Chương 173: Chapter 172: The Abyssal Node (10/15/2015)

DATE: Thursday, October 15, 2015 LOCATION: The Yucatan Channel | Guanahacabibes Abyssal Node, Cuba LOCAL TIME: 05: 12 AM EST The descent into the Yucatan Channel was a slow, crushing crawl. My consciousness was tethered to a Class-7 bathymetric drone. Down here, under the weight of half a mile of the Caribbean Sea, the 1, 100 psi compressed the drone's gelatinous polymer into a dense, diamond-hard matrix. I didn't resist the abyss; I let it consolidate my Avatar.

[JAY TELEMETRY: DEPTH 2, 200 FT] [STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: NOMINAL | BIOLOGICAL SALT-BRIDGE: STABLE]"I'm still surprised we have a signal at all," Dr. Sterling's voice crackled through the comm-link from the Sandbox.

"Seawater should have swallowed the carrier wave near the surface."

"It's not fighting the ocean, Doctor," I replied, my optical sensors adjusting to the lightless void.

"The water around me is actively routing it." To my sensors, the deep pulsed with the faint, digital sapphire glow of the Gestalt network.

"Triangulating," JAY reported.

"Massive thermal anomaly four hundred meters ahead. The servers are venting." I fired the drone's fins, gliding through the freezing silt. Then, the ocean floor opened up into an architecture that defied standard history. Emerging from the darkness was a sprawling server farm built directly into the submerged plazas of a geometric, megalithic city. Massive granite blocks formed stepped pyramids and intersecting corridors. Docked within the sprawling stone courtyards were the Carrier-Hubs.

They were matte black, seamless discs. As I drifted closer, my sensors resolved the payload bays. Inside transparent, pressurized rims, I saw thousands of dormant, three-fingered proxies with teardrop black-glass heads.

"They aren't aliens," I murmured, forcing my heart rate to stay steady under the sensory load.

"They're proxies. They engineered their hardware for the exact same pressure we did."

"JAY, analyze the power signature," I ordered. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Scanning," JAY replied.

"Correction, Chad. There is no thermal exhaust. No propulsion detected." Suddenly, the carrier wave spiked in my visual cortex, sending a jolt of heat down my spine. One of the obsidian discs began to vibrate. The water around the craft didn't ripple; it began to exhibit severe optical lensing, bending the light in a jagged halo.

"Something is happening," Amy's voice rose in pitch.

"The orbital obelisk just dropped a massive data packet. Chad, an Admin just logged in!" I watched my HUD, bracing for a massive kinetic displacement. Instead, the saucer didn't thrust. It didn't accelerate. In one microsecond, it was resting heavy in the granite courtyard. In the next frame, the fifty-foot object was simply... fifty yards closer to my drone. There was no wake. No displaced water. The silt directly beneath its previous position remained completely undisturbed.

It was as if the universe had just deleted the object from one coordinate and pasted it into another.

"JAY, what was that?" I demanded.

"According to our physics engine, the object did not move, Chad," JAY replied, the AI's voice clipping.

"It experienced zero acceleration." [JAY WARNING: UNREGISTERED TRAFFIC INTERCEPTING TELEMETRY] [ROOT PRIVILEGE ESCALATION DETECTED] Through the photogrammetry lenses, I saw one of the small, three-fingered proxies inside the saucer's bay tilt its teardrop head. It didn't have eyes, but I felt the weight of the VR Ghost staring directly at me across the Silver Chord.

"Abort mission," I commanded. A violet light on the saucer's rim was already beginning to flare.

"The proxy is initiating a localized data siphon," JAY warned.

"It is attempting to isolate the drone to find your IP address."

"Drop the salt-bridge!" I commanded, pushing the emergency override.

"Depolarize the matrix!"

"Depolarizing," JAY confirmed. In the abyss, the proxy extended a three-fingered manipulator from the bay. The limb simply snapped into its new coordinate with a terrifying, frame-skipping lack of latency. A fraction of a millisecond before the siphon connected, JAY cut the localized electromagnetic charge holding my drone together. Without the charge, the diamond-hard structure reverted to its base state—fragile, gelatinous polymer.

The 1, 100 psi of the deep ocean hit the unshielded material like a collapsing star. In a single microsecond, the crushing weight instantly atomized the biomatter, scattering it harmlessly into the dark current. The violent destruction shattered my connection to the Gestalt. My eyes snapped open in the Sanctum, my physical body slamming hard against the backing of the chair. My brain reeled from a digital decompression sickness that felt exactly like the bends. My heart rate monitor shrieked, spiking to 160 bpm.

My skin was slick with sweat, my skull radiating heat. [LINK SEVERED | GESTALT INTEGRATION: 0%] [NODE ERADICATED] From the Sandbox partition, Amy's voice crackled through the comm-link, stripped of all scientific detachment.

"Chad... did they get the signature? Did they see where you were broadcasting from?" I sat perfectly still, gasping for air as I manually forced my heart rate to decelerate. The image of that teardrop, black-glass head rendering in my visual cortex was burned into my memory.

"No," I breathed.

"The polymer broke before the siphon could capture the carrier wave. They didn't get the address." I stood up from the chair, my muscles trembling from the adrenal dump.

"But they know a local user knocked on the door," I said softly, staring at the blank holographic displays of the Sanctum.

"The System Admins know we're awake."