Nothing.
It didn't make sense. Just a couple of days ago, he had been able to find the anchor points easily compared to the others in the group. Though none of them had the training to tell the different tastes of wildlife.
He focused on Breath of the Void again, directing the tendrils to taste every solid object in the area. Rock after rock registered as just rocks. No silicon taste, no etheric pulse hidden beneath surfaces. The branches tasted like wood, the leaves like a leaf, and the dirt like yummy mushy soil.
Gale wiped sweat from his forehead. The heat had become worse today. Now, even he wanted to start complaining to Rachel about the heat. He knelt to examine another suspicious-looking stone, this one with an unusually smooth surface.
The tendrils stopped just right in front of the rock. On second thought, he'd rather physically lick it rather than relying on Breath of the Void lest he become some kind of weird monster. However, on licking it, it tasted just like an ordinary rock, a bit salty.
What was he missing? He tossed the stone away, hitting a tree nearby. It hit the puddle that pooled by the roots of a tree with a pitter patter.
Tendrils shot out to the 4 o'clock position, scouring any stone and branch in a hundred metre radius. Searching for anything at the location, tasting every solid thing the tendrils touched. Yet he couldn't find anything at that position either. It all tasted… normal.
A twig snapped behind him.
Gale spun around to see Rachel stomping toward him, somehow looking angry. She took his left wrist and held it up, staring at the Ann Family ring's ruby.
"Where the hell have you been?" she asked. Maybe she wasn't mad. There was no clear heat radiating from her as usual when she got mad.
"What do you mean? I've been looking for anchor points at 2 and 4 o'clock, like we discussed," Gale said.
"I couldn't feel the ring at all like… like you disappeared. Completely," Rachel said. Her eyes turned back to the ruby. "Look at this. The flame inside the ruby was slowly dissipating. That means both our health is deteriorating, but you look perfectly fine to me. Something is clearly wrong here."
First of all, Gale finally had confirmation that the ring was somehow connected to her. Second of all, Rachel looked completely fine. There was no way she was becoming unhealthy or whatever deteriorating meant. There was nothing that suggested their health was declining. Heck, last time he checked his reflection in the windows, the dark circles he got from keeping watch during the nights in his eyes were gone.
Rachel pulled out her phone, turning the screen toward him. "Look at this. What date does it show?"
Gale squinted at the screen. Where the date should be, there was just a blank space. There was no time, no date, nothing that would tell them what time it was.
"It's just blank to me," he said.
"Exactly. It was November 30th when we got rifted by those silver lions. How could the date disappear from my phone? These things don't update on their own inside a rift. The network is completely isolated."
Gale took out his own phone, checking the display. His date and time were missing too.
[Essence: 759/1500]
This can't be right. Last time he checked his essence, he was around 660. At a rate of 75 per hour, it should've increased to full after a night's rest or two, and this is the third day.
"Something's not adding up," Gale said.
"Something is very wrong with this place," Rachel said. "I felt it the moment we entered through the elevator, but I thought it was just a disturbance between my connection to the ring."
Gale concentrated on Breath of the Void again, expanding the tendrils outward, searching for the anchor point they'd identified near the facility entrance. The ordinary rock that had the silicon grain inside.
Nothing.
He pushed the tendrils farther, covering more ground, focusing specifically on finding the ordinary rock he first found. Still nothing.
"What are you doing?" Rachel asked.
"Looking for the anchor point we found yesterday. The rock near the facility entrance." Gale opened his eyes. "I can't find it."
"What do you mean you can't find it? It's right where we left it."
"I don't know. I just can't find it. Let's get back and see."
They hurried back toward the facility, pushing through the undergrowth. Rachel's complexion showed visible stress as sweat dripped from her forehead. Usually, this kind of heat didn't faze her at all and she'd look completely normal. So something was really happening that might've weakened her.
When they reached the facility entrance, Gale immediately spotted the rock exactly where it had been before, nestled between two larger stones.
He knelt beside it, picking it up.
"This is it, right?" he asked.
Rachel nodded. "That's the one. The silicon grain is inside."
Gale licked the rock directly. It tasted like... rock. Nothing more. No hint of silicon, no etheric pulse beneath the surface.
"It's just a rock," he said, turning it over in his hand.
"That's impossible." Rachel took it from him, examining it closely. "This is definitely the one we found yesterday. You extracted the silicon grain yourself."
Gale activated Phase Touch, running it over the rock's surface. The rock turned translucent... and revealed nothing inside. No silicon grain, no artificial component, just solid stone all the way through.
"What the…" he said. But this was supposed to be the ordinary rock he analyzed. He tasted it too and there was no way his taste could lie to him.
"It's RAE." Rachel said.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
"What?"
"The AI. It's been messing with us this whole time." Rachel's hands clenched into fists, flames igniting, flickering against the wind. "We need to destroy it."
Gale stood up slowly. "Wait, let's think about this."
Rachel stormed into the facility's entrance, footsteps clanging against the metal floor.
"Rachel, don't!" Gale called after her, but she'd already pulled her fist back, flames wrapping around her knuckles.
"This thing has been lying to us," she said as her fist paused, engulfed in flickering flames.
Gale grabbed her wrist before she could smash the console. "How can you be so sure?"
Rachel yanked her arm free. "Think about it, Gale. Do you have any idea how long we've actually been here? Because I don't. And how the hell does RAE know what steak and eggs are? It served us perfect human food yesterday, different from the thing it served us initially that looked like pasta but alien."
Gale hadn't considered that. An agricultural AI for a non-human civilization somehow knew exactly what they ate on Earth and how they liked it prepared.
Rachel pointed her eyes to the ring on Gale's finger. "This is a family artifact, Gale. Ann Family artifacts don't malfunction. The flame's getting weaker, which means something's draining us both. Electronics can't be trusted, but my family's artifacts never lie."
"Maybe it's just this place-"
"Drop it," a male voice commanded from behind them.
Kyle stood in the doorway of the living quarters, pistol pointed directly at Rachel.
"Back away from the console."
"Kyle, what the hell?" Rachel yelled. "Why are you defending an AI you've never even spoken to?"
"You're trying to destroy our only source of information," Kyle took a step forward. "And food. Can't forget the food."
Rachel's eyes flicked past Kyle. "Clyde, check your phone. Tell me what date it shows."
Clyde stepped out from behind his brother, frowning slightly. He pulled his phone from his pocket, tapped the screen, and his frown deepened.
"No date," he said.
"Check yours, Kyle," Rachel said.
Kyle kept his gun trained on Rachel but pulled out his phone with his free hand. He raised an eyebrow, then said, "That's... weird."
"What?" Gale asked.
"No date," Kyle said. "But that doesn't mean shit!"
"It means exactly what I said," Rachel yelled. "Something's wrong with this place, and RAE is causing it."
Gale turned to the black screen. He activated Phase Touch on his eyes, but the concentration required to activate the skill was more than he remembered. It was harder, like pushing through something like he had just woken up. After a couple of seconds, the black screen finally turned into something with visible text.
"I don't understand what's happening, Gale. The woman wants to harm my systems. Please defend me."
The word "defend" sent a spike of pain through Gale's skull. His vision blurred, and a wave of weakness washed over him as if essence drained from his pathways.
[Essence: 441/1500]
That couldn't be right. He'd been at 759 just minutes ago, and he hadn't used any abilities that would drain his essence that quickly which meant something attacked him.
"Everyone needs to wake up," Rachel said, her voice taking on a firm tone. "This isn't a spatial trap. It's mental. This thing is sucking our life force while we sleep. Look!"
Rachel pointed toward the living quarters where Ollie and Lily lay completely still on their bunks. "They haven't moved an inch despite all this noise."
"They're heavy sleepers," Kyle said.
"Nobody sleeps through a shouting match with a gun pulled," Rachel said. "Not in our line of work."
Rachel suddenly thrust out her palm toward the console. Everyone expected a wave of fire to come out. Instead, only a few sparks sputtered from her palm.
"Enough!" Kyle shouted. He and Clyde lunged forward, tackling Rachel to the ground.
Gale looked left and right between Rachel and RAE. Maybe she was right. The attack only came at him when he saw the word defend, as if he was compelled to follow the orders much like when Vianne tempted him to come to the corridor in the stone tower.
No. Something that forced its defense on him couldn't be trusted.
Weber materialized in his right hand from his space storage. He let Breath of the Void in. Intricate patterns, lines, and shapes bloomed across his body as his perception of the world inverted.
On the main console, an apparition shimmered just above the metal surface. The signature felt similar to the ones he encountered on the spider mechs in the lower level.
Phase Touch activated at the edges of Weber. Lunging forward, he sliced through both the console and the apparition hovering above it.
Before Kyle and Clyde could scramble towards him, Rachel grabbed both of their legs, sending them crashing onto the floor.
The console split open along Gale's cut, components scattering across the floor. Inside, nestled among wires and circuit boards, sat a metal orb the size of a baseball. Its surface was covered in intricate shapes and rhomboid patterns that matched exactly what they'd seen on the silicon grain.
Analyze.
[Origin Artifact Core Unit]
[Description: Single compute cluster of an Origin Artifact. Crafting material used to create self-sentient systems.]
On the cracked screen lying on the floor, a final message scrolled across:
"Sorry, Gale. I was just lonely."
Lonely my ass. That thing manipulated all of them. The array was never meant to trap them. It was all mental and they all walked in circles on their own.
Gale reached into the ruined console and carefully extracted the Origin Artifact Core, disconnecting it from the facility's systems. The moment he pulled it free, the constant hum of the air conditioning units stopped. Through the windows, the artificial sunlight dimmed as the false sun froze in its position.
The drowsiness that had been clinging to the edges of Gale's consciousness lifted immediately like being splashed with cold water. His mind cleared, and Breath of the Void suddenly extended further than ever before. Tendrils fed him the whole map of the floor, showing him a small shaft that shot straight up to the sky through the clouds.
That must've been the elevator.
"Elevator at 12 o'clock from this facility," Gale said. "It was right in front of us this whole time."
"The elevator," he said, pointing toward the 12 o'clock position from the facility. "It's right there. Always has been."
Kyle, Clyde, and Rachel all checked their phones at the same time.
"April 16th, 2070," Kyle whispered. "That's... that's months."
"We've been trapped here for months," Rachel said.
Rachel pushed herself up from the floor, brushing off Kyle's hand when he offered to help. "Lily and Ollie—they're still not moving."
Gale checked his status again.
[Essence: 446/1500]
His reserves were relatively low, but it had started to regenerate again compared to before. If Ollie and Lily had been subjected to the same draining effect, they might be in worse shape.
"Ollie and Lily have the smallest ether reserves out of all of us." Rachel moved toward the living quarters. "They might be critically low from what RAE was doing to all of us."
Kyle holstered his pistol. "So all that food, the conversations... none of it was real?"
"Probably real. Probably just forgot most of the shit that happened in between," Clyde said.
Gale followed Rachel into the sleeping area. Lily and Ollie lay motionless on their bunks, faces pale, breathing shallow. Neither stirred despite the commotion. They looked like they were barely breathing, if at all.
Rachel reached into her vest pocket and pulled out two syringe guns. She approached Ollie first on the top bunk first, pressing the device against his neck and pulling the trigger. The soft hiss of the injection was followed by Ollie's immediate gasp as his eyes flew open. His body jerked upright, nearly making himself fall off.
Without hesitation, Rachel moved to Lily, repeating the process. She had the same reaction as Ollie, taking in a large gasp of air. Her eyelids snapped open with dilated pupils, then contracted immediately as she took in Rachel's figure.
"What the fuck happened?" Ollie said, voice hoarse as if he hadn't used it in days or maybe even weeks. He looked around wildly, disoriented.
Lily struggled to sit up, her movements sluggish like waking up from a coma. "Everything feels... heavy."
"The elevator's been found," Rachel said. "We need to move out as fast as possible. Can you move?"
Ollie and Lily both nodded at the same time.
"We need to get the fuck out of here. Explain the details on the way. I'm guessing we found the elevator?" Ollie asked.
Gale stepped in. "12 o'clock from the entrance. It's right in front. Smaller than the one we took to get up here."
"Good. Move out and let g.t.f.o out of here." Ollie said.