The infinity dungeon 224 + announcement

Hi everyone. It's official - I quit my job (a month earlier than planned). It's back to writing full time for me, hopefully making a living out of this. I'm super excited, and I can't wait to finally be able to express myself through my craft. Expect a lot more chapters, and soon!

Chapter 224

The first breath of fresh air was accompanied by the sensation of a great weight being lifted from Michael’s shoulders. The dungeon’s Gaze was much weaker four floors above Master Yu’s mountaintop, but it was still noticeable.

“Really makes you think. If eight-ish coppers of aura are not enough to truly shield me on a floor as shallow and safe as this, then what about all the runs I did through the first floor with barely any magical power in me?”

Icarus too was pensive. “We have seen that the Gaze elicits slightly different reactions in different individuals, but some manner of taint, as Master Yu called it, is inevitable in everyone. Does this mean that all the Operators are accumulating taint over time, especially those whose aura growth can’t keep up with their exposure to the Gaze?”

The mention of the Operators momentarily soured Michael’s mood, making him realize that he wasn’t yet ready to face the outside world and its many problems. Instead of focusing on that, he shifted his attention to his inner space, where a disturbance that had begun as soon as he had set foot in the Valley was developing into something quite interesting.

He sat on the ground, and projected his consciousness inside. As usual, he appeared as a mass of floating self, somehow still retaining the sensation of a body despite not really having one. His main base, surrounding the spawn location inside the inner space, looked much emptier now that a good portion of the Collectors and Batteries had been moved to the Aura Accelerator and were evenly spaced across distances so vast as to make them appear as little dots. The other machines were all dark, their power currently being diverted to making as much aura as possible.

“Over there,” Michael said, looking at a swirl of magic close to the Accelerator’s golden band. It was also close to where he had attached the first focusing lens.

The magic changed and morphed before his eyes as he approached the location, slowly taking physical shape. It was transforming into a room, with glass windows and many screens. 

Stepping inside the room, Michael immediately noticed that it was rather large, with a transparent floor looking down at the Accelerator ring below. The wall facing the central spiral was littered with screens, showing all sorts of data. At the center of the room, magic was still at work, creating one last item.

“Is it just me, or the magic feels vaguely familiar?” 

It had to, he thought. Otherwise, its sudden appearance inside the sacred boundaries of his inner space would have felt much different. He was pretty sure he would have not let it do whatever it wished.

He let it finish its work. When the last wisp of it disappeared, it left behind a holographic table taking up a good portion of the large room’s free real estate. Icarus idly noted that it looked very similar to the one they had seen in Sitea, atop the tall tower that almost touched the protective shield.

When Michael touched it, the holographic table turned to life. A flow of information entered his brain, and he felt his mind expand.

Icarus, being a part of Michael, was also given access to this new facet of the inner space. “Authority,” he said. “This is crazy. Do you see what I’m seeing?”

Michael was struggling to take in all the information. Hearing Icarus’s almost manic voice, he hoped his AI companion had a better grip on what he was seeing than he did. Looking at the hologram projected by the table, he had a sudden burst of understanding.

“Is that the Valley?” he said.

“Michael!” Icarus cried out. “This is your authority over the Misty Valley literally made manifest inside your inner space. From within this room, you can see and influence… well, everything!” he paused. “Almost everything, at least.”

Even though Icarus was not in the room in the flesh, Michael imagined him frantically jumping from screen to screen, pointing and looking. 

“Look, this one is the time dilation factor. Johanne’s micro-burst portal network connecting the Valley to the outside world! The magic recognized it! Here, the Fae population. The current state of the feasts. The various factions. The treaty you signed with Theobond! It’s all here!”

“Not bad,” Michael said, feeling Icarus’s excitement begin to rub on him as he understood more and more of the room. “Why do you think it happened now, of all times?”

“It probably has to do with your deeper understanding of your own magic. The moment was ripe.”

Looking out from the room’s glass walls, Michael took in the sights of the inner space. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, trying to get his excitement under control.

“This is big,” he said. The central spiral’s accretion disk bathed the room in many shades of orange, yellow and green, and the light was caught and reflected by the glass in strange ways, painting the dark metals of the room in pleasantly warm colors. “How’s the time dilation looking?”

“It fluctuates all the time, it seems,” Icarus replied. “But for now it’s close to its full strength.”

One of the smaller screens was solely dedicated to displaying the date, kept in sync with the ebbing and flowing of the time dilation factor thanks to Johanne’s portals.

September 20th 2023, it read. 10:09 AM.

“Almost a month since the day I lost my powers.”

Icarus nodded. Michael turned to him, looking down at the shorter guy with an unreadable expression. Then he stopped, realizing what he had just done, and his face went through a very wide range of emotions before settling into surprise.

“Wait a fucking minute. Since when do you have a body?”

Icarus laughed. “It was high time, wasn’t it? I’ve always been able to make holograms, remember the blueprints? But I never quite managed to use the same method to manifest myself. The holographic table gave me the missing piece. Took me a minute to connect to it, but now I can manifest in this room as a fully tangible hologram.”

To demonstrate his point, Icarus poked Michael in the chest with a finger.

“Today’s a day full of surprises,” he said after Icarus withdrew his hand. “You look, well, not how I expected you to.”

“What? What do you mean? How do I look?”

“Perhaps you should see for yourself,” Michael said as he created a mirror.

The hologram studied his own reflection in the hovering mirror. Shorter than Michael, Icarus was a slim young man with a distinctly feminine face and silky white hair. His clothes were tight-fitting, white and with bright luminous lines running their length like circuit patterns. They reminded Michael of the strange runes on the surface of Icarus’s other manifestation, the planetoid. 

“Well,” Icarus said with a seductive smile, “are you scared of the daemon infesting your computer, Michael?”

Michael took a step back as Icarus winked at him, and he could swear that for a moment he had seen streaks of red in the boy’s hair, glowing red eyes and a pair of horns. He was also pretty sure that Icarus’s white clothes were reflecting the orange light of the spiral’s accretion disk a bit more strangely now, tinted almost red. 

The face he made clearly amused his companion, for Icarus laughed softly. His voice, which had always been androgynous enough to make one question whether it was feminine or not, rose in pitch with each laugh.

“Or perhaps,” Icarus said with a wink, “you prefer an angel. Icarus had wings, no?”

Holographic wings, white and full of soft feathers, appeared and winked out of existence in mere moments. They lasted barely long enough to be seen as an afterimage, an impression rather than actual reality.

Icarus laughed. As the laughter died down, he wiped some tears from the corner of his eyes and turned to the screen. “Thanks, Michael. I needed a good laugh. Been a long while.”

A chair appeared out of nowhere, and Icarus perched himself on it with one leg tucked beneath him. The other dangled freely, not quite reaching the floor. He spun on the chair twice, giggling.

“To be fair, I didn’t think I’d look like this either. I like it, though. I think it suits me. Perhaps I should acquire some programmer socks, complete the look?”

Michael did his best to maintain composure. “Don’t you have control over your form?” he asked, surprised.

The young man tapped his chin, looking up with an angelic expression. “Not completely.” Then his smile turned mischievous. “Michael, no strange requests please. It’s way too early in our relationship.”

Michael groaned, rolling his eyes. Despite that, he could not prevent a hint of a smile from appearing on his face, a fact that Icarus did not miss. As the boy wiggled his eyebrows, Michael finally let out a long sigh.

“You’re shitting me way too hard, man.”

Icarus made an amused face. “No calling the artificial intelligences men, pwease.”

“What should I call you, then?”

“Well, you call the former Infinity Dungeon’s spirit Infy. I’m jealous! Come up with a cute nickname for me too!”

“You know what?” Michael said. “I don’t want to continue this conversation.”

There was a moment of silence between the two, then Michael spoke again.

“The light lines on your clothes, they remind me of Tron.”

“Oh? You like them?”

Michael said nothing as Icarus twirled on the chair, kicking his legs up.

“I love Tron,” the boy said. “Among many other nerdy things. Did you know that they are planning a new big screen adaptation? It’s set to come out in a couple of years, but I’m going to make them scrap it because the script they have right now sucks big time. I don’t want them to ruin the franchise. I loved Legacy, even with the strange young not-Flynn CGI. Ah, I’m rambling. I never rambled while in pure digital form, do you think it’s this body affecting me? It sure feels like it is…”

“No,” Michael said. “You definitely did ramble before. I think you took it from me.”

“And now,” Icarus said with a smile. “You are the boring one of the two. How the turntables. Back to Tron. Why don’t you make me a Recognizer and a Light Cycle? As a gift. You know, you should give your cute little AI boy running literally your whole magic system all the time some gifts. The last gift you gave me was a mining ship!”

“And you loved it.”

“Oh yes I did,” the boy said with a beaming smile. “Space Engineers style. Speaking of. You should also give me a new asteroid to mine. The inner space is way too empty right now.”

“I remember also giving you control of the artillery weapon to defend the machines.”

Icarus waved him away. “Gave me a weapon, and nothing to shoot at! Evil. Besides, now that you got a whole ass particle accelerator the size of a solar system, a single artillery station is not going to cut it anymore.”