65. The Datasphere Foundry

Collecting themselves, Jaden, Marius, Fureva-Yung and Nox stood before the door to the south-west, the way the robot insect had come from and the ozone smell originated.
 
“Do you think we could have a break for a moment?” Nox asked, staring at the door and whatever was beyond it.
“I don’t know, we’re on a sort of time crunch if you’re worried about Fureva-Yung’s friend being enslaved to a shard,” Marius replied, eager to keep going.
“But are we, though? We’ve seen no sign of forced entry. How do we know he’s not working with the shard, “ Nox quickly turned to Fureva-Yung to qualify, “I mean, against his will, of course.”
“Nox, take your rest,” Fureva-Yung said wearily, sitting down on the sheet metal flooring, “ I, too, could do with a rest after riding the plant beast.”
Even Jaden had to admit that the trip to the jungle had left her shaken, and also sat down against the wall for a short rest.
 
“Really?” Marius had, as usual, survived the trip to the jungle virtually unscathed, but his team needed a break, “I guess, I mean, sure, you have a break, Nox, and we’ll set out in an hour.”
As Marius fished round in Bellyache for Io, and Fureva-Yung closed her eyes and listened to the building around her, Nox reconnected to Raffi to the public network.
 
He was currently helping out under the dome, under supervision, tending to the plants. It wasn’t adventurous or exciting, but it wasn’t locked in a cell either, so he dealt with it as best he could.
Hey, Raffi. Are the plants giving you trouble? Nox opened up the conversation.
Nox! I wish! If one leapt out of its garden bed and attacked, I’d be ready, but nothing. So much of a big, scary secret.
I thought of you when we were sent into a jungle with two giant plant creatures. They had legs as thick as tall trees and spoke to each other with voices like thunderstorms… She gave him a blow-by-blow description of events, including Fureva-Yung’s abduction on the back of one of the creatures and how they found her encircled by a group of smaller deer-like animals with empty circles for heads.
If it were anyone else saying this stuff, I’d call them a liar to their face, Raffi replied, and it was clear from his tone that he was more than a little jealous.
I wish you could tell me to my face, Nox lamented and audibly heard Marius moan.
“You don’t have to listen, you know,” Nox said out loud.
“You don’t have to sound like a lovesick puppy,” Marius replied.
“Says Temila’s puppy…” She grumbled to herself.
Raffi, Fureva-Yung now interrupted the conversation. I was wondering. When that seed starts to germinate, do you think the roots will expand out of current offices or will make their own way out of your torso? Also, do you think I could be there to watch?
Urgh… Raffi didn’t sound at all well, You are looking for a cure, right?
Yes, we’re looking for a cure, Fureva-Yung! Nox glared at Fureva-Yung, who couldn’t see as she was still listening to the echoes throughout the facility.
 
Say Raffi, there’s a datasphere transporter here. If we can get power to it, we could both translate out into the datasphere and travel…everywhere as bits of information. There's no need to worry about some stupid seed then.
I guess, Raffi didn’t sound convinced at the idea of being turned into energy, Flying around the datasphere wasn’t what I imagined when I dreamed of exploring.
I know, but you’d be free of the seed and its attempts to take over your body. You’d be free of your body altogether…in fact… An idea sprung fully formed into Nox’s mind, What if, while you were data in the datasphere I extract the parts of you that are the seed? Then, when you’re physical again, you’d be pure Raffi.
 
Isn’t it grafted into his DNA by now? Fureva-Yung asked, invested in the conversation, though not fully comprehending it, Wouldn’t he lose all the toughed skin and extra strength the seed gives him?
Well, yes…but the seed is dormant while he’s in N’Quintin. In the datasphere, it would be a simple thing to find the code that is the seed and… and with a grasping gesture, Nox plucked an imagined seed out of thin air and held it up for the group to see.
 
Unfortunately, not even the datasphere would things would be that simple. She needed tools that would help her manipulate the stuff of the datasphere itself, Datashaping she called it. Besides, having a good theoretical idea, she hadn’t a clue how to do it.
 
Maybe you need to think about that one again, Raffi admitted with a note of resignation.
I’m not giving up Raffi, and neither should you.
I know you’re smart. If there’s a way to help me, you’ll find it.
 
Fifteen minutes into the rest the dust collected in corners and scuffed by their passage started to rise into the air. They all looked at the door to the column room, but it was firmly closed. The dust rose to a high of about half a metre before hanging there, a think layer knee height from the ground. Just the group were starting to be concerned the dust suddenly lost its ability to float and fell back to the metal floor again.
 
“Do you think that had some thng to do with that room?” Nox asked, pointing at the door to the column.
“More this door, “ Fureva-Yung replied, pointing at the doorway heading southwest.
 
 
 
 
 
Fureva-Yung had a fairly good idea of what was behind the southwest door just by listening to sounds bouncing off the walls and floors. The room beyond was a trapezoidal shape, the door in one of the sloping sides. Opposite the door, a wall went from the floor to the ceiling with two short flights of stairs either side going up to a slightly higher platform. She knew at least four insect servitors were up there doing no good as she could hear their skittering about and an electrical hum.
 
Partway through the rest, Marius joined her at the door and listened in as he put the io together to form a simple concussive bomb. He couldn’t make the sonic images she could, but he did confirm the presence of active servitors. It was time to start moving.
 
Marius took position to the right of the door, Fureva-Yung to the left, her chain buzzing with sonic energy from a thunderbeam. Nox, camouflaged into the walls of the facility and hid in the shadows of Fureva-Yung. With a swipe of her arm, Fureva-Yung opened the door. In sprinted Marius towards the stairs closest him. He threw the bomb up the stairs using the angle of the wall to ricochetit behind the wall.
Bang! His explosive went off followed very quickly after a heavy WHOOMP! as a cloud of blue pixelated cubes spread out, overtaking his position.
 
“Marius!” Nox cried, but not before, Marius was engulfed in pixels. When the pixelated cloud shrank back behind the wall, Marius was gone. Nox scanned the area where she’d last seen him. Nothing was left to show Marius had even been there.
 
Fureva-Yung climbed the stairs and peered around the corner carefully. There were no servitors, just tiny scorchmarks where molten metal hit. More telling, there was no Marius. Instead, the glowing, pixelated cloud of blue was quickly collapsing before her eyes.
“Fureva! Marius has disappeared!” Nox scampered up the stairs to see the glowing ball. Scanning it she determined it was a collapsing cloud of datasphere energy.
“I think, if he’s anywhere, is in the dataspere,” She said pointing at the sphere, looking around her for a way of stablising it.
“He’s in there?” Fureva-Yung asked puzzled as to how someone so tall could fit into such a small portal. Oh, well, she’d had to make it larger. And she thrust her two hands into the sphere to pull open the portal.
“No, don’t…” Nox said just as Fureva-Yung’s hands touched the surface of the portal. With a pop of rushing air, Fureva-Yung disappeared.
 
There was nothing left to do. Grabbing Jaden’s hand, Nox dove into the portal…
 
“Not again!”
Marius looked around. He wasn’t in the same place at all. This was a large rectangular room, clean and well lit with shackles and readouts on one wall and two doors. He’d been in the datasphere enough to know he was no longer corporeal and anything could happen in this space. Four skitters looked around at him.
 
Quickly, Marius blasted away one damaged skitter with a heatray as two other attacked him.The third was trying to make an escape out one of the doors. He dodged the two attacking him easily and send another heat ray at the third, obliterating it. Fureva-Yung appeared, quickly assessed the danger as one of the two made a break for it. Marius punched one of his attackers to pieces as the thundering chain lashed out and hit the last. The sound of the impact was still reverberating around the room as Nox and Jaden followed by Bellyache appeared.
 
“Nice of you to show up,” Marius quipped merrily as he went to investigate a sliding panel on one side of the room.
“We only came to save you,” Nox growled, “Note, when I get teleported somewhere, I get myself out.”
Marius waved Nox’s complaints away, “Say, look at this,” He thought of useful tools. Suddenly racks and rack of medical tools of all sorts and designs appeared. Picking up a scalpel he could clearly see they were superior to his own and he quickly pocketed a few.
 
“Oh! Let me try!” With girlish glee, Jaden joined Marius at the wall of tool racks. The racks swooshed open a second time, now with a new array of medical tools that were moe robust and could be used for building. Fureva-Yung couldn’t resist trying and was pleased to see a set of medical tools that could be used for cold shaping and carving materials into chainlinks. Finally, Nox tried. There was only one thing and person on her mind at the moment. She closed her eyes and considered the seed, nestled in the soft tissues of his body and then she imagined tools to help extract it. The shelves whooshed open, but instead of an array of medical equipment, there was just one slim transparent card.
 
“It…its a flay key,” She said with some reverence after a moment’s examination, “It allows you to easily open up someone to heal them of some illness. With this and…and the right knowledge, we can save Raffi.”
 
“Oh good,” Marius tried to sound pleased, “Which direction, south or east? The skitters were trying to head east when I stopped them.”
 
“Nodes,” Nox sighed. Last time they’d entered a datasphere in the Spire, she’d spent days decoding doors. She was about to start unlocking the eastern door when Jaden stepped over to the racks.
“A key to open this door,” She said and the racks whooshed open as before with racks and racks of the same identical key. Taking one, she held it up in victory before unlocking the node.
 
Nox stepped through and found herself floating in a large room full of floating blue cubes. Large and small they entered the space, with most heading down to a node at the bottom of the chamber. Following the cubes, Nox spent an hour unlocking the node and entering another similar room. Here red rectangles floated in from the west and collected the data cubes into groups before once more heading down to a node at the bottom of the room. She scanned a rectangle and found it was a schematic, a set of instructions.
 
“This place is gathering the materials from some sort of store and putting them with the instructions,” She informed the others before following the groups she investigated the node.
“It’s a seven. One of these took me days last time,” She lamented before Jaden literally flew off back to the tool room.
“A key for the difficulty seven node, “She thought, picturing the room and node in her mind. The racks slid aside to reveal a single key. A master key to the whole facility. With it, none of the doors would bar their way. Instead of heading straight back, she opened the door to the south in the tool room.
 
This room was familiar. A tall cylindrical room with an interface at its centre. Instead of information, the shelves the circular walls were lined with was filled with red schematics. At the interface was also a very familiar jagged red rip in space.
 
As soon as Nox saw the shard she put it into stasis, freezing it in place. It hadn’t had a chance to respond to their presence before it’s unable to do anything.
“Now what? Can we kill it? I don’t think anyone wants to try eating it again,” Nox looked at Jaden. But Jaden was already on the problem. She was trying to determine it’s weaknesses and how they could deal with this pest once and for all. It was much smaller than the last shard they’d fought in the Spire, much smaller than Nox. Jaden estimated that between them all they could kill it or even eject it from the datasphere. There was also a chance they’d shatter it into smaller just as malicious smaller pieces.
“What if we ask the library how to kill it?” Marius said and tried punching in a few key phrases into the interface. He noticed that an string of servitors was being produced for the material world and shut down the assembly line. The last servitor almost complete, he reprogrammed to work for them before letting the foundry finish the work.
“I do not think it will be so easy,” Fureva-Yung said seriously. Her people had sent great armada of ships to fight the malignancy only to trap it.
“We could fight it, but there’s a good chance we’d only break it up into smaller pieces that may get away. What if we trap it. What if…?” Jaden pushed Marius away from the interface and put in the description of the crystal they’d used to trap the shard infesting the Spire. The schematics were there and in forty-five minutes, a smaller version of the crystal was delivered to the library.
Forty-five minutes of Nox zapping the malignant shard with Stasis every minute. It could not have come any faster for Nox and she was gleefully happy to see the jagged scar on reality sucked into the crystal.
 
“It’ll take care of that,” Marius said, clutching the crystal.
 
“I wonder what the stores have?” Jaden started searching through the files until she found a list of stores. There seemed to be an almost unending supply of simple io, but things of real worth were few.
“These are all worth real cash on the outside,” She said, picking and choosing a midnight stone, a amber crystal and some units of Sacristan shielding.
“Or…you could make something amazing, where better than in a datasphere foundry?” Marius asked, “Don’t you have a pile of plans of your own that you’ve wanted to implement?”
“Add plans to the system?” Jaden hadn’t thought of that and was soon rummaging around in her backpack for her notebook.
 
After lots of comparing her inventory and the foundry’s inventory with required parts for plans she decided she was one Quantum off making a full flying machine like the ones they’d seen at the pyramid. In the end she settled for making five units of Sacristan shielding that could protect electronics from meddling by the malignant shard. Production was two hours and would be delivered to the material world as soon as completed.
“I really want a portal to get back here,” She said out loud and started looking for a schematic to do just that.
“While she does this, can I borrow you for a moment, Nox?” Marius asked and they travelled back to the tool room.
 
He pointed out the shackles directly beside a readout screen and Nox obligingly scanned the two. The tool room had once been an examination room for living and dead creatures. The read out kept tracks of information including the vitals of the living specimens. The shackles…well, it seemed not every one being examined wanted to be there.
“It’s a medical lab…I wonder if we could use this space to help Raffi. Here in the datasphere we have everything we need and with the flay key we’d get easy access to the seed.” Nox mused, but Marius had more serious ideas.
“It’s not the future victims of this places I’m worried about, but the past. Can you get access to a database of patients? I hope Critius Torn was not one of them.”
 
Nox went to work scanning the database for any sign of a creature like Critius, but nothing not hundreds of years old could be found. With a sigh of relief, they left the tool room and returned to find the others in the foundry.
 
Here, on a circular platform the items requested were assembled with the use of hundred of mechanical claws, drills and, soldering irons and cutting blades. As they watched the last of the sacristan shielding was made and teleported out, into the material world.
“And that is our way out,” Jaden gestures, a new devise in her hand. A datasphere key, just like the one in the Spire. This was was shut down, only half of what was required to reenter this datasphere.
 
Once the platform was free again, Jaden set the machinery to teleport them out. Marius, still clutching the crystal stepped up on the platform.
“I’m actually hoping we get to the other side and find the crystal shatters, then I’ll just absorb that blasted shard,” He said with some glee.
 
They emerge back in new part of the facility. The sheets of sacristan shielding lay to one side. Crushed and broken against the walls, a number of servitors lay, but where the servitor Marius had reprogramed, there was no sign.