The next image showed a massive exclamation point above the giant leader’s bowed head and several large tears that dropped down from each side of his eyes.
“What do you think the exclamation marks mean? Concern?”
“Perhaps, ‘alarm’ is more likely. Question marks are likely confusion.”
The next panel the leader stood tall, feet spread wide and an arm pointed outward. In front of him was the Terminal. In front of that were lines and lines of Humans carrying spears, swords, and what could have been rifles. The organized line of armed Humans continued until it grew into two lines, then three. It showed dead crabs underfoot.
The crabs definitely looked a little different than the ones from the Labs but who knew if it was the carver’s accuracy or the ravages of time. Jack didn’t have a problem identifying them however well or poorly they were carved, if there was one thing Jack’s Senses were attuned to it was the sight of a damned crab.
The next scene took Jonah several dedicated minutes to clear. It was a massive carved mural, larger than any of the four were tall. Tall enough that Jack had Jonah stand on his shoulders to reach and clear the upper part of it.
A massive image; massed lines of Men, the giant glowing man behind them pointing a finger forward. On the other side were crabs, swarms of them so large that their carved images were overlapped and looked almost messy. Jonah uncovered parallel lines that went from the crabs side to behind the Humans.
Jack squinted his eyes,“Small tunnels, they flanked them.” These crabs were sneakier than he thought.
That wasn’t all in the picture though, there were large crabs, much larger than the Humans, oddly-shaped and particularly dangerous-looking ones that Jack felt happy to have not encountered in the Labs. What really caught his eye though was that there were no Human-crab hybrids visible anywhere in the carved mural.
That was true except… in the middle of the crab’s battle line was a four-legged crab, its body the torso of a Human. A mess of eyestalks jutting from the neck in replacement of a head. Leanne said something about it and Jonah responded back but Jack heard none of it as his gut wringed in revulsion. He clenched his jaw and grit his teeth as his eyes locked on the hybrid.
There were swathes of dead crabs and Men alike. It showed more and more crabs. Small tunnels where the crabs had been traveling led the creatures into the backs of the Men. It showed the giant fighting in some of the carved reliefs. Whenever their leader appeared to fight in a scene, the men would stand on top of the crabs but for every scene their giant leader appeared, there were always adjacent carvings where groups of Men lay dead with large groups of crabs standing over them.
Wounded Humans were carved into another scene in great numbers. Some of them were carved with half a head, missing limbs, and other odd combinations. The message was obvious.
Jonah was getting frustrated as having to clear so much area that continued to show wounded Human after wounded Human, “It’s obvious a lot of them were wounded, why bother carving so many to say the same thing?”
Jack thought about this, maybe there was a deeper meaning, “Well, how would they know what would be obvious and would be confusing to people who see this however many years later? That or they wanted to emphasize that a significant amount of people were injured.”
Jonah looked at Jack.
“What? You thought I was just some barbarian post-ape Human?”
Jonah gave Jack a mild glare then turned to continue clearing the mural.
The giant reappeared in the next carving, next to a Pod. His eyes were different. Instead of the deep, long-weathered, detail from before his eyes were now spirals spinning outward.
“The leader’s eyes changed, what do they mean?”
There was a Man inside a Pod underneath the giant. The man inside the Pod held a spear and was missing an arm and a leg. There was a tube that connected the bottom of the Pod to the other side of the giant. The giant looked to be placing small Humans on the other side into the tube.
Leanne continued her questions, “Why’s he putting the smaller Humans into the tube?”
She stopped, hand covering her mouth, “Children.” No one particularly liked to hear that. A crunch broke their attention as Jack started eating another ration bar. Leanne’s face twisted but she didn’t say anything. It looked callous to Leanne but to Jack it was a necessity. If he was going to be fighting crabs he was going to do it on a full stomach.
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He usually knew when he was going to be applying some Medjel and the hot itch that tickled him before he would have to fight some crabs. He didn’t know what ‘banana-nougat’ was supposed to taste like but regardless, he wasn’t tasting much at the moment.
The next image showed the warrior emerging from the Pod and 3 crabs impaled on his spear.
Jack filed that away, if he could find that Terminal Pod down here he might be able to fix whatever was going on inside his Soul. At the very least he’d be able to upgrade his Constitution Tier and he wouldn’t say no to a stronger base for his body.
He had long guessed that the AI disk hadn’t been upfront with him about anything really, and, as well, was likely boosting him according to its own designs, not for his own good. The Skills, the Mods, they formed so easily and painfully it seemed strange considering how much he’d heard from Jonah and Tule with their own formations of Skills and Mods. It shouldn’t have been that easy to form them. He had thought it peculiar that he had to adjust so heavily to use those Mods, he had practiced and been forced to adjust and learn the timing of their activation. Like they hadn’t been a natural part of him.
Had the AI forced those Skills into him to boost his strength in the short-term so he wouldn’t die in the Labs? Would that have had some negative repercussions down the road? His gut said yes.
Thinking about these things brought a swirl of unanswerable questions, he looked at the pocket that contained the AI disk, or questions that it would refuse to answer. He remembered the AI offering manual brain surgery last time he had asked about a few too many things. The problem was that he was at a disadvantage talking to the AI when his hand was trapped against the Pad. Trapped and at its mercy wasn’t a strong querying position. Still, those questions lingered and spawned new questions.
Had the AI manipulated the ‘Chit’ price of certain items to guide his actions in that first room? Was the Zappa specifically put at that price point in an effort to test his Electric Affinity? Or did he always have that Affinity and the AI knew that? Maybe it took advantage of his exposure to the electricity and took advantage of it, modifying that Affinity into him? Was that even possible? Tule had said they were inborn but he was one person who had spent their life in the Labs.
Once he started in on questions that didn’t have immediate answers, they would never end. Was the AI trying to make due with what he innately possessed or was everything inside him all part of some complex calculation of the AI? Could he have even bought any of the other items at that first Terminal or were they all part of that same algorithm? That last question spiraled a latent paranoia too far for even him, not now. It even had him questioning whether or not he would let the AI put those skills back into him. He’d start trying to cultivate his own, maybe then he’d had more control over how they developed when it came to the AI. Put a finger on the scales of the AI’s algo.
They were all questions he wanted the answers to but they were also questions that had minimal bearing, at best, to the fact that they were on a massive ship dead-set on crashing into the heart of a sun if he didn’t do something to change that.
That’s if… That’s if he didn’t fail and die somewhere along the way… or, if he was being honest, if he even wanted to land this ship filled to the brim with hostile life.
Or… if it was even possible to fix this situation. Could he? Probably. Maybe. Maybe he’d arrive too late. Did he even want to though? That he was less sure of.
What was the end goal? To safely land the ship that was filled to the brim with insane SI and incredibly hostile life? To what end? So they could twist and murder and abuse Humans safely on the surface of some planet?
He didn’t know what he would decide to do: kill the ship himself, let it burn in the sun, or even try to land it. That choice was important, but ultimately it wasn’t his choice to make at the moment so making a decision of what to do right now also wasn’t important. He had no power to make that decision.
Was he ok letting others make that decision? The Humans who’d been too cowed by crabs and the SI to do anything but scrape and die in the Labs, or those disgusting freak hybrid crabs that murdered and experimented on who knows how many Humans still trapped in their Cryo-Pods? Would he let them make the choice? Let insane SI that treated people like research materials decide the lives of everyone? Of his life?
No. This was a Human ship and clearly his fellow Humans weren’t up to the task. He didn’t blame them, this ship was absolutely insane, each place more twisted than the last.
He’d put every scrap of his efforts into getting into a position to be able to decide the fate of the ship. He’d rather be eaten alive by crabs before he would let a non-Human decide that.
Jack wasn’t sure about a lot of things, but one thing was certain. He wouldn’t just give up and die. If he failed, well then he’d be dead so how would he care after that point? Until then, he’d kill and murder anything that got in his way to the Bridge.
“Jack? Jack. Jack!” Jack snapped from his internal train of thought as Leanne shook his shoulder. That’s why he didn’t ask himself those types of questions. A crab could have planted its claw through the back of his skull and he’d only have noticed when his nose started to itch.
Leanne looked at him as she removed her hand, “Where’d you go off to?”
“Just thinking,” his eyes flashed over Tule for the briefest moment, “Anyone get what this part is supposed to be?”
It was a diversion and everybody knew it but the engraved mural drew them back in regardless.
The Men continued to fight, the carved battle spanned up and down the wall. As if to provide extra emphasis and context of the struggle that was depicted in the primary horizontal panel.
It showed the largest and most bizarre of the crab-forms lying dead under the Men’s feet, swords and spears sticking out of the chitinous corpses. The crab with the Human torso was held aloft, impaled on the Human’s spears.
“They won,” Jonah said.
Jack replied, “Where are they then? Why would they spend time carving all this…”
“To leave it covered by trash…” Leanne finished and Jack nodded in agreement.
It showed the warriors returning to empty squares, houses perhaps. As the image moved along the size of the question marks above the Men’s head increased in size. The biggest warrior stood at the front of the other Men and pointed at the giant. Above the warrior’s head was a bubble with question marks and small Humans.
“They’re asking him about the children.”