Trail #805

“We’re going zoating, can we go zoating?,” the kids were clamoring, their small hoofed feet dancing around Tero in the shade of one of the purple jacaranda trees that distinguished the region.  He smiled and let them go with a wave, and the herd scampered downhill toward the wooded draw that flattened away into the alluvial valley of the River Maaselle.  It was going to be another hot one, already steamy down below.  Here on the hills a whisper of morning breeze still tickled the skin.

This was after they had been on vcation for a while.  The first four weeks of country living at Landfarm had been seductively slow, just what their profiles needed.  It wasn’t that they hadn’t been busy weeks, both Tero and Vilu were proud of the accomplishments that their hosts Dueck and his partner Linsey had guided them to achieve.  Tero knew he would always treasure the experience of working with the young zoat kids. 

Up a slant of morning light along the packed road the new barn was taking shape.   Vilu had been helping to demolish an older outbuilding, for the past few days, flexing her skills again by VRing into the heavy equipment, helping to assemble the newly grown panels for its replacement. 

For Tero, the whole thing was about not going VR, you did that kind of stuff for a living, when you were on vcation you could feel real dirt, smell real smells, even if they weren’t really real either.  The idea of machines within machines had always seemed a little bit perverse to him, even if it was, well, ok, a reality.   Anyway.   So that was what he had mostly been doing, his days spent helping old Dueck with his burgeoning herd of zoats.

The zoats were goatstock that had been modified for intelligence and, apparently, cuteness.  Standing about a meter and a half tall on either front or rear legs (and even bewilderingly sometimes on the corners), the zoats were versatile observers and fixers.   Tero liked everything about the zoats, from their shiny fine fur to their enigmatic rectangular stares.

Tero turned and ambled uphill to take stock of Vilu’s project.  The barn raising was a buzz of activity.  His partner stood quietly to the side of a scramble of robots that seemed to be everywhere, doing everything at once.  As a player himself Tero instantly recognized his partner’s touch--an obsession with multi-tasking that brought the swivel-wheeled vehicles careening within inches of each other, all nimble fingers of the same hand.  He and Vilu had been together now, associated, for almost sixty years now.

“Pardon my dust,” Tero said, coming up behind Vilu and stroking the underside of her arms.  It was a sign for her to release the tensions that the feedback from the heavy lifters induced in her body.  Like Tero, decades of VR had given Vilu a powerful musculature.  She was about a meter and twenty inches tall, only a few inches taller than he was, only a few pounds heavier.  Like him too, she knew how to look into space.

“I never thought we’d get so far!”  Vilu pointed to the second and third tiers of leafage that had been organically welded into place.  The barn was taking shape as a flattened green and brown dome made up of interlocking maple-leaf shapes.  They were modified maple-leaves in fact, he knew.  Her name for the project “Maplewood.” 

Tero looked at Vilu approvingly.  She was still flushed from her virtual exertions.  The fine blonde fur that covered her forearms glistened with perspiration, he could smell moistness in the space between her shoulder and her neck.   "Luli?  I've been wondering if you’re ready to take our hike..."

Almost from the beginning they had taken these afternoon “hikes,” their private word for it.   It seemed like each of these shared experiences were bringing them closer, day by day.   He brought his mouth to Vilu’s, brushing her lips.

“Linsey told me that we should take Trail #805 today,”  Vilu said after a moment.  “That’s the one that leads down into the ocean--where those old ruins are at the shore.”

“Hmm.  This one sounds a little bit like work, doesn’t it,” Tero said suspiciously..  Hadn’t that been the whole idea?  To get them both away from the research for a while? 

He felt a touch of apathy again.  Sometimes it seemed like Vilu and he had been involved in just one investigation after another for such a long time.  And it was true, their team of “consulting archaeologists” been going at it pretty much non-stop for fifty years.  But something was changing.  After just a few weeks of vcation Tero could already feel the eager tickle of curious anticipation return.  “How’s it going with Maplewood?”

“We’re almost done.  Maybe that’s part of it.  How are your zoats?”

Tero smiled.  “Those kids!  They’re doing great, down by the creek now, ‘zoating’.”  He guessed he didn’t mind so much after all.  “Ancient ruins, eh?”

The way was clearly marked, a narrow rutted path that cut through iceplant slopes of brilliant color, first up and away, then over a rocky pass, then down towards the shore of the warm middle sea.  Then to the doorstep of the ruins of the ancients, then past them to the risen shore, and beyond.

“They say that it all happened more than three thousand years ago,” Vilu said over her shoulder as they ascended.  “‘It’s a tale of wonder and wonderful destruction,’ that’s what Linsey said anyway.”  She turned back and began to climb.  “I guess we’ll see what that means to us.”

It had taken years of primitive satellite imaging and teraflops of scanning calculations to reveal what Vilu and Tero saw instantly when they crested the wind-swept pass.  For more than two kilometers to the ocean shore and for twice that distance to the east the earth was curved into a broad dish, scoured into the lava and pumice slope of Mt. Maaselle with perhaps nuclear force.  A vast web of gullies and irregularities had crumbled away from what had once been a mirror smooth surface.  How long ago could that have been?

Tero leaned close to her and spoke against the wind.  “It’s a solar concentrator!”  The fact that the focus of the massive semi-circular dish was in an arc in the offshore waters was not lost on either of them.

“It must have taken years to construct!” Vilu marveled, her sharp blue grey eyes noting a pair of circular slots that the builders must have used for material removal after the initial forming.  In fact it had taken over 500 years, her reference told her immediately, almost the entire extent of the Splendid culture.  “I wonder what it feels like to work on something for 500 years,” she murmured.  Tero smiled at his partner’s pensive manner.  Always a little bit on the serious side, this one.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have me,” he quipped uncertainly.  But both of them knew that statistically very few partnerships these days lasted more than a few centuries.  Oh, now he got it.  A history lesson.

Maybe their long descent to the coast was also a metaphor of some kind.  The obsidian surface that had seemed so unbroken from above turned out to be a  treachery of fractured paths.  More than once Tero and Vilu had to backtrack, more than once they needed to slow to help each other past obstructions, one was a portion of the trail where a cliff of the smoky volcanic glass had shattered across the walkway in knifelike shards.  Tero selected one of the pieces, knocking the edges off one end to fit his hand.  He leered atavistically at Vilu and took a few quick swipes at the air.  Did it mean there would be a monster to slay?  He sort of hoped so.

Vilu tolerated Tero’s fascination with the glass blade with patient amusement, hoping for her part that there would be no monsters.  But Tero had an instinct for these things, she knew.

The man who posed before her with his primitive weapon was trim and athletic, his extended arms sinewy as he mimed defense against a chimera or djinn.    In contrast to Vilu’s, Tero’s eyes were a deep brown that matched his dark brows and lashes. 

He was about a meter and two feet tall and covered with hair, which mostly emitted from his head and was now, after their hike, a sweaty, matted brown mess.  Tero frowned past her, tracking the passages of his glass knife through slanted daylight.  It seemed to glow with significance, Vilu smiled back at him again in recognition of just how Tero that was, his way of making the primitive manifest in the nearly unknowable complexities of their lives.  Soon enough, she knew, he’d be using the same blade for slicing an apple from their pack as their hike went on.

Indeed, after just a moment her partner’s ferocious concentration broke and he let the weapon fall to his side with a sheepish smile.  “Want half an apple?”  Afterwards, Vilu reached her arm down to help Tero come up the slippery glass incline.

What he’d told her besides the apple was the part about the history lesson.  Vilu wasn’t surprised, Tero did have a sharper sense of things like that, he was probably right.  Anyway, though they could theoretically go back (what would they tell Linsey and Dueck?  Robots weren’t that understanding...), why, except for threat of death or injury, which was impossible, would they?  Good question.

“Besides, I know that you’ll be able to defend us from any monsters of history we might encounter,” Vilu said.  “Anyway, it can’t be a history lesson.  We already know all the history.”  The reference kept them instantly apprised of context in every situation.  “Oh,” she said, looking back at Tero, “oh.  It’s going to be about what it all means, again, isn’t it?  That’s what Linsey was saying.”

He nodded.  “I sense a tragedy coming on.”

They set up the retroscope near one of the many utility towers that studded the great solar array.  The pitted granite stone walls of the structure rose upward nearly out of sight above them.  How many tons of material could have been involved in their construction?  Wait,wait, don’t tell me, I don’t really want to know, Tero cut Vilu and the reference off, smiling.    He pointed the scope against one of its gently sloping sides and pressed the button.  A holographic retrieval from a myriad of sources fused together to reveal the paradigmatic that was the Splendid Civilization.

Though frozen in time, the story of the Splendids continually adjusted to their inquiries, drilling down even to individual life histories.  In fact the first images that Tero and Vilu saw were of the particular individuals who had been “in charge” of the mythical Atlantis during that final tumultuous period.

Forgive the Splendids for a little bragging, or maybe their grandiose accomplishments spoke for themselves.   Tero and Vilu watched the retroscope with real admiration as the Splendid culture evolved and matured, spreading first across the Atlantean continent, then the entire planet.  What had gone wrong?  The Splendids had visited the moon, Mars, even established colonies on the Jovian planets.

Vilu drove first.  She needed to know a lot more about this solar collector.  500 years?  The idea thrilled her, somehow.  Vilu was only 75 at this point, the prospect of many centuries, perhaps millennia of further existence a real but hazy prospect.  Though so far, so good.

Just look at all the distinctive terraforming projects that the Splendids had engineered!  Drilling downward, Vilu led them through construction, where oddly modified humans (she shuddered) swarmed like ants to transform the volcanic landscape.   What made the mods horrifying was that they were nakedly genetic interfaces to construction equipment.  Imagine a million souls doomed to lives as front-loaders.  “Still,” she told Tero, “we could do the same thing today with ethical somatic integration.  Think of the possibilites!”

In fact, Vilu pointed out, the mile-wide reflector was just one of hundreds that beamed focused sunlight against a ring of secondary orbiting mirrors  high above the earth.   “See how they prism the coherent light to maintain positioning?  Very elegant, I never would have thought of that.”  She gave Tero a twisted smile, as if embarrassed by the admission.

Tero was much more interested in the Splendids themselves, trying for some reason to imagine life as a front-loader.  At least you knew where you stood in Atlantis.  At the first opportunity he simply asked the question.

“What happened?”

Inside the paradigm the speakers for the Splendids responded.  One of them, a narrow serious man in a draped blue tunic, spoke first, his voice whisper thin.

“None of us have any memory of those events.  To us, here in Atlantis, it’s as though time literally stopped.  “But I have several theories…”

“Oh, stop it, Manilope!”  Another man spoke.  “This speculation won’t solve anything.  Atlantis is dead.  That’s the end of it.  I’m Hafnir, this is Manilope,” the second leader said, introducing himself. “We’re dead.”

“No, really, we want to hear,”  Tero replied.  “I'm sorry you’re dead, by the way.”

Hafnir snorted.  “Thank you very much,” he said, shrugging helplessly.  “Fine, then.  I’ve heard this idiot’s twaddle a million times already.  Another time won’t matter."

“Since we’re talking to them, they’re probably dead too,”  Manilope observed. “Ask me more nicely.”  He appeared prepared to stand on principle, then relented.  “Oh, very well.”  He peered closely at first Vilu, then Tero, exposing a bony finger.

“Theory Number One:  Inhabitants of a sufficiently advanced culture, perhaps represented by your noble selves, created or destroyed us, perhaps both.  I don’t know whether to thank you or to curse you.”

“No thanks necessary,” Tero said blandly.   He disliked Manilope immediately.   “If we knew, why would we be here asking?”

Manilope smiled, as if acknowledging a joke.  “Theory Number Two, then, similar really, is that acts of an unknown third-party or God caused the catastrophic end of Atlantean civilization..  An asteroid?  No, even then some trace should be present in the paradigmatic, last minute warnings or first effects.  Zeus?  The  Last Judgement?  Possibly....”

Hafnir interrupted.  “Don’t confuse the lady.  Our hypothetical existence was more than a thousand years before the Christian era.”  He smiled ingratiatingly at Vilu, who returned his smile uncertainly.

 

“Theory Number Three, more subtle,” Manilope continued, “See if you can wrap your mind around it, this time, Hafnir.  Perhaps the presence of our young friends will serve as a clue. Imagine some sort of malthusian limit that our Splendid culture exceeded, a scaling error that led to sudden mass extinction or irrelevance."

"Perhaps,”  he stared at Tero and Vilu  musingly, “something to do with Life-expectancy.  Yes, imagine a society driven to irrelevance by immortality.  Having achieved immortality by other means the two of us can assure you it isn’t what it was cracked up to be.”

“These two agents,” Manilope continued triumphantly, indicating Vilu and Tero to Hafnir, “Must have been sent to us to investigate.  To isolate the systemic failure of Splendid culture so that a society in the far distant future can avoid the same fate.”

Tero bristled.  “Very astute.  Well, is that the answer?  Did Splendid society become immortal?”

“I’m afraid not,”  Hafnir interrupted.  “Though this fool has already gone on far too long.  No, as we’ve been telling everyone for centuries now, clearly the problem had a moral basis, involved our fatal flaw.  It was the conceit that we were superior to everything, that every problem could be and should be solved.  We were like lemmings, endlessly driven to an ever greater complexity and inter-dependence that suddenly destroyed us.”

So it was pride that killed the Splendids?” Vilu asked incredulously.  ”You mean like hubris?”  She tugged her blonde hair back in exasperation.  “Where’s your evidence for that?”  It was one of Vilu’s hot buttons, Tero knew.

Halfnir turned his palm to the wall behind them and it opened to a vast panorama in which Plato’s three concentric circles were revealed, exactly as the ancient philosopher had so perfectly described them.  Atlantis.  At the center, the supergammathugmatron writhed in the glare of the collected solar flux, fusion energy, inexhaustible and unimaginable.  The “canals” that surrounded  the superhot focus were massive power converters of the molten orichalcum metal.

What you had never gotten from the philosopher’s fragmentary work was just how incessantly this ancient city buzzed with collective activity.  The turquoise skies were solid with airborne vehicles of bewildering size and variety, a thousand colors.  At its zenith the Spendid population numbered more than thirty million industrial beings.  This was hardly a sleeping chamber for eternal life, it was rather the opposite, a hyperbolum of self-justification.  At least in that sense Hafnir was correct, Tero understood.

Wordlessly, Hafnir drew the view up and zoomed high beyond a flashing horizon.  Now half the planet was dark, and within that curved black portion a vast speculation of orichalcum pulsed, a seething bondage of energy, no longer human but somehow much more...splendid.

“I like that,” Vilu said bitterly.  “Blame the engineers.”

Of course it was neither the engineers’ fault nor a moral failing that had led to Atlantis’ downfall.   As insightful as Manilope’s conjectures and Hafnir’s self-flagellation might be, Tero suspected from long experience in the field that the truth, if it existed, would lie on a more everyday level than the political vcaricatures of the two beings, however sentient they might or might not be.  Manilope’s reedy voice continued to waver behind them as Tero and Vilu entered the paradigm themselves and began to walk towards the ancient shore.

Inevitably there were comparisons you’d find yourself making.  “Remember Tulum?”  Vilu asked.   The meso-American city-state had a similar arched stonework as the Atlanteans, and in its sudden transition from glory to...nothing, it sort of felt the same.  “Remember that one, Tero?”  There had been no sign of famine or disease in the thriving late Mayan population.  Rainfall readings, inferred from retroscope interferometry, proved the key--the civilization had been literally scrubbed from the leading edge of the Yucatan peninsula by a series of monster hurricanes during the fatal season of 738 CE.

The Splendids had lived on the shore too.

“Could it be something as simple as global warming?”  Tero mused.  “Atmospheric spillover from the solar collection?”  It wasn’t like the Splendids to ignore major thermodynamic factors.  And yet the gentle, implacable waves that lapped at their feet seemed irrefutable.  Whatever had happened to Splendid civilization, its remnants lay deep beneath the sea.

“The one that I remember and worry about is Cthulhu,”  Tero said, “Just because you can’t die in VR doesn’t mean you enjoy having your soul sucked away.”  He pointed his obsidian blade into the deep blue waters.   “That was a tough one.”    The nihilistic evil of the Ancient Ones’ ‘culture’ hadn’t had the distinctive high-touch technology of the Atlanteans, and yet in its banishment to the depths of the ocean, it too seemed unhappily similar.  “Take that, squid-face!”

Vilu shuddered.  Sometimes it felt like the taint of contact with the alien evil still crept quietly within their brains.  But that had happened long ago, when she and Tero were in their 40s.  “Let’s hope not,” she said.  “You cut off their tentacles, I’ll run them over.”

Near where they had come down, a broad avenue slanted onward into the sea.  Vilu waded a few meters into the waters, automatically gauging distance against depth.  “It seems shallow.  I think we’ll be able to free-dive.”

“My little dipstick.  What if there’s a trench right off shore?”

She looked so enduringly alluring, standing hip deep and dimpled in the waves, her clothing already dissolving.  Tero knew that he would always have loved her, even if she had not done what she’d done.  Still, there was no question that everything had changed afterwards.  Was remembering that the point?  If so, it was a good one.

Tero knelt in the shallows beside his partner, splashing his skin with the cold, salty water, ducking down below.  The water was tinted green, a little cloudy and refracted.  He flapped once and let it gush refreshingly through his parched gills.  Yes!

You could talk underwater, but the bubbles made understanding difficult.  Instead, sub-vocal sonic emitters kept them in constant contact.  “Ready?”  Vilu vibrated harmoniously.  They reached forward together and dived down.

Vilu didn’t think about the Cthulhu investigation much anymore, though she guessed she understood why it meant so much to Tero.   It wasn’t every day that you could be a hero and save your partner’s life.  But the need to act and the action to take had been obvious, Vilu thought.  There really wasn’t much else to say about it.  After more than thirty years, Vilu still recalled her physical impact with the evil octopoid, that numbing lovecraftian nothingness.  It had really only been momentum that had gotten the two of them past it.

She led, as usual, swimming powerfully along the stone incline of the underwater causeway.   Previously the water had cooled as they descended.  Now, abruptly, within a few meters,  it warmed to near body temperature, gaining a clockwise current that seemed to draw them further downward. 

There are no grand vistas beneath the sea.  Even the “birds eye view” offered by swimming above is defeated by the opacity of the medium.  But in exchange you gain a kaleidoscope of views and orientations. What they saw as the current drew them down was a baroque tracery of coral-encrusted pillars that lined the streets of the underwater city.  Organic constructions, the tendril-like forms intertwined crazily together  more than a hundred feet above, weaving arches and canopies that  supported additional dwellings.  Don’t judge us by our architecture.

It was not the way that Vilu would have done things.  “Barnacles,” she said scornfully.

Potentially within the paradigm, all the Splendids were present at any moment.  Tero always preferred to keep factors like that to a minimum, adjusting the retroscope so that only a translucent trace of the bustling population could be seen.  Now he reversed the dial, filling the streets with people.  Time slowed, stopped, began again.  It was the last night in Atlantis once more. 

Oh.  So that was the first insight.  Rather than the flowing robes that Hafnir and Manilope had worn, these beings were naked, dolphin-like, cream on gray.  Clearly for a good portion of its existence the Atlantean population had evolved undersea, its citizens modified to their environment.  As Vilu and Tero watched, a large group of splendids, it was impossible not to call it a school, emerged out of the twisting algae forest and swept past them.

Rather than reducing its global footprint, Atlantis had apparently accepted the consequences, its civilization inexorably lapped under by the rising waves of global warming, its genotype shifting towards the aquatic.  Three thousand years of mods can have a profound effect.  Tero hardly recognized the sleek creatures who now swirled in the waters above them as human.  Maybe it was the eyes.

Their eyes are just creepy.  Where did those genes come from?  That was Vilu’s first thought.  , There was no there, there, within the raw red rectangles, seemingly no focus or soul.  And yet their bodies were marvelous, two meters long and nearly as far across when extended, they resembled sinewy seven-pointed starfish,  streamlined strong from swimming.

“Zoat eyes!” Tero realized suddenly.  He had seen eyes like this many times by now in the zoat stock back at LandFarm.  Deriving from their original genetic base of goats, the zoats’ eyes were large and protuberant, glistening golden, with distinctively rectangular pupils that seemed to defy analysis.  Still ... that angry red.  No doubt an unfortunate side-effect of the gene splicing.

But you only had to converse with the Atlanteans for a few seconds before their essential humanity came through..

Using historical analysis techniques, Tero’s machine had zeroed in on “The Seven,” that group of beings which had tried in vain to hold back Atlantis’ final catastrophe.  Had there been time, they would have been heroes, but of course, there was no time.

Swimming upwards, Tero addressed the group.  “Greetings, we’re scientists from another dimension.  We’ve received word that your world is in extreme peril.  While we’re not aware of the nature of the threat, we may have information that can help you.  Does anyone know what I’m talking about?”

One of the beings extended an additional tentacle-like finger in response.  “I believe it will be volcanic,” he spoke with a voice that rippled the waters like chiming bells..  “There have been seaquakes.  We seem to have induced some dangerous resonance in the planet’s molten core.”

“The new solar ring has just begun operating at full capacity,”  another chimed in, “could that be related?”

Consulting some internal references of their own the group quickly identified the problem.  A staggeringly large sector of the economy had been diverted to construction of the solar collection system, after the project was completed there was literally nothing to do.   Fortunately, it was claimed, the bounty of free energy available from the colossal solar dishes had more than compensated for the social cost.  It had been said to be truly the golden age of Atlantis.

But their accounting for genetic drift had been inadequate.  Inevitably, Tero and Vilu knew, the Vital Force exhibited itself in new and unexpected ways.  Within a few years the workers had returned to work, creating, despite themselves, an additional exquisite set of global mirroring systems, arguably of better design.

Until finally the system had been destroyed by its own insane efficiency.  Early on the strategy had depended on sinking excess energy back into the earth’s core.  The sudden surge created by the orbital concentrators compromised the exchange system.  There was, it developed, no “resonance,” it was pure thermodynamics that doomed the splendids.

“Just turn it off,”  Vilu snapped.  There had to be a way to divert the receptors at least temporarily into the atmosphere.  Better a few birds and drones than all humanity.  “We need to break that beam!”

“Coordinate zero!” clanged one of the Splendid Seven.  I will name them now.  He who spoke was known as Scraper, a massive being inclined to physical capacity and quick action.  All of the Seven were workers who in fact had built one of the final terrestrial collectors. 

“VR?”  Vilu inquired.

“No access to any administrative functions.  We have the machines.”  Polish and Shine were much slimmer than their colleague, though nearly as broad.    Their dorsal surfaces were an iridescent gray, underbellies a soft cream color that concealed an iron-hard twenty-eight pack of muscles geared to precision control over the surfaces above which they glided.  Their tendril-like inner arms danced excitedly as they spoke.

“And we need to get there,”  Transport said, extending his inner arm.  “A priority stream will have us at Zero in fourteen minutes.”  The other two of the Seven were Test and Direct.

“We better get going,”  Direct clanged imperatively.  Tero and Vilu hooked on to Transport as the band turned as one and quickly slid into the faster currents leading to Coordinate Zero.

.”Help us understand,” Vilu asked Test, “Divert or Destroy?”

Test was a nervous being.  “Destroy,” she said, “We can’t move anything big enough fast enough.  The system wasn’t designed for hierarchical control.”  Her inner arm writhed in distress.

Vilu nodded grimly.  “That’s what I think too.”  She looked at Tero accusingly.  “Are we?”

Tero shrugged.  It wasn’t likely to make much difference, was it?  Comparative Engineering was one thing…

How much can you possibly owe a doomed race?  And was it even ethical to encourage this band of heroes to a lost cause?

It was usually Tero who was the more sympathetic, Vilu often far more hard-hearted than he.  But that was in situations where there was continuity, history, not sudden extinction.  The retroscope had allowed the two archaeologists to interact with many of history’s pivotal events.  It was true, he acknowledged, he had a tendency to meddle too much, while Vilu was more practical.  Still.   Whatever tragedy had transpired in Atlantis, they knew, it was ultimately over.  This was the existential truth of time, they understood.  Right?

Tero shrugged again.  “Fine,” he said.  “Let’s go.”

It might not have mattered.  Like anti-bodies rushing organically to the source of an infection the band of seven swept through the transport system to Coordinate Zero.  Could the few second’s delay in bringing their observers along have been critical?  No, you couldn’t say so.  Vilu was on it, in the stream, her hand firm around Tero’s wrist.

Even with impulse power it was hard to keep up with the seven star-shaped Splendids.  Their powerful arms churned through the water, a spiral crawling motion like a propellor that Tero had seen somewhere before.  I still don’t like this, he thought.

What form had love taken in the 22nd Century?   Like humanity itself the meaning had shifted.  Surely it hadn’t always meant being compelled to do things you didn’t really approve of?   He wasn’t sure he shared Vilu’s admiration of the Splendid’s strange bodies either.

The fact was, love hadn’t changed all that much.  Otherwise Vilu might have recognized the signs beneath Tero’s display of male picque.  Instead she threw herself into VR’ing with the complex machinery that the band had identified.  Didn’t he realize they had time-critical things to do?  The plan was to physically topple one of the massive concretions that supported the collection nexus, tipping it and preventing the high-energy solar focus from occurring.

To Vilu’s annoyance, when they arrived at coordinate zero the ghostly figures of the two Atlantean politicians were already present.   Manilope and Hafnir were standing as close as possible to the exact spot, as if their proximity conferred understanding. 

Now the two personalities had sharpened, become even more adversarial as Tero and Vilu had drilled deeper into the simulation.

“Work, the Vital Force, is all,” Hafnir was preaching.  “Whether in a constructive capacity or whether, as happens from time to time, a destructive one.  This thing had to be stopped!”

Manilope looked at him with scorn.  “This revolution was worth all existence?”  He shrugged expressively, looking at Tero as if to say, “See what I have to deal with?  Whatever happened, and we’ve been through this before, it didn’t end well.  Why must we go over it all again?”

“That’s what I’m saying too,”  Tero began to agree.  But they were both cut short by Hafnir’s uncharacteristically silent attention to Vilu’s determined preparation.   Hmm, maybe this time something would really be different.

Tero could feel Vilu’s confusion as she reached out to establish contact with one of the massive movers.  VR for the two of them had usually been an artificial construct, a machine.  However close their thought processes had often seemed to the apparatus, in the end there was no real attachment, just a series of control abstractions. 

But the Splendids had not followed this mechanical model, they dealt in organic assimilation and power.  Actual beings, often incredibly sophisticated ones, were manufactured by genetic engineering, their body tissue cultured in many cases; their psychologies an exposed control interface. 

Tero watched as an orifice opened in the creature’s broad back and accepted Vilu’s lower body, her strong shoulders quivering subtly as the somatic integration occurred.