Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 42: Special Chapter - The Bird in the Cage

Chapter 42: Special Chapter - The Bird in the Cage

The Lighthouse

Vertex Point Five

Homura Akemi's Room

Incubators don't panic.

Hmm.

True, this particular Incubator was trapped in some unknown location and imprisoned with little hope of escape. True, this one was cut off from the group mind, and if Homura Akemi's word was to be trusted, the group mind was either gone or corrupted beyond hope of recovery. For most other sentient beings, such circumstances would induce fits of helpless panic.

Incubators, however, don't panic.

He ("he" being the pronoun Incubators generally used for ease of communication with humans, despite its fundamental inaccuracy) was perhaps the last unaltered Incubator in existence, and true Incubators did not fear. Humans had a curious idiom he remembered hearing: "Afraid? I don't know the meaning of the word!" The statement implied ignorance to basic vocabulary on a surface level, but as he understood it, it was intended to be a boastful declaration of personal courage. Curious, then, that Incubators seemed to embody what it represented: not ignorance, but absence of fear.

He was not afraid. Of course he wasn't; Incubators did not fear.

An idea occurred to him. Homura Akemi's adjustments to the Isolation Field, his prison, enacted filters that blocked all but visual and auditory stimuli... and telepathy, of course, but telepathic access remained under her strict control. However, he reasoned, Homura Akemi in all likelihood had no knowledge of the exact range of Incubator vision. If she limited control of the visual filter to match the specifications of the typical human eye, as he suspected, then ranges outside of that of the human spectrum would likely be overlooked, and therefore might not be blocked.

Intriguing. Kyubey decided to test his hypothesis. It worked; a simple reconfiguration of his body's optical receptors switched the spectrum of his vision to an infrared wavelength. He could now see the heat signature of Homura Akemi asleep on opposite side of their room. The room was programmed for a standard Earth twenty-four-hour day/night cycle, and the lack of illumination plus her dormancy plus her lowered temperature drove Kyubey to conclude that it was "night", and she was asleep. He did not quite see the logic of adhering to such a cycle when Earth was an unknown but significant number of units and realities away, but he supposed that human circadian rhythms, inefficient as they were, would not adjust well to an entirely diurnal or nocturnal period of activity. As always, they sought normality in most matters. A curious species, to be sure.

With his hypothesis validated, Kyubey proceeded to experiment with altered visual spectrums. Observing alpha, beta, and gamma frequencies offered little of interest, but upon adjusting the spectrum to x-radiation...

Hmm.

Now he could observe the Lighthouse beyond the confines of his prison. Since he was, after all, still in place inside the prison, it was only logical that Homura Akemi would find no fault in his actions, and thus would have no logical reason to enact disciplinary measures. Of course, Homura Akemi seldom followed any logic when it came to disciplinary measures toward Incubators, or when it came to anyone or anything else, for that matter. With her asleep, however, there could be no reprimand and no attempts at discipline. Therefore, he concluded, he was free to observe as he wished.

With that decided, he returned to his observation. There was something on the x-frequency that caught his interest. Scanning through the structures of most of the Lighthouse revealed little. The humans, humanoids, animals, assorted extradimensional "fairy" creatures, and others were uniformly asleep. On board the Arthra, a few nightwatch officers made patrols of the ship's decks at regular intervals, but most of the staff was inactive. However, when he directed his attention to the highest peak of the Lighthouse, the presumed location of the constant sweeping ray of light that gave the structure its name... he could see nothing of it. The uppermost portions of the crystalline tower were a black void, a blind spot in his vision.