Chapter 1: Living in the center of the world…
The cool dark earth gives way and my spade sinks into the ground, I bury a small apple seed and pat the earth flat. “That’s the last one,” I cross out planting in my to do list and I close the book, “thing to do”-from dad. A cold breeze touches my skin and the scent of grass and fruits fill the air, the gaze of the sun blocked by my dads straw hat, how refreshing.
Suddenly a small humanoid droid with tracks about half my height, drives past the trees, crushing all the flowers in its path. Not like I mind doing this again…
Your sister requests to see you, Gen fowlhiem
“Give me a moment,” “Can’t you see I’m busy,” “I’m going to have to replant those flowers you just ran over.”
Your sister urgently requests your presence
“Fine… take me to her,” “I’ll fix this up later,”
The small droid pats the dirt off my clothes and I hand the spade and place the straw hat on top of its camera. The little droid zooms off, and I follow right behind to go see my sister. As I leave my simple garden, the sky seemingly goes dark and begins unfolding itself revealing a grand dome with a red sky. Inside the dome is a huge street filled with busy drones, droids, and all sorts of automatons, every droid that roams the street were designed by my father and produced by my sister, it takes a while to get to the factory from the garden so I hop on a nearby cargo drone headed straight to the factory.
A little while later I can see a huge factory situated right in the center of the dome, it looks like a huge metal pole, that touches to the sky high roof of the dome and a little more. The cargo drone sinks into the floor with its contents. As it sinks deeper into the metal floor, I can see the floor is made up of trillions of nanites just for this part of the ground, the nanites move around me with a fluidity like water and avoids me, in a bit the nanites close off the roof and the walls around me light up revealing a large tunnel full of bustling cargo drones holding shipments of metals, chemicals, and goods of all sort. I hop off and take an apple from one of the cargo drones passing. Ahead the little robot idly waits besides many elevators and leads me into one.
Stepping inside little bug like droids scuttle away into various openings in the floor, the interior is very cold, the elevator is mostly used for transporting goods in and out of the tower my sister resides 24/7. The doors close and with a click the elevator shot up towards the main tower. As the elevator neared the roof the red glow from the magma above glowed through the window and lit up the cold elevator. Through the windows we neared a looming tower reaching and piercing the magma above, the tower sprouted an energetic shield keeping the magma around us from caving in and filling the domes. Soon the lift slowed down and stopped near the tower and doors on the surface of the tower opened up swallowing us before closing shut shutting the red glow of the magma. Soon the elevator slowed to a stop and let us out, I continued down a path of lights that guided us to a large steel door. Cameras above turn to face us looking straight at me. The doors shakes and with a growl from the motors of the door it finally opened letting out a gust of wind from the pressurized room. The only light that peeked into the room were from the lights of the tunnel so I had to watch my step, soon the doors shut behind me cutting all light leaving me and the droid in complete darkness.
Suddenly I felt the ground rumbling under me and almost lost my footing. I quickly continued forwards the path and found myself in a ginormous room in the tower, dimly lit up screens filled with up the walls monitoring all sorts of areas and displayed everything within the domes and a little beyond, hanging from the room were thousands of cables of all sizes and lengths held together by a ginormous ring attached to the roof by many other cables, but all the cables are attached to a single enormous entity too dark to see, Suddenly lights around the ring switch on and lit up by the ring is a grand steel statue, its figure was that of a woman in her 20’s. But the statue had thousands of arms, and many arms were inhuman, some arms had clamps, while others were spiny and needle like, many had different numbers of fingers and even split down its elbow. The giant figure stands around 200 feet with a dress made of wires anchoring it to the floor. It’s thousand arms were all working the monitors and various levers and switches.
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“Hey sister!” I greet the giant. It gazes down on me,
“Your finally here,” the room reverberates back, but her iron lips unmoving. Her cold iron eyes split open and needles, antennas, and cameras stick out of them. She turns to face me, stopping whatever she was doing at the moment, she kneels down onto one leg her figure still looming over head. “You’ve taken your time getting here,” her voice came from the walls, reverberating across the room. With one of her many arms she brings down a large monitor down to me. It displayed a diagram of the earth showing the many layers of the planet, right in the center of the planet was the dome where we reside in. She zooms the image into the center of the planet, displaying the dome in the center.
“A hundred years ago, our father built thousands of labs across the entire surface of the planet, scattering labs across countries and even ocean floors,” “despite the thousands of labs, their research all focuses on a single source of energy, he called it Ratton,” “His labs were all powered by this seemingly infinite source of power,” “but like moths to a lamp, outer beings were attracted, calling themselves our gods, they shaped themselves to our myths and took over our lives.” “They craved the monopoly fowlhiem had on the power, sending his own colleagues to take it for themselves.” “In retaliation he hidden away his labs and hidden away earth with this power.” “This entire place is built from the hundreds of thousands of labs father built over the years,” “for hundreds of years after the war we have been separated from the surface of the planet, the layers of the planet too thick to get back up,” “for the first time is hundreds of years, a hole has formed in the planet, straight down to here giving us a chance to go up. Not all the labs have been able to successfully head to the core of the earth, some were intercepted by your fathers own colleagues who researched the energy with him, and some just couldn’t reach the center,” “the lab was built to facilitate all ratton, every last bit of it could be theoretically controlled, but the facility is full of holes and breaking apart at every corner, it would have collapsed in on itself if I wasn’t keeping an eye on it 24/7,”
“And what am I supposed to do,” I asked, “there are thousands of labs that are still up there,”
“You will be sent up and retrieve the labs,” “you just need to repair them and they will automatically come here,”
“How am I even supposed to head to the surface,” she’s asking me to do all these impossible things,
“Well it’s very simple,” “since there’s now a hole in the mantle of the earth, we’ll just shoot you to the surface of the planet and we can go from there,” her metallic face showed no signs of movement.
“…what?”
“Anyways we’re on a time crunch so you’ll need to head down to the launch pad right below the hole,”
“Wait you’re just going to launch me straight through the-,”
My hand is grabbed and pulled by the maid droid from before and I am pulled back to the hallway, my sister waving me goodbye before the doors close shut. Soon we are back in the elevator and the droid hands me a diagram of the rocket used to send me back up, it is small and looks like it won’t even make it halfway to the surface of the planet, I look out of the red lava sky as the elevator moves to the launch pad. Looking down from the top of the dome I can see the vacant spots where more domes should be. And in the sky above the launch pad I see many drills working on the magma above, drilling holes wide enough to fit the rocket.
Pieces of molten rock falls and hits the surface of the dome sliding off before being collected by drones above. Suddenly the lift shakes to a stop, the entire area begins to rumble and shake. Suddenly above the launch pad the magma roof cracks open and bursts apart, sending fragments of lava destroying the drilling equipment nearby. A huge hole in the magma formed, a gust of wind blowing from it, a bright light comes down from the hole, the light dies a little revealing a flaming horned man, his face resembled a goat skull and his upper body were bulky and tough and covered in flaming tattoos. He looks around in the air smelling the air around.
“The divinity here is seemingly endless, what is this place…” he takes a deep breath, his flames growing a bit brighter, “if I devour this place I’ll truly become a god,”
Suddenly droids below begin firing beams at the being, but the beams don’t even hit him bending away, one stray shot almost takes out the lift. He glances to my lift and notices me, and in an instant he seemingly teleports right by the window. The fires from his body begin to melt the lift. “What are you? You look human but the energy that comes off you smell weird” He reaches out to the window shattering it, the maid bot bites at his hand, melting a bit of its own face doing so, “annoying.” He brings his arm up and slaps the lift, sending it flying straight into a building.