“What do you think this is for?” I asked Faelix. He flew over and landed on the table in front of me.

“It’s text input field waiting for something,” he said and before I could stop him, he’d pushed a bunch of keys and the screens as filled with a fast scroll of text before it stopped, again, at a flashing cursor.

Faelix hit more keys and a history of what had been typed into the sytem started scrolling down the screen and then stopped and waited for Faelix to hit another key.

“Well isn’t that just a bucket of monkey?” Faelix said.

“A bucket of monkeys?”

“Focus on what’s important,” he said. “You may be god-like and all powerful when it the magic is working, but right now you’re not much better than the rest of us and that means pay attention.”

“I’m pretty sure I can kill you,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure you can’t kill me.”

“That’s not the point, now is it?” Faelix said. He pointed through the door. “There are people out there who need you to be successful in here and since I also need you to be successful so I can get away from the Faery culvert and off into the wide, wide world.”

I got that and even though I knew exactly why I was pushing Faelix’s buttons, he was right in that I needed to pay attention to what he was doing. It could mean something and while I could figure everything out without having his help, it was a lot easier listening to him than having to learn anything new.

He seemed to smile at me, like he was reading my mind, and then pointed at the screen and said, “There’s an ongoing conversation via text between your monster and whoever controls him-it. It would appear that he has been asking questions about you, specifically, and wanting to know what stories or history exists to either support your existence or to explain …”

Faelix paused and leaned into the screen as he hit the wide button at the bottom, “… why your presence was causing problems with his tools.”

“I was causing problems?” I asked.

“It would seem so,” Faeliz said. “None of his instruments seemed to work properly when you were around. They didn’t not work, but they also didn’t give consistent or reliable data.”

“Then why did he insist on keeping me around?”

“According to the interchange, monster and whoever he-it is talking to thinks you might be the the answer to some problem they were having.”

“He couldn’t see the ruins of the castle or the city on the other side of the river,” I said, half to myself.

“There’s a city on the other side of the river?” Faelix asked.

“There’s always been a city on the other side of the river,” I said. “Through when I saw it, there were more ruins than seemed appropriate and the cook fires I could see disappeared as soon as I noticed them.”

“Interesting,” Faelix said.

“Is it?”

“No. But it is something we can work on. See this part of the conversation? It points out that you could see something, though he-it dismissed it and continued to think it was absolutely rubbish in terms of reliable information.”

“Yes. Well, what do we do about that?” I asked, pointing as the screen changed to a blinking cursor and then:

We’re online, waiting for an update.

“What kind of update?” I asked.

“Probably new information about the data or you,” Faelix said.

He looked at me and then typed:

Have spent the day with subject and systems are still responding with a lack of clarity. What have you found on your end?

He hit Enter and watched as the shade of green changed and another blinking cursor appeared.

“What did you do that for?” I asked.

“You don’t get a response without doing something. Something in and then something out. We just put something in and now ….”

“We’re looking for what comes out,” I finished. Clearly, Faelix was clever. ”Which reminds me, we need to talk about my dimensional space. How’d you get in?”

“I told you, that was easy,” Faelix said. ”And I’m not sure whether or not I can trust you with information you’re not supposed to have.”

“Of course you can’t trust me,” I said. “Why would anyone want to trust me?”

“Which is exactly why I’m still questioning whether or not I can trust you,” he said. “You may know you’re not trustworthy, but you’re also not an idiot. An idiot would never question whether or not they can be trusted because idiots believe themselves to be smarter than they are. You, however, question whether or not I can trust you because you’re inherently untrustworthy. Which isn’t actually the question being explored, it’s whether or not you are going to disclose something simply because you can.”

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“That makes almost no sense,” I said.

“You don’t believe that,” he said.

He was right. I didn’t believe myself and understood, mostly, what he was talking about. Yes, it’s true that I’m not trustworthy and will sell you down the river for the possibility of a giggle, and yet I also knew the value of keeping secrets and not sharing things. Especially when I could benefit from that information.

The screen changed:

Still looking up subject. Need better information on what you were able to do during daylight hours and how the subject responded to changes in the variables.

“You’re the subject,” Faelix said.

“I got that,” I responded with a snarky smile.

“What do you think we should tell them?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Watch this,” he said and then typed:

Subject still insists on seeing objects on the other side of the river. Scanning in that area is still inconsistent and unreliable. Subject also insists she was once capable or turning me into some kind of animal (I didn’t understand what she was specifically referring to but got by inference something wet and slimy and disgusting).

“That’s not exactly far from the truth,” I said. “I could’ve done that.”

“Before,” Faelix said.

“And again, sooner or later.”

“Which is irrelevant until it’s true,” he said.

I was pretty certain Faelix was keeping score, but at the same time so was I and among all the people and creatures I’d interacted with, Faelix was the most interesting and had secrets and it was the secrets I wanted.

Keep observing subject

The screen responded

And we will continue to review information provided for additional historic or mythologic significance.

The screen then reverted to the previous scroll of information with a new file added to the bottom of the list. Seeing this, Faelix typed some more and the screen changed again. This time with different information, a much longer interchange between Ethan and someone else. There was data being sent and received, though what the numbers and references to other files actually meant was beyond me, and as Faelix continued to read he seemed to grow more excited and increasingly more alarmed.

“What’re you reading that’s causing so many changes in your attitude?” I asked.

“The tubes in the lower level,” he said, “are a growth medium.”

“Okay?”

“For human-like beings. In theory, these could be used to create almost anything. Yourself included, which seems to have been part of the conversation when he first started detecting you.”

“First started detecting me?” I felt stupid.

“Yes. Apparently, his readings started to change in such a way as to suggest someone, or more specifically something organic, was about to appear and they were preparing to get more data with the possibility of adjusting the growth matrix to … to make whoever was being sent here more receptive to the natural environment.”

“They’re sending people here?”

“Yes,” Faelix said. “Who do you think that monster was? Just some random creature from some faraway place?”

“I didn’t think about it at all,” I said. “As far as I knew Ethan was just another human who seemed weird. A lot has changed, clearly, since the faeries trapped me.”

Faelix nodded as he continued to look at the readouts on the computer. “We have to stop the process,” he said. “If we don’t it looks like there will be even more monsters showing up.”

“More?”

“Yeah. It looks like whoever is behind all this is sending a couple of more people into those growth chambers. Which was probably why there was extra equipment you could use. According to this,” Faelix pointed out a scroll of text, “the first monster requested additional resources when you showed up and claimed to be some mythical creature. The consensus was that you’re dangerous and he wasn’t safe on his own.”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t have done anything had your group not made a deal with me,” I said, then shrugged and looked to the door leading down.

“Funny. Self-fulfilling,” Faelix said. “They were right, but for the wrong reasons.”

I didn’t feel like exploring whether or not I would’ve done something top Ethan. My goal, from the beginning, was to feed off of him to use my powers. Knowing he was and wasn’t humans helped me understand why I couldn’t get anything from him. Though, to be perfectly clear, I still had no idea why it was I couldn’t see the fantastic world before I saw the jackalope.

Faelix flew to the door and I followed, opening it and then following him down. When we got into the underground room, the growth chambers had changed. There were definitely bodies growing in the liquid. They looked more like homunculi than actual humans, more misshaped and wrong than anything else.

Within the liquid were mechanical arms that extended into the liquid and seemed to be building out the organic matter with other things.

“Those are the electronic components that help connect the human meat into the combination of organic and electronic medium,” Faelix said, pointing at the mechanical arms and the bits that were being inserted into muscle and sinew and flesh.

“I’ve seen some disgusting shit,” I said.

“And this takes the cake,” Faelix said.

“How do we destroy it?” I asked, thinking about the golden sword and other things in my satchel.

“Not the way you dispatched the monster,” he said, somehow realizing I was thinking about the sword. “This is an electronic and mechanical problem, not one that can be dealt with magical tools and spells.”

Okay. “How do we do it then?” I asked.

“The easy answer,” Faelix said, “is to overload the system. Blow it to hell and back again. I’m pretty sure, given what I’ve already seen, there are explosives built into the structure for the very situation we’re in. One of the forest creatures, the magical kind, getting into this room.”

“Great,” I said. Still waiting for Faelix to get to the point.

“We just need to find the button or buttons that activate the self-destruct system and then run,” he said.

“There’s a system specifically designed to blow up this building?” I asked.

Faelix nodded.

“That seems very uninformed,” I said, struggling for the right words.

“You’d think. But these humans, they have different ideas about right and wrong. There are entire books about morals and ethics that dictate a lot of their actions. Most of it is complete rubbish, but some kind of makes sense. I guess, if you’re human.”

“If you’re human,” I said and motioned for Faelix to get on with it.