The Core: The First Guest

28. The Convict Games

As soon as he locked me in place my vision was pressed up against the ceiling inside the slot, leaving me only a couple of millimeters to survey the glowing chains around me. I wasn't sure why this was the case but I began to suspect that what I really was looking through was a tiny hovering camera. I felt nothing, none of the falling or the insane heat that probably now surrounded my perfectly encapsulated prison module.

Not having a hud or interface to call up was really troublesome. Without anything to see besides the glowing chain buttons around me I couldn't tell how long I had been falling for. My mind started to wander the more I waited for something bad to happen. I had expected to hear something when I got closer to the sun. I didn't think that something that big wouldn't generate at least some destructive noise. Perhaps it was true that sound didn't really travel that well through vacuum or maybe it had something to do with the fact that cr was supposed to be impervious to everything. That, to me, made more sense. I mean... how impervious would something be if you could vibrate the person inside to death?

I felt out with my senses at the cr around me. Being this close to it had changed my interaction with it in a subtle way. Instead of always needing to respond with an agreement and acknowledgment when I willed it to do something it now felt like it was part of me. It felt good.

I spun in place, looking at the surface of the disk that I was trapped in from my limited perspective. I couldn't remember which chains did what and I figured that in the end, it didn't really matter. All I needed to do was to turn them all off. Unless there was a chain that turned me off, effectively killing me. That was not a pleasant thought to have. There might be text somewhere around the edge that I couldn't see, but that wasn't helpful as well if I couldn't understand or translate anything without an interface.

I already knew what five of the total six chains around me did. Sight, Speech, Hearing, and the last two that Regeth mentioned right before Magus locked me in here were Linking and Interface. I guessed that Linking allowed me to control the little robot I was inside and Interface was something to do with an AI that would teach me how to actually harvest cr while I served my time.

Turns out I was wrong about what both of the chains did. I went around and poked each of the chains in turn with a finger pad I created out of the surrounding cr, turning them off one by one. It didn't feel like the walls were solid, they flowed easily to my every thought as though I was just moving my hands. The moment I touched the fifth chain an interface popped up in the corners of my vision. It appeared to be a stationary hud that stayed relative to wherever I was facing. It had a simple built-in feature that would identify what I was looking at if I stared at it for longer than a brief moment. I glanced around the little text blocks and soon found that I had yet to enable the Linking function. The chain that I hadn't known the name of earlier was called the Control chain and it allowed me to control the robot I was inside. I laughed at this little block of text until I realized what it really meant. They sent convicts in robots that were built from cr that was not owned by the convict. That meant that the convict would never be able to change the configuration of the robot in any way in an attempt to escape. It was just as effective, if not more so than a prison collar and outfit. Additionally, this meant that they were locked inside their robot until the owner of the cr chose to let them out.

The more I read the little blocks of text the more I understood just how evil Magus's final actions really were and why I had seen the look of horror on Regeth's face when he realized what Magus had done.

Magus had left every chain locked in place when he shoved my prison module inside the harvester robot.

He had sent me into the sun to suffer a horrible unending torment.