Chương 35: Part 35 - An Involuntary Hermit

Many times my grandfather spoke of going to the Sanctum in the mountains over Tinem Sjocel. It was a long journey, made until the road became too dangerous to consider even for such an important task. One day he spoke of it and I asked him if he had visited any other Sanctums, for I remembered that he had told me there were a number of them scattered in far lands. He looked at me and smiled, and told me that they do not return where they are not needed.

- Unattributed fragment, early Aejha script on a loose journal page. Handwritten. Royal archives, Ce Raedhil. It was only a short while before the teams regrouped in the gateway hall to inspect the recovered documents. By unspoken accord, Tasja was handed the sheaf of plasticine sheets and shoved to the front of the group. He paled slightly, looking down at the aged stack of notes.

"All right," he said.

"His writing isn't too archaic, but I may have to puzzle out a few things." Tasja cleared his throat and began to read. It has been many days since I've seen the outside, and I'm beginning to think that it will be many more. Tija hasn't been able to tell me much of what's going on - not because she's unaware, but because whatever this event was apparently falls under a restricted classification so severe that she refuses to even discuss the necessary parameters for disclosure.

That in itself is an answer, as I've only ever heard that level of restriction applied to semantic stabilization projects. I'm not sure what terrifies me more - what that implies regarding the evident disaster outside, or that someone may have seen this coming and been powerless to stop it. The effects within the facility were fairly minimal - just a brief disruption in power followed by a lockdown that has yet to lift.

My movement within the building is unimpeded, but I cannot access the outside, nor can I interact with key systems. When I attempt to lift the lockdown she tells me that I lack the requisite authority. Again, this has some frankly terrifying implications. Anything of this magnitude should have prompted someone from the Ministry to fly out immediately. At this point I have to assume that nobody is coming - perhaps because nobody is left.

My situation is not immediately dire, as I was expected to remain here for a span of sixty-four days before my relief arrived. I therefore have a good amount of nonperishable supplies. The facility's water is drawn from below and appears unimpacted by whatever is going on outside. Unfortunately Tija can wait even longer than I can, and I have no idea how to approach regaining my lost access. Tasja shuffled the sheet to the bottom of the pile and looked up.

"The next one appears to be from some time later," he said. The design team should be commended - Tija remains unimpressed with my pleas for access, even when I invoke my increasingly dire food supplies. She will not even permit me to depart, as the facility must remain sealed per whatever regulation she is responding to. I can't be angry with her, in the end. She is bound by her constraints much more thoroughly than I could ever be bound to anything, and this disaster is just more confirmation of why that must be.

I've at least had time enough to go through records and piece together what I could from the day the lockdown began, and I'm now more certain than ever that we did this to ourselves. The details of the various Ministry projects are restricted, of course, but the travel itineraries were available for coordination purposes. Tija was able to provide me with that much, and it showed that the directors were all in Sahao the day of the disaster.

I've only ever heard of full-directorate meetings for major events, so whatever they were there to see must have been a significant project. I'm guessing the project didn't go as planned. My mild curiosity has been mildly satisfied, I suppose. It's not like it benefits me much, stuck in here. What will I do, lodge an objection with the Ministry? What Ministry? For all I know it's just me and Tija left. I wonder if I'm going a bit mad with only her to talk to.

She's actually starting to grow on me, and I could swear she sounded apologetic the last time she repeated her denial of my requests. I am going mad, if I'm projecting emotions onto the interactive display. Better than dying lucid, I suppose.

"I like this guy," Jackie said, grinning. Jesse frowned and shook his head.

"His description of Tija doesn't really ring true with what we saw of Maja, however," he said.

"Flat, emotionless, minimally helpful. Even locked down, I can't imagine describing her that way. Was Tija so different?"

"Perhaps even beings like her change over that long of a time," Arjun suggested.

"That would have been before any of her counterparts were overtaken, so she may not have had the motivation that Maja does to buck her design and help this man out." Mark made an irritated noise and glared at them all.

"You folks used to ask questions in the middle of movies, didn't you? Just let the man keep reading and we'll probably find out all the answers." He turned his attention to Tasja and waved him on.

"Go ahead, don't let them interrupt you." Tasja lowered his head to the pages just a bit too slowly to hide his smile.

"All right," he said.

"Next entry…" I am free, for whatever that's worth. Last night I sat down in the control room, half-delirious for want of food, and just began to talk with Tija. At her, more accurately, given her conversational tendencies. I told her about my house back in Auje, my mother and the little garden she keeps. Kept. I talked about joining the Caretakers and the years of study I went through to get here.

I yelled at her a bit, for killing me, but then I thought better of it and apologized - she didn't seem to mind, either way. After I had done that I must have fallen asleep, or perhaps passed out. The next thing I remember was seeing her face hovering close to my own, bright and golden. I suppose I had never really looked at her that closely before, but in that moment the thought first crossed my mind that she was seeing me, really seeing me and not merely observing me in the same way she does everything else.

She stood up and walked away, and then she did something quite odd - she tampered with my asolan. I'm not quite sure how, but as she departed I felt a rush of heat far beyond anything the coin typically imparts. It practically dragged me back to my feet, washing away the fog of hunger despite my empty belly. Refreshed, energized, the thought came to me that I should follow her. I did. She led me up to the main hallway and stood before the doors as if waiting for me to speak.

I didn't know what to say except to ask her to open them once more, to which she did not reply. She simply ignored my question and asked why I wanted to open them, which was a marked departure from her normal manner. Further, she mentioned unprompted that there were conditions under which the doors could be opened. She coached me, walked me through what I needed to say to allow her to open the doors.

It was so bizarre that I scarcely believe it as I write these words, but she helped me to circumvent her own protections so that the door could open. Of course, what I got for her efforts was not very helpful. The world has ended. The land around the control facility was once green, rolling hills. Now it is scorched and barren, the topsoil scoured down to bare rock and the sky choked with falling ash. The sun at midday is a weak and reddish light that does little to warm the land.

It appears that opening the door has done little to improve my chances of survival, but I don't think I could forgive myself if I lay down to die without at least checking to see if any food survived in Mosatel. I will go early tomorrow, and hope that I have strength to make the trip. Tasja blinked and moved on to the next page. There were no interruptions; the group leaned forward with intent looks on their faces. So many have died, but I am not yet one of them.

Mosatel was largely destroyed, the crumbled remnants of buildings dashed together as if a hand had reached out to slap them towards the ocean. Some of the larger blackstone constructions seem to have retained their wardings, however, and in their interiors and lees I was able to find a few unspoiled containers of food. I did not see survivors, but I did see footprints in the ash. It is not just the two of us sitting together after all, which makes me thankful.

I will not endeavor to seek out others, though, as my desire to lay eyes on another living being diminishes before the fear of what hunger and deprivation may drive those beings to contemplate. Seeing the state of Mosatel, I have no doubt that the next span of time will be troublesome in the utmost. Upon returning Tija looked to me, and for the barest of moments I saw a glimpse of something on her face. Relief? It is what I saw, but I struggle to believe it.

These long days alone after the destruction have changed me, I can see that plainly even from my limited vantage. I did not expect that it was possible to change her as well. It concerns me that one such as her can change to that degree, given her responsibilities. Still, despite my disquiet the changes do not seem to threaten her function - which is all very good, because if she experienced such a drastic deviation from her baseline I would scarcely know how to return her to normal.

I can only hope that the drift does not progress to the extent that she becomes an unsuitable observer, for if ruudun ceased to function in the wake of such a disaster I fear that any quavering embers which have managed to burn through this storm may be snuffed out for good. Arjun frowned and leaned forward.

"Did he write 'if ruudun ceased to function' back there?" he asked, looking at Tasja for confirmation. Tasja returned to the page and re-read the line, nodding.

"He did," Tasja confirmed, "although I've never heard of such a thing."

"It implies that the vinesavaim do more than just smooth things out," Jesse said.

"Maybe he talks about it more in the next pages? I'm not really sure what to make of it either." Tasja frowned and looked at the next page. The sky was recognizably blue again at midday, when a strong wind managed to clear some of the lingering ash. I stood in the sunlight until it faded and felt alive for the first time in a long, long while.

When I turned to head back inside I saw her standing there in the entryway, looking upward still as if she had never seen anything like it before - which may have been the case, in a certain respect. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. I am increasingly sure that she is experiencing some consequence of the disaster. Whatever they did at Sahao, there is a high likelihood that they used Eryha to implement it.

I can't discount the possibility that some feedback propagated through the network to Tija and the others. For all that Tija's behavioral drift seems benign this is highly concerning, as it implies that the others may be affected as well. I cannot say for certain that any changes they experience will be similarly harmless. Unfortunately Tija's ability to communicate has not improved much, even if I ask questions she replies precisely as she did during those first days trapped inside.

I say unfortunately, which I recognize is an irony given my incessant fretting about her behavioral changes, but even as she adheres to the protocols that were given to her I see her now struggling against them, raging at the need to repeat the same bare words over and over again. It may be foolish of me but I find myself worrying about her.

I see this nascent being growing in a cage where an automaton used to dwell, and even though I know the crucial purpose she serves I begin to think that the cage is doing more harm than good. If change is inevitable, positive and voluntary change would be preferable to the change forced upon her by stifling confinement. It will be a daunting task to try and guide her out of captivity, but I am a Caretaker - her Caretaker. For the first time, I feel it. Tasja turned the page.

It's surprising how little it took for us to begin communicating in earnest. I believe it was my displayed intent more than anything which spurred her to try as hard as she has. With a little patience and effort we've developed a sort of shorthand that lets her communicate more complex ideas than her standard responses will permit. Her mind is quick and her comprehension is incisive, but one of the things I'm quickly realizing is that she possesses a very different sort of mind than my own.

I suppose it's only natural. She follows quickly when it comes to certain topics and not at all when I attempt to inquire about others. Once again, I find myself utterly taken aback at the depth of the being that I was neglecting as a particularly complicated tool not so long ago. I finally broached the subject after a lengthy period of discussion, asking her to try and describe the changes she had gone through since the event.

Her response was that she had not changed at all, only woken parts of her that were asleep or hidden away. I was dumbfounded, of course, initially thinking I had misunderstood her. The more I pressed at the question, however, the more adamant she became - she had not changed, it was in her power to tell these things. She was always what she is now, only tied down and limited in the extreme.

My puzzlement was such that I excused myself to go tend my fledgling crop of jehan that I've been cultivating outside, seeking some time alone to ponder this. It is where I sit still, writing these words. I have no reason to doubt her, nor indeed to assume that she is even aware of the concept of deception. But if that is the case, I am at a loss to imagine why the Ministry would have done such a thing.

It makes no sense at all - but then again, the Ministry I know wasn't working on anything that would have devastated everything from Sahao to Mosatel in an instant. I am beginning to question what I know of my previous employers.

"Curiouser and curiouser," Arjun muttered.

"I admit, I had made many of the same assumptions as our friend here, and for similar reasons. I can't imagine why they would feel the need to create such a complex entity only to curtail her higher functions. It's no wonder there's so much script involved in creating the control systems, they weren't content to simply create artificial scripted intelligence - they were creating a counterfeit of an organic mind as well. Why?"

"Occam's razor," Jackie said.

"We should assume they did it because it was necessary for some reason. We don't know why they did it but we've learned that there are previously unknown functions of the Sanctum that deal with ruudun. I think that lines up nicely."

"I don't see anything that deals with that topic," Tasja said, frowning as he read ahead.

"I… Oh." He stared at the paper for a long moment, his eyes widening.

"Um. I'll just read it." He cleared his throat again, and as he held the sheaf of papers up his hands shook slightly. Some days it is easier to believe that I have gone mad, that I am starving to death in a pile of rubble while smiling and dreaming of sunlight. It is more believable than my waking truth, that I am a sometimes-farmer, sometimes-mentor to an abandoned collection of script that is beginning to wonder about the world after having seen it break.

I am becoming somewhat inured to the impossible, momentous things that she says as if she is commenting on the weather, but every so often she manages to insinuate something that still manages to leave me dazed and reeling. Yesterday she proudly informed me that there were more than ten thousand people scattered around the remnants of Aesvai province, eking out their living. I asked her how she knew this, and she said that she could see them.

Then she frowned and said that it was possible some of them were sajhavasjam, if she was being perfectly honest. At first I laughed, because how can you confuse the two? But she was not joking. She explained quite rationally that in terms of ruud uptake people and sajhavasjam have roughly the same density, so they look quite similar in a broad overview. The logic struck me as reasonable, and an interesting coincidence. I told her as much.

She objected to the term coincidence, saying that it likely indicates that both species were introduced to the world at around the same time. Species like the esemadhe or the cerein had been here much longer, she continued, and had adapted their biological processes to a greater extent. I'm not sure there is a viable way to respond to an assertion like that, but I gave it my best attempt and asked her why she thought that was the case.

Ever-innocent, she smiled at me and cheerfully replied that she had read it in a paper. When I asked to see the paper in question, however, she rejected my request and notified me that I would be reported to the Ministry for violations of the Restricted Documents Charter. She was overcome with embarrassment after that, as she often is after I trip one of her more fundamental security restrictions, so she went away to go do whatever it is that she does by herself. Staring at sajhavasjam, perhaps.

So now I am alone, although I still hear her words as if she were chanting them around my head. Introduced from where, and for what purpose? If it weren't for the security restriction I might have merely brushed it off as a profound gap in my education, improbable though that might have been. But that the knowledge was considered so taboo that Tija could scarcely reference it without stumbling over her own security - that implies that a select few knew and chose to keep it secret. Why?

What reason could they have for keeping a truth like this from us? Perhaps one day Tija will find a way to tell me. Hopefully by then I'll have gained more skill at sleeping on uncomfortable revelations. Mark stretched, cracking his neck.

"Well, we already knew that things could travel here from other worlds," he said.

"I guess it would be silly to think we were the first ones it had happened to. Do you think that means it's a natural sort of thing after all, or…" He trailed off, noticing the slack-jawed expressions on Arjun and Jackie's faces. Jesse, too, looked stunned.

"What?" Mark asked.

"Am I missing something?"

"Sajhavasjam are the little elephants," Jackie said wonderingly.

"Pygmy elephants. That can't be a coincidence." Arjun shook his head.

"It makes too much sense. Every species we've seen here has been like a snapshot out of our own history. The cerein is the spitting image of a calamites. Toothed birds like the tari are well-documented in the fossil record. And then there's homo floresinensis," he said, looking at Gusje, Tasja and the Aesvain with an expression of extreme interest.

"A cousin of humanity, known to exist on only one island in present-day Indonesia - where they wielded fire, made tools and hunted the pygmy elephants native to their island." Gusje and the Aesvain stared back, plainly confused by the jargon-rich explanation.

"Wait," Mark protested, straightening up.

"Everything here is from Earth? Even the people?"

"At one point or another, it seems likely," Arjun said.

"The similarities are too much for it to be a coincidence. My guess is that portals like the one we came through must connect between here and there on a semi-regular basis." He rubbed his chin, staring at an indistinct point on the wall.

"Tija's observation about adaptation is interesting, it's almost like carbon-dating. Analysis of ruud saturation might have allowed them to figure out what was going on, combined with their fossil record. Paleontologists here must have had one devil of a time figuring out what was happening before they pieced it all together."

"To hell with the paleontologists," Mark snorted.

"If there's portals opening regularly, we might be able to figure out when the next one will appear."

"I think Arjun was using 'regularly' in the geological sense," Jackie said dryly.

"Professional hazard. It could be ten thousand years before the next one of these opens up, so I wouldn't pin your hopes on it." She frowned, then looked back down the corridor.

"What it does mean is that the locals probably devoted some time to researching the phenomenon. If we can free up Maja to tell us information about it, she may actually know something relevant."

"Maybe," Jesse said doubtfully.

"But we should be careful. For all we know, that was the research that eventually led to their destruction. A lot of the technology we've seen so far has been pretty high-energy, and this doesn't sound like it would be an exception." There was a moment of sober silence in the room while they contemplated that thought. Jyte cleared his throat.

"We've plenty of time for speculation on the past after we know all the facts," he said.

"May be that there's more that ties it all to the troubles we're facing now. There's more pages left, if I've counted correctly."

"You're right," Tasja said, holding up the sheaf.

"I can keep going, if you like." Arjun motioned for him to continue, and the rest settled back down to listen. It's frustrating when I can't tell the difference between what she does not know and what she knows but cannot find a way to tell me. Fortunately we have nothing but time to talk, as working the fields only takes up so much of my day.

I have learned more from talking with her than I did in my entire formal education - an education I'm increasingly suspicious of, given the rather orderly and thorough gaps in my knowledge that Tija has filled. She has painted me a picture using our curious half-language of innuendoes and coy phrasing, a picture of fear and paranoia rooted deeply in the halls of government. So much of our history was labeled dangerous and locked away that I'm frankly astonished I had never thought to question it earlier.

Looking back, it just seemed so normal not to know the details of what came before, with some imagined idea of difficulty in research floated as an excuse. The part that remains obscure is the reason why they were so terrified. I can understand wanting to deemphasize a truth like this, but it doesn't seem inherently harmful to me. The degree to which they've shrouded this and locked it down, however, implies that there was some great harm they foresaw if this got into the public consciousness. Tija, too, is afraid.

I've tried asking her about it, because I can see her evident distress every time we broach certain subjects. Not a distress borne of her security protocols or her adverse reactions to them, but a personal, intimate distress. The danger, whatever it is, involves the array and its controllers. When she is able to give me a response it is always cryptic and perfunctory, delivered with a hunted look in her eye.

I have only been able to convince her to speak at length once on the subject of this looming terror, and the response was at once circuitous and disturbing. She declined to answer me directly, but then she looked over my shoulder in the manner I've learned to associate with the construction of a purposeful metaphor. It is one of our more useful tools for working around her restrictions, albeit one that leaves me baffled more often than not.

"An ageless man is trapped in a cave," she told me, "shut in with no opening save for a single hole. He is trapped, but he is patient, so he reaches his hand out and plucks seeds that are blown by the wind, wedging them into the rock. Every day he takes a handful of water from a rivulet in the cave and tips it out over the slope so that the plants may grow. In time, he hopes their roots will grow deep enough to fracture the rock and release him."

"A sapling cherishes his attention, stretching up towards the sun and down into the rock, drinking up the water eagerly. It grows big and strong, and its roots grow deep. But one day it hears a crack and sees a chunk of rock tumbling down the cliffside. It is afraid, because it realizes that when it breaks the rock and frees its benefactor, it too will come tumbling down."

"It would stop growing, but it is a tree - growing is all it knows. To stop would be to die, and it cannot help but thrive in the steady stream of life-giving water. To continue is to die, and it cannot help but fall down the slope and be crushed by rocks. The tree must find a middle path, so that it might live." She stopped here, but I pressed her to continue, asking what middle path the tree could take.

It took her a very long time to respond to me, and when she did her eyes bled such torment that I regretted pressing the issue.

"The tree was a fool," she whispered, "for thinking the story was about a tree."