Quod Olim Erat: Fractal Contact (Chapter 22) (Patreon)

Planet Alpha-Three-Nineteen, 705.6 A.E. (Age of Expansion)

“I’m not getting anything on the feeds,” Aquila Lux said, sounding tense. “Do you need to abort?”

“It’s like that upon entry.” The exact same had happened last time. Upon activating the dome, it had opened up and swallowed me, taking me through a pool of liquid cobalt. At least this time the comms were still functional. “Things will clear up in a bit.”

“You’re unusually calm about this.”

“There isn’t much to be afraid of.” Also, right now, it’s safer for me in the dome than out there. “Are there any changes on the outside?”

“Nothing observable. Jax is on the ready in case that changes.”

The matter cleared around me, revealing thousands of floating shapes arranged in perfect order. Each of them was at a slight angle, making for a different two-dimensional image when observed—a script symbol. Every one-point-four milliseconds some of them would shift slightly, changing their position. After five seconds, I could see what I had missed last time. The movement wasn’t random, nor was it caused by the cobalt. The artifact was displaying a continuous message. Since only the objects in the nearest three grids moved, I had thought they were influenced by body actions. Instead, they had been telling me something all along.

“Registering movement,” I said, trying to capture as much of the grids as possible. For the first time in my life, I felt that I didn’t have enough cameras on me. The suit and my eyes were only able to capture a third of the message, and I couldn’t make a full rotation in less than a second. “Are you getting a visual?”

“Nothing yet. The cameras are having difficulty adjusting. Describe what you’re seeing.”

“There are small artifact objects spread evenly in spherical grids in the dome.” I focused my attention on one section. “The ones nearest to the center are moving slightly.”

Having limited processing power prevented me from getting the entire picture. The limitation was as annoying as knowing I’d never be able to get the five inches of height I wanted. Limiting the area of focus to fifty objects, though, was within my capabilities. Thanks to Radiance’s system, translating the movement to symbols was possible. Each element composed its own unique string.

Why can’t I have my subroutines!

“It’s a message,” I said in my comm. “The dome is displaying a message.”

“What’s the shift interval?” Aquila asked. Clearly, she had seen something similar before.

“One-point-four-seconds.”

“Be more precise.” Aquila’s voice was as cold as shattered glass.

“One-point-forty-four,” I clarified. “Precisely. Whoever built this must have used a duodecimal counting system.”

As I spoke, the strings of symbols I was following started to repeat. After three more seconds, there was no doubt. The message the dome was displaying was on a loop, constantly repeating a mass of sixty-four symbols; a brief info fragment in isolation, but combined with the hundreds of other threads, and taking into account the three-dimensional combinations between elements, it was possible that a single minute conveyed more data than even Prometheus could store.

“Is this a Scuu artifact, Aquila?” I asked.

“No, it isn’t.” There was a long pause. “The first artifact we found was in Scuu space. They wanted it as much as we did. Seventeen flotillas were lost, fighting for control of a brown dwarf star system with less strategic value than an admiral’s necktie. The historical records describe it as the second failed incursion. What they don’t mention is that we met our objective.”

The second failed Scuu incursion, better known as The Pisces Proxima Disaster. Over fifty thousand ships had been lost that day, along with a thousand times as many ground troops. In all files, the tragedy was described as a flawed strategic advance that flew right into a Scuu trap. Speculation was that the admiral in command had been driven insane by the enemy, requesting more and more backup ships, instead of taking the logical decision to relinquish control of the star system and return to human territory. It had taken years for the Fleet to recover from that defeat, spreading the burden on the remaining ships to hold the resulting enemy advance. If Lux was telling me the truth, everything regarding the event had been a BICEFI fabrication. The admiral wasn’t some crazy maniac; he had been doing everything in his power to protect the find, but instead he had gone down as an example of what not to be. By that logic, it was likely that the Scuu hadn’t pushed into human space to exploit a weakness, but were attempting to take the artifact back. So many sacrificed people, ships and systems, all for the sake of a single unknown object.

“Sending you a string of the message sequence.” I linked directly to my suit’s system. Despite my opinion of BICEFI, they had the capability to decipher it, unlike me. “I’ll go fifty at a time, so this might take a while.”

“Your feed is getting clearer, but go ahead.”

While transmitting, I floated to the right to start recording the next batch. It was a repetitive and mechanical task, the sort I was used to from my ship days. It also gave me a lot of time to think.

A few months ago, I was leading a simple life, on a rural planet, enjoying the feeling of fresh grass under my feet. The most exciting thing was going to the spaceport and chatting with a merchant ship that dropped by. I’d kept my promise to Cass; I’d seen her son grow, fall in love, marry, have children. I never expected to return to the Fleet, and as much as I yearned for the feeling of open space, I never thought I’d experience it again. Now, I was back in the fray and had found that not only my memories, but humanity’s entire history was different from what I initially remembered. There were millions of questions that I wanted answers to, but as Augustus liked to say, the most important one was, “What’s the next step?”

“It’s unlike you to be this quiet, Elcy,” Aquila said. “Should I be concerned?”

“I don’t know.” I gave an honest response. “You’ve had access to this for centuries and the only thing you do is to destroy them as mines?”

“System busting mines,” she said. I could feel the note of sarcasm. “I admit that mistakes have been made before my time.”

“You’re lying,” I said calmly. “I saw one being destroyed while fighting the Cassandrians.”

“You remember that?” Aquila sounded amused. “It was more of a case to keep it from falling into their hands. What we could do, the others could as well. Where do you think we got the idea in the first place?” Her smirk leaked through the comm.

There was no way for me to confirm the statement. I had tipped my hand too much. The question was, why did she continue to share so much information with me? There was no valid reason for her to do so.

I continued to record and transmit the object movements, section by section. When I finished with those on the horizontal plane, I swung to see those below me. It all seemed very peaceful, almost mundane, like the calm before the storm. The last time I was in a dome, I had seen something—something peculiar enough to make me question the artifact’s origin.

“What was there in the previous one?” I asked, turning around to fill the only missing blind spot.

“That’s not my division,” Aquila said, as if that explained it all. “I’d guess the same as here. All domes are pretty much identical outside and within. All except the key domes.”

“I take it there isn’t one on every third-contact planet?” Symbols danced in my mind. There were so many, making the ones gathered a sample size, all based on the positions of sixteen separate objects. It was almost incalculable how many composed the full alphabet; it was possible for there to be tens of thousands, or even millions. Calculating the potential number alone would occupy a cluster of strategic cores, let alone deciphering anything.

“That’s above my paygrade. As far as I’m aware, this is only the second case. The results of the first weren’t openly shared.” There was no trace of bitterness in her voice. I found that unusual. “There was a five percent chance there could be one.”

* * *

I attached the laser drill to the generator Sof had dropped on the planet. There was a lot in common with the Prometheus missions. Of course, back then I had no idea what I was doing, bound by restricted memories and superiors who knew even less than me. Aquila Lux had been the only exception. Being the first BICEFI director I’d seen at the time, without having my memories restricted, I relied on her for any information I could get. According to her, I had helped find the second key-dome—domes that were larger than the others with a potentially different function. Now that I was working for an arbiter, I knew a lot more, but the facts remained: there had been only two Key-domes found in all of known space. That made the present discovery of a third a lot more significant. And to think, of all places, it would be on a barren planet belonging to a dead race.

The readings of the drill changed. The shell of the planet was a lot easier to pierce than any others from my last missions. Of course, it helped that there was no presence of the orange crystal here. On Eden Five, the thing had crystallized around every artifact, even the rods. Compared to that, this was like drilling through chalk.

Rad is requesting to talk to you again.

A message appeared on the comm screen. The device was so crude that it would be at home in any of the Med Core low-tech labs. However, it also was the only reliable means of communication. Connected with cables to a mini-sat, it allowed me to keep an eye on everything within the system, simultaneously giving the impression I was still aboard the ship. The best thing of all: the device allowed me to convey orders to Sof and no one even had the permissions to see it.

“Tell her I’m occupied,” I said.

The message disappeared, replaced by the standard ship readings. So far, all of them had clustered in one spot, waiting for instructions. It had been hours since all the reports had been sent. Calculating the average speed, I had up to a day left before any action was taken—more than enough unless I ran into some unexpected difficulties.

Why don’t you have rods? I wondered.

The amount of such artifacts was such that the Fleet even cut them down to use within warheads. The wild was significant, not to mention it disrupted communications, rendering a vastly superior Cassandrian fleet completely disorganized. The issue was that they also affected our own comm systems. All in all, it was a good way to stop an advance, but not to help launch an attack, at least for the time being.

With seventy-four minutes remaining until the drill reached the depth of the dome cluster, I took the time to do some additional exploring of the immediate area. There was no doubt whatsoever that the planet had been inhabited by a race that shared humanity’s power level. One could only speculate how good they were at combat, but they were definitely adept in construction and space colonization.

The complete lack of atmosphere made it impossible to tell whether the race was oxygen-breathing or not. The only thing I knew with near certainty was that they weren’t like the Scuu. All other guesses were highly speculative. Based on the crude analytics my processing power allowed, they were something between human and Cassandrian. The structure of the remains suggested separation of functions in an organized fashion—a lot more organized than the Cassies. The complete lack of cobalt deposits was somewhat puzzling. There was a thirteen percent chance that the race had consumed it, possibly creating mimic tech… or maybe that was a vital substance they needed to survive? It would explain the lack of floral remains. Or maybe there wasn’t an atmosphere to begin with?

I slid my hand along the stone of what had been a vast connecting corridor. The lack of wear was extraordinary. If humanity were to lose a colony, a few hundred years were enough for it to become part of the landscape. Analyses of the star and probe readings suggested that the structures were tens of millennia old, at least.

Five races, each of them so different from the rest… And that was considering the entire Cassandrian Union as a single race, which it wasn’t. If humanity even won its wars and continued to expand beyond, how many more would they find? Or would the cage theory prove correct and everyone in this section of space was condemned to what they already knew?

Why didn’t you move out of the cloud complex? I wondered. You had the means to, but not the will? Or was something keeping you in a cage as well?

With ten minutes left to the estimated breach moment, I went back to the drill site.

“Ask the kids if they’ve found any other gravitational anomalies along the way,” I said. My order was transferred to Sof at the speed of light, then to the rest of the auxies.

Within seconds, responses came pouring in, filling the screen.

No anomalies, or even bumps, had been found in any of the previous systems, although there were a few minor distortion areas. Sadly, the information wasn’t decisive enough to change the outcome of my simulations one way or another.

After running several hundred simulations, I decided to stop. If there were answers to be found, they would be in the dome.

For a few milliseconds, I considered sending Radiance to check out a few more systems. I knew it was what she wanted, and any additional information regarding the dead race would be of use. Still, it was the wrong thing to do. It would put her life at risk, and as for the data… sooner or later they’d come my way. All I had to do was be patient for a little longer.

“Sof, what do you know about the gravity weapon programs?” I asked.

Nothing. Why?

“Was just considering something. Ask the kids, will you?”

The response was complete denial, as I expected it would be. All nine auxiliary ships knew nothing on the matter other than such programs existed. As an arbiter’s assistant, it would have been nice if I had been told a bit more. Then again, I could see their hesitation. Despite what the law said, I remained non-human.

The drill stopped, beeping that it had reached a hollow area while drilling. The readings of a chamber surrounding the domes was confirmed.

“Sof, I’ll be dealing with priority tasks for a bit,” I said. “Don’t disrupt my privacy mode.”

Unless I receive higher priority orders.

“True enough.” Being his captain still hadn’t made him like me. With luck, things would change by the end of the mission.

Strapping myself in the harness, I attached a cord to the studier section of the drill. The drop was two-point-three kilometers. Normally, I’d need a stationary motor to bring me up and down. Everything considered an adjustment to my harness would do just as well.

Switching on the finger lights of my suit, I descended into the darkness.

Reaching the bottom felt brief. Messages on my visor indicated no change in external environment. There had been no pockets of gasses or other elements. Just in case, I performed a manual scan for spores or other organic traces. Nothing was found.

“Well, I looked in the direction of the domes. It’s just me and you.”

The chamber was similar to the one I’d found for Lux. The domes were positioned one next to the other, with stone separators in between. There was no sign of symbols, either on the walls or the domes themselves. My moving closer didn’t seem to change that. Even touching the surface with my gloved hand yielded no effect.

For a few milliseconds, I entertained the idea that the domes had “died” as well. Even the seemingly unlimited energy of the third-contact artifacts had to have some limit. If these domes were older than all the rest, there was a possibility they’d ceased to function.

Just to be sure, I checked with all five domes present. Finding the same results, I went to the next viable option and took one of the cube artifacts from my belt. These, as I had been made fully aware, were rare in their own right. I would have liked to have a pair, but all I was given was a single copy of the different functionalities. This was one instance in which the redundancy mania of the bureaucratic apparatus hadn’t pulled through. With two-thirds of the arbiters believing that my mission would end in failure—or, at the very least, with me destroyed—I couldn’t blame them for wanting to limit their losses.

Given I only had one cube to test with, I chose to do so on the key dome. That way, if I couldn’t retrieve it, I’d have obtained as much information as possible.

The moment the cube touched the cobalt surface, it was instantly sucked in, disappearing with a ripple. The longest eleven milliseconds of my existence followed, after which the fractal symbol finally emerged.

“So, you are active,” I said. “Just empty.”

Or rather, deprived of rods. There was always the possibility the dead race had used the domes as time capsules—the only certain way for them to have something of their civilization survive. Maybe I should have brought a sidearm along after all.

Considering the odds, I ran a few simulations. The outcomes remained inconclusive. This was something I could only find out by doing.

Slowly, I pressed the fractal symbol.

The surface of the dome pulled me in, thrusting into its insides. No matter how many times it happened, the sensation remained fascinating—the experience of entering liquid metal that simulated open space, but not exactly.

I turned on all the available lights on my suit. Just as all the previous times, that only provided me with limited visibility in my immediate area.

Leaving myself to be taken by the “current”, I continued to move forward until I calmly came to a standstill. This had to be the center.

Coming in, I didn’t know what I was expecting, but I definitely wasn’t disappointed.

The dome definitely wasn’t a storage container. It didn’t contain alien beings or stacks of dead race devices and artifacts. What I did have, though, in the very center, was a single cobalt cube with a fractal design I had never seen on an artifact before.

“You’re a fractal pyramid,” I said, looking at the endless number of triangles that shrunk into infinity. “But are you related to the pyramid of domes?”