Another door admitted them to the scanning area where station scientists conducted remote study of the Worm. Yishna inspected the giant heads of the multi-spectrum EM emitters and receivers poised around the giant canister below them, like thorns around a bug. Subversion-hardened machinery actually penetrated the canister: the heads of the nanoscopes, other emitters and receivers, and diamond probes and other mechanical tools. Intervening spaces were webbed with power and data cables and support frameworks. To perform maintenance impossible to conduct from outside, the OCTs always entered here in threes, so they could watch each other. Yishna now understood why.
The invisible muttering crowd seemed packed shoulder to shoulder all around her, but just slightly out of phase with the reality she knew. She heard occasional distinct words, "location…compression…death…" and began to feel a terrible anger, yet Yishna had always considered anger a destructive emotion and had trained herself to avoid it. Thoughts started surfacing in her consciousness. She saw Orduval having his first fit on the floor of the Ruberne Institute museum, remembered eating sage cake with blueberry jam, began making random calculations, wondered about starting a lesbian relationship with Edellus and considered strangling Director Gneiss because he knew too much about her. She could make connections between these thoughts, and logically argue how they had proceeded into her consciousness, yet felt on a deeper level that some outside influence had forced them there. Telepathic inductance. She understood why the OCTs felt the way they did, and felt her own fear grow as members of that invisible crowd all around now fell silent and seemed to turn their regard upon her.
Bleed-over.
Station Director Oberon Gneiss, the man with the weird eyes and seeming emotional disengagement from the world, had stated that those studying the Worm must gaze upon it with their own eyes and feel its presence, for otherwise they could too easily fall into anthropomorphism and an expectation of the prosaic. Though Combine scientific communities frowned on the irrational, they valued imagination. Very well. Yishna tried to separate herself from the effect and to focus on her purpose here. She had come to study the Worm, so she forced her attention back to analysing her surroundings.
There were several scorched and melted places around the central canister. They called it an information fumarole breach when the Worm began to take over some piece of equipment, even equipment hardened to such attacks. A huge energy surge, tapped from massive capacitors lodged in Centre Cross, usually solved the problem, but to the detriment of the equipment that had been breached.
"Let us go down now," said Dalepan.
Pushing off from the lip of the airlock, they descended towards the canister. It was fashioned of a ceramic-steel composite except for one end-cap, that one being optically polished diamond. A lattice of grip bars stood out only a few feet from the cap in question, the knurling cut into them worn smooth in places by the clench of sweaty hands. Edellus and Dalepan took hold on either side, leaving a space in the middle for Yishna. She noticed Dalepan was staring in through the cap, while Edellus kept her face averted. Catching hold of one bar and placing her foot on another, Yishna too peeked inside the canister.
Tangled bright complexity faced her: metallic ophidian movement squirmed across her optic nerves till she felt the need to scratch those places in her head, even though her eyes stood in the way. The mass lying underneath six inches of optical diamond seemed to be in constant motion, though when she focused on any part of it she saw no movement at all. This effect seemed to nibble at the periphery of her vision, at the edges of all her perception. At first she felt herself being observed, as she herself would observe a bug landing on her hand. But then the intensity of that observation increased, and it seemed a star-shaped crevice opened in her brain, and into that began to drain away all her self, all her will. There seemed a solution to all this contained in the patterns behind that diamond pane, if she could but stay a little longer to figure—
"Time to go." Dalepan was gripping one of her biceps, Edellus the other.
"No, I just need to—"
They pulled her away from the bars and launched all three of them towards the airlock. She wanted to fight but, as the fascination broke, she realised how futile that would be since there was no way to get back there until she reached something to push off from again. However, by the time they reached the airlock, Yishna started to feel the fear, and did not want to return.
"We thought you might be a scratcher," Edellus told her, as they unmasked.
"Scratcher?"
It appeared that one in fifty of those who looked upon the Worm would tear off their masks and try to scratch out their own eyes. The OCTs then warned her about after-images flashing in her visual field, and that if they occurred she must consult the doctor immediately, since the eye-scratching sometimes occurred after the visit to the canister. She also learned that her seemingly brief moment before the diamond pane had actually lasted for an entire hour. But now, with the formalities over, she could begin her apprenticeship, and decide the course her future research would take. Though, of course, Yishna had quickly decided her area of study would be bleed-over, as she searched for the god in the machine.
5
Our ancestors here used biotechnology far in advance of what we Sudorians currently possess (though perhaps not in advance of that employed by the Brumallians). They used adaptogenic drugs and DNA-editing nanomachines, esoteric surgical techniques and viral-recombination therapies, but these weren't really enough. They knew with absolute scientific certainty that this world would kill them before they could enjoy grey hair. It was already killing them. Changed but not completely adapted, they took all that they and their machines could carry, and headed south out of the Komarl and into cooler climes. During the journey a quarter of them died, and a further quarter of them died while they set up their domed encampment where the city of Transit now stands. The survivors managed to endure simply because they limited the time they spent outside their specially cooled domes, where they worked quickly to raise the next generation. That next generation was created by drastic alteration of the embryos they had imported. The children inherited, and were free to walk outside but, as their parents and educators died around them, they did not inherit everything. Machines fell into disuse and technologies were lost, as these children tried to build a society. They did not yet understand that the nuts and bolts of civilisation are more important than political infighting.
— Uskaron
McCrooger
Face down I could not see what had me trapped. It must have leapt on me from the top of the tunnel exit. Just to the right side of my head I could see one long jointed finger the size of a banana, looking like it was made of brass gone verdigrised on its upper surface, and terminating in a vicious though translucent talon. Chummy growled with gurgling wetness beside my ear, which gave me the benefit of its pickled-herring halitosis. I brought my elbow back—not too hard since I did not really know my assailant's intentions. It made a glottal urf and a long red tongue slurped down the side of my face. I heaved myself up, lifting it with me, reached back and grabbed a thick wrist, rose onto one knee, then threw the creature over my shoulder, slamming it down hard into the mud before me. I then paused, somewhat at a loss on observing the form of my assailant.
About three hundred pounds of something looking like a cross between a monitor lizard and a Rottweiler struggled there on its back, panting for breath. Its chest was a ribbed shield of yellow and green, its dog's head and the rest of its body was that same verdigris-and-brass colour, without fur, reptilian. Its thick lizard tail whipped back and forth, and it gazed up at me with mismatched eyes—one blue and one brown. I stood up, not recognising this creature from the Brumallian planetary almanac.