The infinity dungeon 258

Chapter 258

Icarus’s white room slowly bled its brightness until all that remained around him was black. The data streams changed, arranging themselves into constellations and bright lines, clusters of information, video and audio feeds and telemetry from sensors picking up everything under the sun–and beyond.

It was not the doing of this particular thread of his consciousness. He simply let the room change around him while he worked on tracking the don, while the main him figured out how to integrate the spaces they used with Michael’s inner space.

The end result was going to be amazing, he knew. They would be closer than ever, a single being of entwined consciousness. 

Something zipped past him.

As expected, he thought. The Technomancer runs interference. 

Grinning, he split his consciousness into many threads. Some of them retreated into another room, isolated from the rest, so that they could deal with the Technomancer with no risk of compromising the main system. Others created fake trails to muddy the waters. The few that remained with him helped him track down the don’s organization.

Why does he keep sending out priests?

It was the missing piece. Until, finally, after sifting through terabytes of data, Icarus found an image.

David was slumped on one of the Silver Room’s chairs together with Travis–who was staring out of the window. The name of the room had been changed at Michael’s request, because he just could not deal with having yet another control room.

“Is that the fucking pope?” he cried out.

“It is almost unsurprising, honestly,” Travis said. He did not move away from the window, gazing upon Site 00 from above. 

Icarus could see it in his gaze that he was still coming to terms with the fact that all his eyes were seeing was Michael’s domain.

And mine, he thought. It’s ours. Ours. He and I.

Clearly, Icarus too was struggling with coming to terms with the full implications of the recent developments. It felt as if his relationship with Michael was on the brink of changing, on the cusp of something, but nothing had really changed yet.

We took some steps in a direction, then acted as if all was normal again.

In a way, he had always been inside Michael’s head. But now Michael was in his as well. No, the two were an item. It was more than just reading thoughts.

I only hope that these steps won’t lead us to falling off a cliff. 

“Icarus? Icarus! The fuck is going on with you?”

He refocused on Travis and decided to pretend nothing was wrong. “You were saying?”

“Is there a way to enhance or something?”

The image depicted an ornate room of golds and reds, almost empty save for the presence of two people. The don, and the pope. The only other feature of the room was a massive mirror that almost reached the ceiling, propped against a wall at an angle.

Several pieces of it were missing, and the reflection was strange, but it was hard to tell from the incomplete data.

“Sorry,” Icarus said. “This is the best we have.”

“Ah well,” David said. “The fucking pope. No wonder they got their hands everywhere. We thought it was just lone priests that the don had managed to blackmail or some shit, but this changes everything.”

The feed on the screen was still playing live. 

“What are they doing?” Travis asked, finally moving away from the window, as if getting closer to the hologram would allow him to see through the grainy footage.

In said footage, the don was talking animatedly with the pope. The man was listening, patiently, almost immobile. He must have spoken eventually, because Casellaro suddenly stopped gesticulating and looked at the pope straight in the eye. The man was shorter than the mafioso, who loomed above him.

After he was done threatening the man, he turned to the mirror and touched it. It came alive with color, fragments of images. No, moving things, like a million videos being played one beside the other.

Icarus hummed loudly, frowning and playing with his hair. 

“What got you worked up?” asked David as he noticed the AI’s distracted look.

“I detected several exotic magic signatures all over the world. Their appearance coincided with the don touching the mirror.”

“Can you track them?”

“No. They are fuzzy. The Technomancer is interfering, and there’s Faith.”

“Do you see the shape of the many images in the mirror?” Travis said as he leaned even closer. “Look at the top, where there are a few missing shards. Don’t they all have roughly the same shape?”

“I’ll be damned,” David said. “They do look like the missing pieces. It’s like a mosaic of shards.”

“Two confirmed signatures on the moon and several in deep space,” Icarus said. “The main me is with Michael in the dungeon, and he’s reporting a sharp decline in the time dilation factor at all floors. One moment, I’m asking Michael to check something.”

They waited with bated breath. Without warning, the mirror went dark again, and the don stormed out of the room with one last threat to the pope.

“Exotic magic readings are back to normal,” Icarus announced. 

“What about Michael?" David asked impatiently. 

“I asked him to go to the fourth floor, where he had encountered the robes for the first time. He didn’t make it there in time, but… as expected, he’s good. He found some lingering traces of the same exotic magic I detected around the world. Do you two want to guess the only place where I did not detect it?”

David frowned. “Wherever Casellaro and the pope are, I’m guessing.” 

Icarus nodded. He threw himself back, and a plush pink chair materialized to catch him. “What a pain,” he whined. “I hate, hate, hate their stupid Faith magic! Even the Technomancer is not all that bad. Oh, nevermind, he just infected three threads of me with a virus. They had to terminate themselves. My hate for him grows.”

Travis suppressed a shudder at the thought of someone being the target of the AI’s ire and hate. As Icarus kept changing, he couldn’t help but find him more and more uncanny to the point thinking about him kept him up at night. 

The AI in question glanced at him, and he wondered if Icarus knew of his thoughts. They were inside his domain, after all. What if he could read their mind? Did he even need to?

I don’t, thought Icarus. And I wouldn’t even need to use the magic of the domain to do so. 

The data from mundane sensors was plenty enough to decode basic brain activity like conscious subvocalized thought. 

***

“General.”

“Travis Tyrell.”

The nature calls of the forest echoed around them. They were eerie, enough to give Travis the chills even after all the time he had spent in the valley. The former OA general looked more at ease with them than with Travis. But then again, Travis thought as he looked at the man’s face. He had easily aged more than twenty years. His hair was white and thin and his beard long. By now he must have spent more time here than even I have.

“How are things in the Valley, general?” Travis asked nonchalantly.

“They haven’t always been easy, but I found my place. Eventually.” Around them, some Fae wandered the forest and nodded at him. He nodded back, then refocused on Travis. “Are you here to take it away?”

“No need to be so wary of me, general,” Travis said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. What of your wife and kid back home? Don’t you miss them?”

“Of course I miss them!” growled the man. “I miss them every day of my life.”

“Do you?” Travis waved his hand, and a hologram appeared. Courtesy of Icarus who, despite all his misgivings, was always eager to help out. In the holo image was the general, together with a fox-Fae and two little kids. “Looks like you moved on well enough.”

The general inhaled, stepped toward Travis, then thought better of it and deflated like a sad balloon. “What was I supposed to do? You gave me no sign you were ever going to release me from here. Years passed. A decade and then two. At a certain point, even though I knew intellectually that time outside wasn’t passing nearly as fast as here… I suppose I looked at myself in the mirror and truly realized that you were going to let me die of old age here. Why keep living like a prisoner, shut inside my home, only going out for food? I was never going to see my family again. I met a few Fae, made some friends, and she waltzed into my life like thunder with clear skies.”

“Heartwarming story,” Travis said monotone. “Does this mean you don’t want to leave anymore?”

The general looked down, shaking head weakly. “Is this some form of torture, or what? Why did you force me down this path, only to dangle the choice before me like this? Are you asking me to choose?”

“Well,” Travis grinned. “That’s the neat part. You don’t have to. I have an offer for you. Do you think you can handle raising two families at the same time? Don’t worry about the grey hair, Unity has a brand new drug to take care of that and much, much more. It won’t be your body giving up on you that prevents you from being able to two-time all you like. Two worlds, entirely separate. Time dilation and the Fae’s strange sense of time working in your favor.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” the general said immediately. “What’s the catch?”

“Other than being a horrible, horrible cheater? Not all Fae are monogamous, but I bet your cutesy fox is. What of your wife? What would she think if she knew?”

“That’s it? Cheap blackmail?”

“Nah, that was just me wondering out loud. Here’s the kicker. I don’t need to blackmail anyone. Icarus, portal please.”

Behind him, a portal flickered open. Through it, the general could see the muted colors of the outside, a sharp contrast to the oversaturated radiance of the Valley.

“You see,” Travis said. “We control access. I don’t need anything else to make sure you behave.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“It’s time, general, to go back on duty. It never hurts to have a man we trust be Secretary of Defense, does it?”

“Secretary of Defense?”

“Congratulations for your promotion, general Zachary Brewer. Remember to head to Dr Kavins for a full rejuvenation. When you are done, a helicopter will take you to the airport, where you will fly to Washington. I expect a meeting with the President to talk about our new Daedalus system by the end of the week. Icarus will brief you about it.”