Ragnarok

Chapter 35 - Darkness

Micah had barely slept the night before, unable to take his mind off of the key that had been given to him by the wanderer who had claimed to be the game's creator, now become a ghost within his own machine. He kept trying to analyze Ferrell's warning about not spending too much time on Ragnarok, arguing with himself as to whether to listen to his advice or disregard him as an obvious nutcase. Ultimately, he had ended up staring at the key until a notification popped up that the Sephirot had landed and the crew was preparing to depart. It was 5:02 in the morning, but what the hell, it wasn't like he was sleeping anyway.

He had joined the simulation just as Rei was murmuring about small steps for posterity, floating along behind her without concern for the planet's immense gravity. He was no more substantial than a ghost in this mode, after all, and nothing multiplied by any number is still going to be nothing. He did watch her appreciatively, how deliberately she moved for her robotic frame to withstand the stresses required to even lift one leg up and put it in front of the other. Not to mention how nice the black cybersuit looked on her posterior.

Rei finally noticed him, and her expression was, as usual, unreadable. But before she could say anything, whether remonstration, recommendation or simple greeting, the darkness around them was pierced by a column of light, and he saw the ziggurat in front of them, along with the holographic image of a gigantic, allosauroid creature. It seemed not to notice the cloud of virtual observers behind Rei, Smith and the rest, staring down at them with a pitiless gaze.

To his amazement, it then seemed to have a conversation with Mia, who had stepped forward to attempt communication with the hologram. It struck Micah as funny, two species greeting each other through technological proxies, one because the world they were meeting on was far too dense for its form of life, the other because it had been scorched from the planet's surface long ago. The dinosaur hologram had a rather aggressive manner of speaking, and he was pretty sure he didn't like how it kept snapping its jaws together, but surely a mere hologram couldn't harm even a regular human, let alone these advanced exploratory roboforms. So he believed, anyway.

Finally, it seemed to bore of the conversation, and both it and its spotlights disappeared, leaving Micah's eyes utterly blinded as the dark closed back in. He had never been afraid of the dark, but there was something sinister about the way the planet's buildings loomed around them, like predators staring intently down upon prey creatures too small and short-sighted to even know they were being stalked. Then, a walkway in front of them slowly began to glow from within, shedding an eerie green luminescence that resembled the glow-in-the-dark plastic that was so popular in the late 20th century. It led off to one side, around the great ziggurat, and then disappeared behind a corner.

Rei stared down at the glowing stone for a moment, studying it. "Doesn't appear to be radioactive, at least not in any way that's harmful to machines."

"Well, looks like they rolled out the green carpet for us," Smith put in. "Would be a shame not to oblige them, yes?"

Rei did not reply, simply said out purposefully, leading them across the glowing tiles. Around them, the shadows loomed everywhere, silent and watchful.

* * *

Micah couldn't help but feel that he was in some kind of Cthulhu-punk VR game, like Eldritch Space. The buildings around them were twisted into bizarre shapes, which only made the extremely dim lighting seem even more ominous. He felt like he was exploring some long-lost R'lyeh, an alien city of such non-Euclidean strangeness that even staring too long at the walls was to risk madness. But instead of being buried at the bottom of the ocean, this one had come from the stars themselves.

"The only question is, where's Cthulhu?" he muttered to himself. Sometimes there was such a thing as being a bit too well-read, because his imagination tended to run away from him in places like this. Not that he, or any other human being, had ever been in a place anything like this.

The party walked on in silence, the vacuum swallowing any sounds their somewhat awkward footfalls made upon the glowing path. Micah switched spectrum filters, since visible light was telling him next to nothing. Fortunately, someone had thought to equip the explorers with old-fashioned radar, and it was sending out a ping every few seconds.

The radar map of their surroundings was even more impressive, with the twisting architecture thrown into sharp relief by the echoes of the radar pulses. The immense structures stretched on for as far as the radar could show. The huge 'horns' that stood above the city had only been visible in the number of stars they blotted from view, like a pair of shadows in the sky. The radar showed that they were very much solid objects, and hollow inside, though for what purpose Micah could not begin to conjecture. Mia, in her endless notations, had theorized that they were some kind of mass driver engine, using electromagnetic fields and the structure's immense height to break the giant planet's orbital velocity.

Staring up at those thousands of tons of char-broiled rock and alien metal left him feeling even more disturbed than he had before. He chose instead just to switch back to visual light and stare at the cobblestones as he floated along behind Rei. Strange, to feel so weightless on a planet with such immense gravity.

The glowing path wound around the ziggurat where the alien had appeared, then down a wide thoroughfare that seemed to lead towards the heart of the necropolis, a heart that still pulsed with fusion power. Though there was nothing visible in that direction other than the green glow of the cobblestones, he knew without switching to infrared that they were going into one of the hottest places on this frozen shell of a planet. A quick glance at Mia's scrolling commentary confirmed that they were headed for what had been assumed to be a fusion plant. Something had to be powering the computer banks it was using to play this little game, after all.

"Gotta keep the lights on someway," he muttered again, Rei giving him a cursory glance as they trod ever onwards down the pale green road. Micah smiled a bit sheepishly. "Sorry, something about this place makes my brain go haywire."

Rei simply nodded with a small smile, and continued to shuffle forward, keeping an eye out for any obstacles. He noted, with some surprise, there was virtually no clutter to be found anywhere. Perhaps it had all been burnt away along with the planet's atmosphere, when Spica had turned into a blue giant. But even then, rocks and bits of rubble should have been everywhere, especially with the engines that had been placed on it had causing considerable seismic stress. He made a note of his own in the running commentary, and noted that Mia's string of observations had been joined by those of the other cosmonauts. Unlike Mia, their comments were terse and to the point, and like him, many had noticed just how uncluttered the streets of this strange city were.

Finally, the strangely claustrophobic thoroughfare opened up into a large, circular courtyard. Surrounding the courtyard was a ring of large, golden statues, all of them Ormarr. They may have been the same individual, for all Micah could tell. At least, at first; there seemed to be some variation in the Ormarr's crests, which may have helped them tell one another apart.

The glowing path led to the circle, then appeared to dead-end in the circular square. "Well, we seem to have run out of road," Mia said into her microphone, stepping up next to Micah's simulation. "Wonder where we're supposed to go now?"

"Maybe Mr. Toothy from earlier will pop up again and tell us," Micah muttered in reply.

Suddenly, there was a grinding sound, felt more than heard through the cosmonaut's boots as a deep, rumbling vibration. The center of the circle opened up like an iris, then the stones began to slowly descend into the shadows underneath. They unfolded in a spiral that spread outwards, until it had turned into ramp leading down into the ground. The top of the descent was only a few inches from Mia and Rei's boots.

"Well, looks like that answers one question," Smith said from behind him. Rei pretended to draw in a breath, nodded, and started down the glowing spiral ramp.