Octavia wasn’t sure how long she laid on the ground with her eyes open as she stared up at the slowly rotating hologram of the planet they were on, taking a moment to let her mind catch up with her body. The sharpness of her perception was taking some getting used to - she hadn’t even noticed the dimming of her senses when it was happening, but with the sudden transition it was impossible to miss. Colors were more vivid, the edges were sharper, she could feel every inch of her armor pressing in against her, and she could hear the sounds of sobbing mixed with hushed conversation somewhere else in the room.
Even her mind felt more clear, as if a great haze had finally been lifted from her thoughts. Everything that she had experienced since Destiny felt like it had been a dream; faraway and murky, obscured in color and shape until it all blurred together in an unsightly mosaic. The last thing she remembered clearly was sitting in the bay of a Cutlass, contemplating what to do with Mack after the horrific disaster of Destiny.
And still, Octavia couldn’t help but feel hollow and empty. The Seraph had reached inside her mind and scooped out a great deal of data, leaving her mind free of burden. When she reached through her neurolink, she couldn’t help but miss the presence of her second DI, even though she knew she shouldn’t. She felt cold, bare, and ever-so alone.
“Support systems are back online, Octy,” Vita declared, though she sounded just as distracted as Octavia felt, “I’ve got a line on a network here, but no idea how to connect to it.”
“Keep an eye on it,” Octavia replied quietly, the clarity of her own voice surprising her. She swallowed unsteadily as she searched through her mind, going over the list of her digital functions one item at a time.
Without being overclocked, everything was suddenly reading as optimal. She could access her offline databanks, her microsurgeons were reading green across the board, and her armor was even beginning to trickle-charge off of her own energy. The sensation of everything coming back online at once left her dizzy and disoriented, as though phantom limbs were slowly reforming themselves into reality once more.
“Armor coming online now,” Vita informed in a subdued tone as the visor in front of Octavia’s face flickered purple briefly before her heads up display began to populate once again. Her vitals and the condition of her armor and weapons came up in the corners of her vision, along with a compass and a local area map that showed her position at the center.
Octavia reached through her connection into the armor and did a check of its systems herself, taking a look at the damage that had been done to it. While the carapace had been minorly compromised and some of the internals had taken a beating, it was still mostly in serviceable condition and would keep her alive until she could get it repaired properly. The offensive and defensive systems were slowly coming back online as power bled back into the suit, while the support systems were already back to full functionality much to Octavia’s relief.
As the armor blinked to life around her, positive chimes and increasing humms assaulted her senses as the various systems came back to life and reported full functionality. Octavia took in a deep breath of the mechanically filtered air and sighed in relief as the sterilized scent cleared her nose of the lingering smell of peat and sulphur. Satisfied that the armor would come back to life on its own in the next few minutes, Octavia slowly moved on the ground, pushing herself into a sitting position.
“Miss Tiberius?” Cody asked breathlessly, the young human suddenly appearing out of the corner of her vision. She turned her head to regard him, instantly noticing the blood dripping down his face from a series of small cuts and scorch marks along one side of his face. Seeing her movement, the human grinned widely despite his condition, “You’re alive!”
“For the moment,” Octavia agreed, her voice amplifying through her helmet mechanically, “What happened?”
“You had a seizure,” Cody informed, his face dropping as he glanced down at the floor, “You collapsed and began spasming. We couldn’t help you with the Omni storming the room - then Miss Kelro managed to get the door open and Mister Tur carried you to safety,” he explained, looking up at Octavia with a remorseful look, “And I suppose you know the rest.”
“B’roka… Jace…” Octavia muttered, turning her head to face the doorway with a hidden frown.
“They sacrificed themselves to save the rest of us,” Cody replied quietly. There was a brief pause before he stood up and offered his hand down to Octavia, “But we still have a small issue on our hands.”
Octavia looked up at the offered hand and couldn’t help but scoff quietly at the sight; a tiny human teenager offering her a hand in getting up. She was reminded of Enya doing the same in the jungle and she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d ever see the tribal amaranthians again. With a sigh she reached up and gripped Cody’s hand more as a symbolic gesture than anything as she used her own muscles to push herself off the ground.
“What’s the situation?” Octavia asked as she let go of Cody’s hand and turned towards the rest of the room, taking stock of what was around her.
It was another room with a similar design to the trophy room that they had just escaped from, except it was a decent size larger than even the expanse of the trophy room. Its walls and ceiling were covered in the same glowing blue engravings as the rest of the facility, and an enormous hologram of the planet took up the majority of the air in the room. It was projected out of an enormous raised dais that glowed with the same blue energy that flowed through the walls, and the dias took up most of the center of the room as well.
On the far side of the room there was a significantly smaller, single-person sized stone door with the same style of glowing blue engravings as the enormous doors behind her, and off to the side of the room was an open passageway that led into a hallway. Octavia couldn’t see where the hallway led, but she could see that it dipped down and transitioned into a downwards staircase at the end, receding from view. She couldn’t see any other structures or pieces of architecture that drew her attention, but she could see Alex and Remiel in the room with her.
Remiel was currently standing by the far door with her arms crossed and an annoyed look on her face, her features scrunched up in a sour expression as she regarded the enigmatic door in front of her. Octavia was immediately reminded of her conversation with the Seraph within the boundaries of her own mind and her hackles stood on end, a primal rush of anger surging through her at the sight of Remiel. The rage died before she could even begin to express it when the sound of a pathetic wail drew her attention to the floor next to the dais.
Alex was curled up into a pathetic ball with her one arm wrapped around her knees, tucking them in against her chest as she cried into the void. Tears streamed freely down her face as she blubbered incoherently to herself, rocking back and forth dangerously against the dais as she did. Her metal hand was clenched into a tight fist and her eyes were slammed shut, trying to stem the endless tide of tears to no avail.
“About what you see,” Cody replied quietly as he surveyed the room with Octavia, his eyes landing on Alex with a quiet sigh, “I’ve been trying to help poor Miss Jones, but she is rather broken up… for obvious reasons,” he added, glancing morosely back at the double doors behind them.
“And Merith?” Octavia asked, turning her head and following his gaze towards the door trepidatiously.
“Miss Kelro skipped in shortly after the doors closed while you were incapacitated. She went ahead to scout the side passage there,” he explained, pointing towards the open doorway that led to a downwards set of stairs, “She hasn’t been back since, but it hasn’t been very long.”
“Do you mind staying with Alex?” Octavia asked, glancing down towards her friend. The sight made her heart ache, but they were trapped once again in an alien facility and she had been tasked with finding out what Remiel was really after. Time wasn’t an ally, and as much as she wanted to help her friend, she knew that she couldn’t afford any more distractions.
“I do not mind at all, Miss Tiberius,” Cody reassured with a small smile, “Just be safe on your ventures. I fear that we cannot afford to lose any more good people today,” he added with a heavy tone, his shoulders sagging as though the realization had dragged him down even more than he had let on.
“I will,” Octavia assured with a nod. She reached out and pressed her hand to his shoulder gently for a moment before she slipped away and strode purposefully across the room towards the side passage, leaving her friends behind once again as she passed through the threshold into the dimly lit hallway beyond.
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The staircase was narrow and lit in the same eerie blue glow as the rest of the facility, casting long inklike shadows in the crevices between steps and the nooks of corners. With her perception back to what it used to be, she found herself dizzyingly disoriented from the sharp contrast between the fluid sources of light and the splotches of shadows. She had to consciously focus on taking each step at a time to make sure she didn’t fall, which slowed her progress to a crawl.
The staircase seemed to stretch on forever, taking her deeper and deeper into the bowels of the planetoid as she made her way to wherever the side passage was taking her. She didn’t hear anything up ahead, but she wasn’t surprised at the lack of sound with how many times the stairs looped around on themselves. Eventually she rounded a corner and was relieved to see that the stairs plateaued at the bottom, leading into another facility room.
Octavia stepped off of the staircase and came face to face with the barrel of a rifle, causing her to stop dead in her tracks with wide eyes.
“Oh shit, Octavia!” Merith exclaimed in surprise, hastily lowering her rifle, “Fuck, sorry about that. Are you okay?” she asked hurriedly, stepping forward as her gaze wandered from the top of Octavia’s head to the ends of her paws and back again, “Cody said you had a seizure or some shit.”
“Yeah, the Omni hacked me,” Octavia admitted quietly, crossing her arms in front of her chest, “Tried to erase me from within,” she explained. While it wasn’t technically a lie, she didn’t figure that Merith needed to know any more than that at the moment.
Merith frowned slightly, a look of concern crossing her features, “Hack you? Are you… all there?” she asked, gesturing towards Octavia’s head, “They didn’t turn you evil or anything?”
Octavia scoffed derisively and shook her head, “No, absolutely not,” she replied, “I’m still me, and I’ve expelled the rest of the hack from my mind. To be perfectly honest, I’m just looking forward to this being over so I can take a long fucking nap.”
“Mood,” Merith replied with a bark of laughter, shaking her head in amusement. She let her rifle drop limply in one hand and turned halfway to gesture to the rest of the room, “Well, we gotta figure out what to do with this thing before we can call it a day. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
The room they were standing in couldn’t be any bigger than a five-by-five room with a single doorway leading to the stairs, and on the far side of the room was a nondescript waist-high black metal box with no discernible function. There were no buttons, no levers, and Octavia couldn’t even determine if it even had significance. Octavia strode across the short distance towards it and came to a stop in front of it, crossing her arms in front of her chest with a hidden frown.
“You haven’t been able to interface with it?” Octavia asked for confirmation without looking away from the anomalous box, her brow creasing at the sight.
“Nah,” Merith replied shortly, “It’s nothing like the terminal in the other room. I could connect with the other one psionically and tell it what to do by thinking hard enough. This one can be used psionically, but I have no idea what any of it means.”
“What happens when you try to use it psionically?” Octavia asked, glancing to the side at Merith with a questioning gaze.
Rather than replying, Merith reached a hand out with her palm facing the machine and closed her eyes. For a few moments nothing happened, then suddenly the machine flickered to life as a blue holographic screen leapt up above the console and a holographic touchpad projected beneath it. The touchpad only had a handful of figures in it, all of which were sharp and uncomfortable to look at, but clearly represented some sort of language.
“That didn’t happen with the other one,” Merith remarked as she opened her eyes and looked at the machine in wonder, “I don’t think this one is meant to be used psionically. I can interface with it, but it’s not the psionic language that the other console used - this is different.”
Octavia stepped up to the console and observed it for a few moments, regarding the empty holographic screen with a skeptic look. Her eyes flicked down to the holographic touch pad and its small configuration of ten digits. She glanced over at Merith, “Do these symbols look familiar to you?”
“No, they’re not the ones the other console used,” Merith replied as she looked over the alien figures with narrowed eyes.
Humming in thought, Octavia stepped up to the console and waved her hand through the touchpad. A series of symbols popped up onto the screen in front of her, but otherwise nothing happened. She curiously pressed a finger to another holographic figure, and once again a corresponding one appeared on the screen in front of her.
“I think this is a computer,” Octavia theorized, flicking her hand through two more symbols, causing them to appear on the screen once again, “And I think these might be numbers.”
“If it’s a computer then I’m pretty sure that’s your territory - I couldn’t navigate it psionically, so the ball’s in your court” Merith remarked offhandedly, crossing her arms over her rifle as she leaned back against the nearby wall.
Octavia frowned slightly, ignoring Merith’s response as she focused on the hologram in front of her. A thought struck her, and after a moment of deliberation she glanced at Merith and asked, “Keep an eye out for a second, would you?”
Merith nodded wordlessly as she watched Octavia with a curious look. Octavia closed her eyes and reached out through her neurolink, focusing on the data around her. The digital world was sparse without any dominant network to connect to - she had lost the connection to the RTTAN when she had entered the planet’s atmosphere and hadn’t managed to pick it up since. But there was something there at the very edges of her periphery. Something that was almost like a chorus of whispers in the dark, a phantom network that wasn’t meant for her.
She grasped the phantom data in her mind, clutching onto the alien data as tightly as she could, wrenching it out of the shadows and into the light. None of the words made sense; a cacophony of repeating patterns made up of unfamiliar sounds, bouncing back and forth eternally. The network was surrounding her, permeating the very air of the planet - though she couldn’t understand the words that were being used, she could feel what they meant, what the network felt.
With her eyes closed she felt the terrain of the nearby landscape with its unforgiving mountains and valleys, the steep terrain with uneven rocky ground hiding rich mineral deposits. The sensation of creatures grazing in the grasslands, the presence of natives on the other side of the valley they had escaped from. And below it all, she felt it. The Spire.
It was enormous and imposing, a machine construct channeling a source of nearly infinite power. Dark and silent, hidden underneath layers of soil, rock and ore, the machine steadily thrummed as it balanced the ecosystem it was responsible for. It measured everything down to the atomic structure in real-time, a constant feedback of data rushing back and forth from the Spire to the computer she had interfaced with, and to some source of power beyond the last doorway in the facility.
What surprised her more was what the Spire was doing. While it monitored everything within range down to the atomic structure, it was also actively changing said structures to keep them a certain way. She had wondered why the transition from tropical jungle to temperate grassland and rocky mountain had been so sudden - it was because the Spire had formed the planetoid in exactly that way. There were clearly defined barriers, rules and restrictions that everything native to the planet had to follow, and Octavia couldn’t even begin to understand what those definitions were. All she knew was that the Spire she had connected to was responsible for everything from the topography to the genetics of lifeforms and everything in between within its given radius.
As Octavia focused beyond the simple sensations of the Spire, she turned her attention to the actual network and the repeating patterns of unfamiliar sounds. Millions upon millions of patterns overlapped one another, creating an indecipherable mess of sounds until each one was lost in the sea of noise. It took all of her focus, but as she turned her attention directly to the console in front of her, she narrowed in on but a single pattern, and then she listened.
One sound. Two sounds. One sound. Two sounds. It repeated back and forth, the same two tones creating a complex pattern that raced through the network faster than any language could be typed or understood. The same two sounds played again and again, and as she shifted her focus to the greater network once again, she found that all of the patterns consisted of only those same two sounds.
“I think…” Octavia trailed off with her eyes closed.
“I think it’s binary,” both Octavia and Vita remarked at the same time in an awed tone as Octavia’s eyes opened in a rush, realization washing over her like a bucket of cold water.
“Binary?” Merith asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Binary,” Octavia agreed with a nod, “There’s a Curator network here, connected to some sort of terraforming device. I think it’s called a Spire. All of the transmissions are made of the same two sounds; ones and zeroes, A’s and B’s, this and that,” she explained, turning her attention towards Merith in surprise.
“Makes sense, I guess,” Merith remarked curiously, “Greatest psionic minds to have ever lived didn’t have a language, so if they’re building a traditional computer they’ve gotta rely on a universal language,” she theorized.
“But why would they make the Spires traditional computers in the first place if they’re all psionic?” Octavia wondered with a slight frown.
“Maybe psionics and Erillium don’t mix?” Merith suggested, “I’ve definitely noticed some things here that I can’t feel with my mind. There was some little butterfly thing in the forest on the way in, I couldn’t feel it psionically. Thought it was weird, but I didn’t exactly have the time to check it out.”
“Maybe,” Octavia agreed, glancing towards the computer, “So that would mean they built the Spires and these computers to bridge the gap. Create an effect with Erillium by channeling psionics through technology,” she suggested.
“Either way, we’ve probably got about forty five minutes before the Omni reinforcements get here. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some way to brute force the door, so we’re on a time limit here. You need to figure out how to get the next door open,” Merith remarked, turning to look at Octavia with a clearly stressed expression on her face.
“Forty five minutes,” Octavia remarked with a frown, “Alright. Get upstairs and stay in contact telepathically. Try to help Alex if you can, she’s a mess right now. I’m going to try to interface with the Curator network from here - there must be some way to open the door through it. You keep me updated on any developments.”
“Roger that,” Merith replied with a nod. She paused for a moment before offering a small smile, “Good luck.”
“You too,” Octavia replied with a nod, reaching out to give Merith a reassuring touch to the shoulder. They shared a brief moment of silence before Merith turned and jogged her way out of the room, disappearing as she rushed up the stairs as fast as she could without tripping.
Octavia turned back towards the ancient computer in front of her and focused in on her neurolink as she did. The world around her warped briefly as she latched onto the Curator network around them. Once again she was submerged within the alien binary, the world shifting into a pattern of two repeating sounds as the physical world melted away from her, leaving her drifting within digital space.