Machine

CHAPTER 2

“HOW ON EARTH DID THIS ship ever get this far from Terra?” Tsosie asked.

It was a terrible joke, and I refused to laugh. “It’s moving pretty fast.”

“Not that fast,” Sally said, deadpan. “I did the math.”

We both laughed at that one. Sally couldn’t help but do the math. Math was literally her entire being. The processors she inhabited were… houses. She was made of code. Elegant, elaborate, exquisite code.

I’d wanted to work on AIs when I was a kid, but I didn’t have the chops for it. So I knew just enough to appreciate what a beautiful thing she was.

“Seriously,” Tsosie persisted. “How did it get out here?”

Part of doing what we do is staying frosty. Staying focused on the task. Humor helps with that; helps you keep your distance and keep your cool. The rightminding helps, too. If you feel what everybody you’re prying out of the wreckage feels, that empathy can be debilitating.

I have no idea how people managed it back in the old diar. Such as the era this ship was from.

Tsosie was staying alert by talking about stuff we’d already been over, to keep a conversation going. “How did it get all the way here? There’s no possible way it could have covered this much distance at sublight speeds in that amount of time.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t want to think through it now. It made me shiver. There were too many unexplained things about this ship. Why was she here? Where were her crew? Why the distress signal? Why had the methane-breathing crew of the docked vessel fallen silent? And where were they?

So many questions, and an insignificant number of answers.

I didn’t have any more time to be scared now than I’d had when I was jumping. It wasn’t my job to be scared. It wasn’t my job to theorize, and it wasn’t my job to get excited about the archaeological opportunities.

“Wormhole?” I offered, in a tone of voice intended to indicate how tentative an offering it was.

“Are they theoretically possible this week?” Tsosie asked. It sounded like a genuine question. He was a hardass, but whatever his other quirks he wasn’t sarcastic.

That was Hhayazh’s defining bit of… personality.

“Sort of,” Sally said. “Maybe. I mean, wormholes are possible. Looked at the right way, white bubbles are wormholes. Sort of. Tesseracts, anyway. Traveling through naturally formed wormholes, on the other hand… without being compressed, squished, topologically transformed, and generally spaghettified…”

If she’d had a head, she would have been shaking it.

“Okay, so Big Rock Candy Mountain didn’t drop through a natural hole in space-time. And she didn’t go faster than light, unless somebody boosted her somehow. Jury is still out on artificial holes in space-time, however.”

Alcubierre-White drives weren’t true faster-than-light travel, which still remained hypothetically impossible. They put your ship into a little bubble that compressed everything around it. So you didn’t move. Rather, the universe flowed past you like one of those old-timey murals they used to paint on a roll of canvas and spool past people sitting still in chairs, so as to simulate travel. Back on medieval Terra, or whenever.

So, technically you didn’t move. But your relative velocity could be a good deal faster than light, depending on how much power you could manage to throw at it. Sally had a lot of power.

White drives were kind of a dick move when it came to respecting the laws of physics.

A white drive would work on a ship like the one we were in. It didn’t require a lot of structural strength to sit still. But the energy requirements to build a space-time bubble around it… I didn’t think even antimatter, at least antimatter in containable quantities, could manage it. Big Rock Candy Mountain was just… too big.

“She’s moving somewhat faster than she should be, even if she’d been under constant acceleration since leaving Earth. And giving a reasonable wiggle factor for gravity wells along the way boosting and slowing her. Plus she’s on the wrong vector.”

“Thanks, Sally. So… she’s gone a lot farther using that initial v and her drive capability than she should.”

“Right,” said Tsosie. “That’s what I was saying.”

“That’s not worrisome at all.”

“Right,” said Tsosie. “That’s what I was saying.”

“I’ll keep working on it,” Sally said. “It’s possible they tried some slingshot maneuvers for extra velocity. In the meantime, pull out your sample kits. There’s dust in the corners. Some of it might be shed skin fragments containing DNA. Vacuum it up and analyze it, would you?”

We found the bridge soon after. Not by accident: we had the ancient plans and schematics and had been aiming in that direction. If anybody was left alive on this ship—if anybody was left at all on this ship—perhaps this was where we would find them. But when we entered, it was nearly dark and nearly silent, except for a rill of green and amber lights around the edge of the room at counter height, accompanied by a melodious beeping.

A moment later, lights began to brighten, and Tsosie and I found ourselves standing on what once must have been a fairly pleasant, beige and slate-blue bridge. The layout was semicircular; we had entered from the flattish side. Large dark viewscreens covered the arcing wall in front of us, and two rows of consoles and chairs curved around a single central command chair.

We stood behind that one, but slightly above it, as the stations we were near were slightly elevated. Oddly, in my experience, they all had tall chairs shaped for humans. The consoles all had dedicated push buttons and switches and dials, not adaptive consoles like the ones I’d worked with all my life, even back on Wisewell, the frontier settlement where I’d grown up, been orphaned, got married, had a kid, and left the first chance I’d been offered. Those consoles and chairs were the thing that brought home, unsettlingly, that everybody on this ship really had been a Terran human. Knowing something intellectually and realizing it in your bones are very different.

Because of our elevation, and because the command chair was turned toward the back of the room, we could see that the seat was not empty. And that the jumpsuit-clad person in the chair had been there for a very long time, and was not likely to move from it under their own power ever again.

On the other side of the bridge, Tsosie and I kept on walking. The tinkertoys were back, and watching those modular lattices click apart ahead of us and click together behind us as we got farther and farther from the egress made me even more unsettled than the dead body in the command chair had. We could cut our way out through the hull if we had to—a rescue hardsuit, especially backed up with the physical power of my exo, was more than capable of rearranging the generation ship’s superstructure. I wouldn’t do that unless our lives were in imminent danger, however. It would kill any crew members in the areas of the ship I would inevitably decompress in the process.

And piss off the archaeological team.

Assuming for the moment that there were any crew members left on this ship—an assumption that was seeming less and less probable with every weirdly echoing step Tsosie and I took—it was my job to save them, not murder them.

There had been skin cells in the dust I collected, at least. And all of them were Terran. People like me and Tsosie, only six hundred ans removed. Six hundred of their ans—years, to use the old style—and closer to a millennian for us, I guessed. Time gets really funky when you’re zipping around the galaxy at relativistic speeds and information still travels either through white space packet, or by slow boat or electromagnetic progression.

That’s one of many reasons why I am not an archinformist. They have these plots of events happening at different times and in different places and where the information fronts of those events intersect. It’s like trying to read a contour map while somebody spins it in the air in front of you and the colors keep changing.

So. A ship full of missing Terrans. Missing, bar one: the body that we—or one of our sister ships still inbound—were going to have to come back to collect and transport eventually.

Inside the hardsuit, I licked my lips uneasily. The hairs on my arms horripilated and my palms grew cold.

Intuition is a real thing, though there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s not without mysteries, however. The human brain (and presumably, the nonhuman brain as well) gathers and processes a lot of information in excess of that which we are consciously aware. It doesn’t use words or often even images. It deals with feelings and instincts, and that glitchy sensation that you can’t trust somebody, or that something is wrong.

So when I say that I had the increasing, creeping conviction that the generation ship’s endlessly rolling wheel was deserted, that it felt empty, I don’t pretend there was any higher knowledge behind it. But I was sure there were plenty of subtle clues, even if I couldn’t have named a one of them.

My conscious awareness was pretty busy riding herd on a half dozen exotic ayatanas and the processing issues that all of them were having with the alien (to them) environment and my human sensory input.

There’s a common misconception that wearing an ayatana is sharing your brain with somebody else. And it’s not, exactly. It’s more like having someone else’s memories and opinions and experiences to draw upon… along with their neuroses, preconceptions, trigger issues, and prejudices. Because nothing in this galaxy can ever be simple.

But I had two different methane species loaded, including one from a Darboof staff member. That was the species that was driving the fast packet we’d seen. Or had been driving him, at least: they might be gone now, too.

I’d also gone deep in the Core General archives and pulled the most archaic human ayatanas I could find, and a couple of systers recorded around the time of first contact with my species.

It’s generally contraindicated to load more than a couple of ayatanas at once, but I’m a trained professional with years of experience. Kids, don’t try this at home.

Inside my head, the methane breathers in particular were having fits about what, to them, was a blinding, flesh-melting level of light and a profoundly unfriendly hot environment. Balancing that and keeping myself alert in the confusing, constantly altering environment of the microbots and the creaking ship took up a lot of my attention. Managing my pain levels—they’re chronic—took up a little more.

So I didn’t notice that we hadn’t heard from Sally in quite some time—not until Tsosie said her name, and nobody answered.

I stopped with a foot in midair. Because when somebody else says something is broken you can’t be totally sure until you try it yourself, I idiotically echoed, “Sally?”

The silence was immediately twice as loud.

I put my foot down very gently and groped for our uplink. There was nothing on the other end. Not even the quiet feeling of connection that usually radiates down the senso from a linked AI when you tune into it. For a second, the bottom dropped out of me, and I flailed in the panicked certainty that Sally was gone and we were trapped here on this weird ghost ship, and that all our friends were dead.

I admit it: I am not the galaxy’s best at not immediately producing the worst-case scenario. Fortunately, I’m also aware of this tendency, after years of rightminding and some time in a nice, secure environment, and so I bumped my GABA and serotonin levels up and my cortisol level down and took six deep breaths until the sensation of my heart squeezing tight around a shard of glass eased up somewhat.

The brain is—mostly—an electrochemical meat machine. The fact that you can tune it is why humanity still exists, centians after the Eschaton and the crazy desperate nonsense of those who could afford to escape an Earth we’d declared doomed attempting to save themselves at any cost.

Crazy desperate nonsense like this big old ship I was standing on.

I looked over at Tsosie, and saw his face pinched and his brow dewed with beads of sweat behind the faceplate. He’d stopped moving, too, and when we halted the clicking of the tinkertoy microbots silenced. They were frozen mid-peel, as if somebody had hit pause on the animation.

“What are the odds we’re blocked from coms, and they’re fine up there?” I asked him, trying to sound reasonable. “And they’ll get in touch with us momentarily?”

“If it can be done, Sally and our crew can do it.” He sounded like he believed it, too. Some people just have solid neurochemistry. Or more robust rightminding.

Or less trauma, I supposed.

Maybe I was a little freaked out by the entirely empty ship. Entirely empty, except for one dead person and a weird tinkertoy machine. Entirely empty of the thousands of crew members it was large enough to contain.

“What are the odds that something terrible went wrong and they’re all dead?”

“Have a little faith,” said Tsosie. “Come on. Keep walking. Let’s do our job and trust them to do theirs, what do you say?”

“I don’t know much about faith,” I said to Tsosie, ten steps later.

“What?” he answered, distractedly. He was scanning the lattice construct of microbots warily, and I expected he was as busy pinging Sally as I was.

My brain was building architectures of attack, sabotage, or accident, and I needed to distract it. “What you said about having faith. I never knew how that felt. I guess it’s some kind of neurological defect. I was born without it. Or it got knocked out of me so early I never remember having those feelings. I don’t believe in things. But I believe in Core General. I believe in our mission. I believe that we are here to help people.”

I was, as you have probably diagnosed, babbling. I was also grateful to Tsosie, for providing me with a distraction from the panic that wanted to overwhelm me. The least I could do was talk about trivialities in return.

If they really were trivialities.

He hummed a sound that made me wonder if he’d even heard the second half of what I’d said. “You mean religion, when you say faith? Because I meant, our crew and ship know what they’re doing, and we know that.”

“Nah.” I shook my head inside the hardsuit. And checked my battery levels. The suit had extra backups; it and my exo were still fine.

Tsosie pointed to a hatch in the side wall.

I nodded, and followed him. “Like trust. Like believing in people. Like believing that things will turn out okay. Like… what you said.”

The hatch was an access point. Beyond it was a tunnel that would need us to crawl.

“Let’s save those for after,” I said.

He nodded. “And after we get back in touch with Sally. And her sensor arrays.”

There it was again: that faith that we would get back in touch with Sally. I was having a hard time remembering that she even existed, that we weren’t stranded out here alone with no support.

“I want to put eyes on her,” I said.

“Next hatch. Let’s see if we can find a viewport.”

There had been windows. We’d seen them from the outside. Mirrored to reflect the potentially unforgiving light of space. There weren’t any here, because this was a corridor.

Or were there?

I started inspecting the control panels we passed more carefully.

“This is a personal question,” Tsosie said formally.

I glanced over at him and nodded. The hardsuits fit close enough that you can pick up even a little gesture like that.

“I consent,” I said, so it would be on Sally’s record. If Sally was still out there. If we ever got our link back.

Quit psyching yourself out, Dr. Jens. If you tell yourself something firmly enough, it’s almost as good as hearing it from a trusted authority. Especially if you can back it up by fiddling with your brain chemistry.

“Do you remember a time before the chronic pain?”

I could claim that wasn’t a perceptive question, but then I’d have to explain why I stood there silently for a good thirty seconds before I found an answer. “No,” I admitted. “There’s always been the pain.”

“So how would you, as a kid, have learned that things were going to be okay, or that adults could solve your problems? Why would you ever have cause to think things would turn out all right?”

“Huh,” I said, eloquently. While the tinkertoys went click click click.

I chewed on my lower lip inside the faceplate. It was a terrible habit; I was going to give myself a chapped lip in the dryness of the suit environment, and if it started to bleed in zero g or while I was under acceleration, that was going to be a bloody mess. Quite literally.

I ducked under one of those weird, trailing strands of tinkertoys. This one hadn’t peeled apart with the others to let us through. If they were as fragile as they looked, they should have been collapsed all over the decking, even under such light acceleration as this. “So you think I never learned trust because, as a child, I had nothing to believe in?”

“You trust, though. You trust Sally with your life—”

“That’s not what I mean.” I sighed. “Yes, I can decide to take a risk on Sally, or on you. But I know it’s a risk. Whereas I’ve heard people talk about the belief that somebody would never hurt them. Or the sense that everything will turn out all right in the end. I’ve never had those.”

“So why do you take risks?”

“Well,” I said. “Because if you don’t, you never gain anything. And, as I said, I believe in Core General. I believe in what we are doing there. I believe it’s a good thing. Worth risking myself for. So I trust… I guess I trust the mission.”

The tinkertoys were denser here, and less responsive to our presence. I gave up on crouching and ducking under them. I got down and crawled. By the way, the inside of a hardsuit isn’t any good for the outside of your knees.

Tsosie had come up beside me. He gave me a funny sidelong look and got down on his hands and knees as well, but he didn’t say anything for a minute. When he did, it was a change of subject—or a segue.

“So you trusted the mission when you were with the Judiciary?”

His kneeplates scraped irritatingly on the decking.

I knew he was talking so we wouldn’t think too hard about where Sally was, or Loese, or Hhayazh, or Camphvis, or Rhym. That was fine. There wasn’t anything we could do for them from here, right now. He was right—we had to trust them to take care of their part of the mission, even without communication.

They would be trusting us to do the same.

I shrugged. “Well. Not in the same way. I decided it was a good mission and that I could serve it. And it helped me get closer to the Core, where I could get better care. And it got me a military-grade exoskeleton, which is absolutely the bomb for mobility issues.”

One thing about the Synarche. It’s so big, and data and people move so slowly through it, that it takes a while for tech to disseminate. Medical tech along with all the other kinds. And backwater settlements on marginal planets are definitely at the bottom of the list, most of the time. There aren’t enough people there to make them a priority.

I shouldn’t say people move slowly. They move very quickly. Just… over ridiculous distances.

“Anyway,” Tsosie said. “Before I interrupted me, I was pointing out that once you got to Core General, you finally got to a place where people could take care of you. They took care of your pain.”

“Judiciary took care of my pain,” I corrected. “If they hadn’t, I would not have been much use to them.” I was managing my own pain now, which was a task I usually outsourced to Sally so I didn’t have to concentrate on it, but this didn’t seem the time to mention that.

“How effectively?”

I wobbled my head to emphasize my eyeroll of defeat, since the faceplate hid the eyeroll part. “All right, you got me.”

“And you probably weren’t taken seriously by medical people before then.”

“Well… It wasn’t that bad. I learned the lingo in the military, which never hurts. And people don’t dismiss you when you can prove your rightminding is effective.”

“People don’t love being presented with unsolvable problems, though.”

I chuckled. “Core General does.”

“I rest my case.”

“Are you suggesting, as my commanding officer, that I have some untreated medical post-traumatic response?”

“Mmm.” Noncommittal.

I turned my shoulder to him, concentrating on the medical panel on my forearm, looking up occasionally to make sure I wasn’t about to crawl into anything—or past one of the control panels without inspecting it.

“What’s wrong with me isn’t that complicated,” I said. “I grew up on the kind of planet where resources were limited, because the settlement was at the very edge of things. We got supplies, but sometimes we went a long time between drops. And medical relief was intermittent at best.”

“The last scarcity economy in the galaxy.” I could hear the smile.

“I mean, it was the Synarche. It wasn’t like I grew up in a Freeport, or totally outside civilization.”

“Civilization is not evenly distributed. Did you join the Judiciary to get away from your backwater homeworld?”

I was starting to get irritated with his obtuseness, but at least it distracted me from the hardsuit pinching and banging in uncomfortable ways. “I said it got me better medical care—”

The tinkertoys seemed to be getting more responsive again. I wondered if the patch we’d just wormed through were reinforcing a structurally weak spot. Or if they were so old they didn’t work very well.

I risked standing up, and the cloud of microbots got out of my way. I rubbed elbows I’d bruised on the inside of my hardsuit while Tsosie levered himself to his feet also.

“Crap,” he said. “This is like caving.”

“Better light,” I joked. “I joined the Judiciary because it got me this exo. And it seemed interesting. A chance to travel and see things. And then they offered me medical training, and I found being a doctor was even more interesting than being a cop, so I transferred to Core General once I got good enough.”

Tsosie waited to see what I would say next. His boots scraped along beside me. We’d both turned off the electromagnets and were moving more or less normally, given the low simulated gravity. It wasn’t quite push-off-and-bound, but one definitely had to be aware of the ceilings.

Core was installing a new artificial gravity tech salvaged from a Koregoi archaeological site. Sally would probably get it next, unless one of the other ambulance ships was the guinea pig. Most ships in transit aren’t designed to spin up gravity, but it’s hard to operate on somebody when you’re floating, and their bodily fluids tend to form large rippling balls under surface tension. So we had fake—centripetal—gravity now, and soon we would have better fake gravity still.

“I feel safe at Core,” I finally told Tsosie.

“And you never felt safe before.”

“No,” I agreed. “I never felt safe before. So I believe in Core, because it makes me feel safe.”

“Congratulations. Now you understand why people go to church.”

“To feel safe? Is that all faith is?” I pounced on the next control panel. “Aha!”

“Aha?”

It was push buttons and little toggles. Mechanical linkages rather than electronic: the sort of thing you could fix with a tiny screwdriver. Smart, when wandering off into space for generations.

I flipped one of them, and heard a pop as the beige panel beside it unlatched. “Help me slide this gently.”

Tsosie didn’t argue. And after two steps sideways, I saw his body language perk up as he got it.

The beige panel was a cover over a viewing port two meters wide and a meter tall. It sealed, airtight, when the port wasn’t in use, and slid aside so crew could look outside and check the structure. Or take in the view.

Which was breathtaking. A sweep of hull decked with antennae and other protrusions was visible below the window. The port itself was bubbled outward, and if we stuck our heads in, we could see the hub far above us, and the massive arch of the wheel made to seem like a fragile tower by the vastness of its diameter. Far in the distance, against velvet black, the stars revolved.

And there was Sally, right where she should have been, holding her position alongside Big Rock Candy Mountain while the wheel whipped beneath her. Or, from our perspective, she was zipping backward along the great, motionless arch of the ship we were in.

She looked intact, and her navigation was obviously working. Tsosie reached out and tapped his fingers on my shoulderplate, silent acknowledgment of our profound shared relief.

We each let out our tension on a held breath in turn. Hand still trembling a little, I flashed a light out the port.

We’re okay. Continuing.

I repeated the message three times.

Copy, Sally flashed back, after a while. Standing by.

We went on.

Step by step—and occasionally crawl by crawl—we came quite a way around the ring of the generation ship. One pie slice, maybe, depending on the size of your slicer. We checked in again with Sally when we found a viewport pointed in the right direction. We also checked side passages and chambers, when we passed them, and found—mostly—predictable things, all filled with more lattice. What was this stuff?

“Tsosie.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you…” I got embarrassed and trailed off.

“…do I?”

“May I ask you a personal question?”

He laughed. “I started it. Be churlish to say no.”

“Do you go to church?”

He smiled. It turned into a grimace. “No. I don’t go to church. My people thought the world was their church. So now, I act as though the galaxy is.”

“The galaxy isn’t a safe place, though.”

The grimace went back to a smile, but it wasn’t an easy one. “Neither, it turns out, was the world.”

I was still wondering about that—about Tsosie having a connection to “his people,” even going back to Terra, a standard hour or so later when he looked up from his wrist and said, “I might have a thermal signature.”

“Might have?”

“It’s a big ship and there’s a lot of stuff in the way.”

The macro-microbots were unzipping before us and zipping back up after us again. Tsosie and I had both opted to reskin our hardsuits, which were normally marked all over their chest and backplates with an inelegant clutter of galactic medical and rescue symbols. Based on the provenance of Big Rock Candy Mountain, we were opting to prioritize the Red Crescent, the Red Cross, and the Rod of Asclepius, and deemphasize the others. (It didn’t escape me, given my conversation with Tsosie, that all of those had started off as religious symbols back on Terra.)

My favorite was the Nazzish symbol, the Blade of Life, because it looked so badass. But walking around with a great big scalpel on my pec plate probably wouldn’t inspire confidence in the descendant of refugees from one of the more barren and brutal periods of Terra’s history.

People who fled the Eschaton in their primitive space arks did so because they believed that anybody who stayed behind would die, along with the rest of humanity.

And if those of our ancestors who hadn’t made it onto an ark hadn’t discovered rightminding, the Alcubierre-White drive, and the Synarche (in roughly that order), those with the resources to become refugees might have been right. As it was, we managed to start making decisions that took the pressure off the Terrestrial environment and ameliorated climate change in time to save both Earth and humanity.

I overstate the peril. Earth would have been fine. The biosphere would have persisted and expanded again, as after other extinction events. Even a mass die-off from a methane burp is recoverable on a geologic scale.

But I and my species are predictably ethnocentric. We would have missed us, even if nobody else would. And thus: primitive space arks.

I was struck again, as we explored, that this particular primitive space ark showed signs of long habitation before its current state of abandonment. It was spotlessly clean—I wondered if there were more bots devoted to scrubbing—but the surfaces were worn, the finish on the walls buffed to a matte shine with layers of polishing scratches.

Tsosie said, “On the bright side, we haven’t found any more cadavers.”

Or even any skeletons. The giant ship we were searching seemed to be not just spotless and not full of dead people, but perfectly functional. Those side doors had led us to endless low-moisture farms full of food plants. The air that we weren’t breathing was heady with oxygen, and the hardsuits were filtering it out of the environment to recharge their own tanks.

So who was doing the maintenance? Was the crew… hiding?

We found bunk spaces, cabins, and apartments. We found dining halls and science labs. We found recreational facilities, kitchens, and parks. We found what looked like a running trail around what seemed to be the entire exterior rim of the wheel, in case anyone wanted to run a marathon in .37 gravity. We found absolutely nobody using any of those things.

We found a lot of indications that the ancient hull was under stress, and that material had been scavenged from it for… mysterious purposes. It was still intact, but it was thin. And I wouldn’t have wanted to rely on it for my life and well-being.

Big Rock Candy Mountain was not the sort of place where you took a nap without a space suit on. Not if you were me.

“Want to chase that thermal signature?” Tsosie sounded as frustrated as I felt.

“Point me at it.”

Sally uses a magnetic resonance imager built into the hardsuit helmets to stimulate our visual cortexes and induce controlled hallucinations. They’re vivid, and you can’t ignore them. She makes them look a little cartoony, to be sure you know they’re not real. Linden, the Core General wheelmind, can pull the same trick.

In the absence of AIs, Tsosie tapped into the same functionality and used dramatic shades of magenta to outline a distant blotch and give me an idea of the path of hatches and corridors that would take us there.

“This ghost ship stuff is starting to creep me out,” Tsosie said. “I didn’t sign on to recon the Flying Dutchman.”

“Even if everybody is gone, this is a valuable source of archinformation,” I reminded him.

“Well, I didn’t sign on to excavate the Flying Dutchman then.”

“Worse things happen at sea,” I joked.

He reached back—he was a half step ahead of me at that point—and rapped me on the hardsuit pauldron with his fingertips.

I waved at the structures still rearranging themselves in waves around us. “What if everybody got disassembled and made into tinkertoys?”

“Then we’re next,” he grumbled. “This ought to be the hatch we’re looking for.”

It irised open as we approached, which none of the previous hatches had done. They’d all worked when we asked, but this one seemed to be anticipating us. Beyond it, we could glimpse an even more colorful thicket of pegs and keepers, and behind that fretwork… something moving. Something that seemed to be replicating the pieces.

It was glittery and holographic and refractive, like the tinkertoys, and caught the light like them. It seemed to be curved, though it was hard to tell through the lattice.

We stepped up to the hatchway. I called, “Hello?”

The lattice furled itself up like a series of stage curtains being drawn open, and we found ourselves face-to-facelessness with a humanoid form like a shaped bubble of inexplicably golden mercury.