the more recent one is probably what sunk A’Atla. From what Psyche said, there was fighting here before it went down. She wasn’t here for it but she’d know. That doesn’t line up with those journal entries.”
Come to think of it, he could probably ask Psyche for more information. It’d be easier once he was off A’Atla, but if he really had questions he could relay them through Rissa.
He had to figure out what questions to ask first.
“I haven’t managed to find anything else that would give us a timeline,” Lex admitted. “At least, not without somehow getting it into a computer. There’s all sorts of data recorded, but no way to make sense of it.”
Aide, can you help with that?
I only have access to the same things you do, Aide reminded Serenity. Which means only at the spire and your father will have to grant additional access.
Serenity moved over to the spire and touched it. As Aide predicted, the sort of low-level data that Lex mentioned wasn’t there. “Can you give me more access? I’d like to see that data.”
Lex grinned at his son. “I can do better than that. Your mother’s second in command, now, so it’s letting me hand out other ranks. I gave Blaze the closest thing to Chief Medical Officer I could find; you’re getting the engineering hat.”
“You held off on giving it out just so you could see my face, didn’t you.” Serenity released the spire and shook his head at his father. He wasn’t sure if he should be annoyed or amused, but he settled on amused. Lex liked to see his son open his presents; more than one of Thomas’s birthday celebrations was delayed so that his father could be there. Serenity looked back on that with fondness, even if it’d been a little annoying at the time.
Lex tilted his head. “Not just to see your face, but that was part of it. Hmm. It really doesn’t want to give it to you; there are three levels of warnings that you have higher-priority duties and should be given an auxiliary role instead. I’m going to push it through anyway.”
Serenity knew his father had succeeded both from Lex’s satisfied “Finally!” and from the words that appeared in front of his vision.
Critical Mana Shortage: 95% of minimum level available
All nonessential systems are disabled
Minimal life support available
Title Granted: Lord Wizard of A’Atla
Congratulations on your promotion!
Remote interface available
Full A’Atla System Access Available
A series of tabs appeared on the right edge of Serenity’s vision. Several of them looked interesting; he wanted to start with the Structural Overlay tab. Aide, can you handle the Logs tab? I think there’s going to be a lot there.
There is. This is going to take some time to work through; it’s all raw data.
Serenity winced at that. He’d worked with raw logs in the past; if you wanted to make anything out of them, you had to figure out what to look for. Even worse, if you wanted to look at how things changed over time, you had to extract the data from the logs and turn it into a format that was useful for what you were trying to do. There aren’t any prebuilt tools to help manage the data?
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Not as far as I can tell. It looks like most of this wasn’t intended for anything other than immediate diagnostic use; it was simply never thrown away.
Joy. Serenity was glad Aide was handling that instead of him.
The Structural Overlay tab was everything Serenity hoped it would be and more. It allowed him to see a model of A’Atla that was clearly the original plan, with notes all over it. The model could easily be rotated, zoomed in or out, and even taken “apart” so that Serenity could see what was going on inside different pieces. There were notes about wear and tear, failures, and even indications where parts of the ship had torn away due to fighting.
By far the most common notation was “flooded”. The second most common was “salt contamination”. Serenity decided to ignore those for now. The reason for them was obvious.
Serenity found an entire options menu and toggled off several of the currently less useful notifications. Not only did he not care about flooding, he didn’t care about areas that were running in “automated mode, manual override disabled” or “standby due to low mana”. Turning those off turned the model from a thicket of warnings into something he could actually look at and do something with.
It was clearly toggled off by default, but there were options to display current personnel, residents, and visitor locations. It refused to turn on with an Error: Below Critical Mana Level, but Serenity looked forward to seeing how that particular feature was set up once it was functional; it might well let him improve his scouting rituals.
This was far more than Serenity expected. There were modern programs that could do all of this, but they took large quantities of data input and tended to be more useful after the fact than realtime. He’d expected the ship to be closer to what he’d seen as Vengeance, where data gathering was primarily performed by people instead of automated. For that matter, how did the ship get this information?
Some of it had to be automated somehow. There was a section of the ship that showed something that looked far more like a wireframe than the relatively solid model he saw elsewhere. Some investigation showed that an entire chunk was missing and he was seeing the plans rather than the actual ship. That could have been filled in by a crew member at some point, except that when Serenity zoomed in, it wasn’t just a line; it clearly showed how the area had been repeatedly stressed then broken, almost torn off. There was absolutely no reason to record that level of detail about the damage manually and then not repair it.
That thought sent Serenity back into the options menu. If this was being done manually, how frequently was it done?
It turned out that there was a way to show that with each entry; it was simply turned off by default. The major damage to A’Atla - the missing section - occurred roughly seven thousand years ago. There was a date and even a time listed, though the dates were ridiculous. If he’d counted correctly, it recorded a date millions of years after whenever the date system started; it even had the same CY next to it as the journal entries Lex found.
That, along with the far lower dates from the log entries, seemed to indicate that the ship A’Atla was millions of years old and had been uncrewed for nearly all of that time. That was insane.
Serenity really wanted to see its self-repair capabilities. It had to have them or there was no way it would still be even remotely functional.
The notes about flooding actually started earlier than the note of major damage, but the early ones were all near the edge of A’Atla; the more central ones came after the edge of the ship crumpled. It was an odd pattern; at first, it worked its way in from the edge, then damage notices appeared at the center. Some were accompanied by flooding notices, but those were all connected to segments that had already flooded. Most of them had flooded notices that came much later.
Not long after the central damage started, flooding notices started near the core of the ship, deep towards the interior. There were no damage notations associated with them; it looked, as far as Serenity could tell, like A’Atla was flooding itself deliberately.
The initial damage took almost two days to accumulate, but once the internal flooding started, it went relatively quickly. A few hours was long enough for the majority of the ship to flood. It never tipped significantly; Serenity could see that the flood notices for the fields that weren’t included in the relatively small heavily-damaged area happened within minutes of each other.
It looked like it was a deliberate flooding of A’Atla, but Serenity didn’t understand why. As far as he could tell, there hadn’t been anyone who could order A’Atla to flood itself in millions of years at that point; wouldn’t that require a Captain?
Wait, were there standing orders of some sort? That would explain why A’Atla stayed on the surface and repaired itself even though there was no one in command.
Serenity backed out of the Structural Overlay tab and went digging. He didn’t notice the passage of time as he wandered through the different sections of information on A’Atla; it was fascinating to see what was there and what wasn’t. Eventually, he found what he was looking for. It turned out that there was a last set of instructions left by Acting Captain Reka.
Monitor mana and essence levels across A’Atla. While they are outside these limits, submerge and follow lines of stability. Protect inhabited spaces (standard submergence protocols). Once they are within these limits, surface and refit the top levels for habitation.
Ready yourself for a new Captain.
There were a number of attachments defining the limits and what the various applicable protocols were, but Serenity didn’t dig into them for a long time. If he assumed that A’Atla sank itself in response to the mana disturbances caused by mass combat on the surface, everything made all too much sense. Everything except for why it stayed underwater, at least. Eleven thousand years ago didn’t match up with the second round of damage to Gaia.
Or did it? He could have been wrong before. It wasn’t like he’d been able to assign an exact date, after all. If he assumed that the gods were active for a while after A’Atla sank, it would make more sense. “A while” would be thousands of years, but that … was possible.
That sent Serenity scrambling for whatever he could find on mana levels. The results were disappointing; they were recorded, along with essence levels, but not in a format Serenity could immediately read. Even worse, there were no good tools for figuring out how they were changing, only what they currently were.
Why did they have such an excellent display of the ship’s status and such terrible tools for everything else?