Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 47
🕑 Added 2023-05-29 16:39:29 +0000 UTCAlbert sat on the side of his bed, dangling his legs and waiting. His mother told him that she would soon take him to the Quadrangle, making use of the small window of time she managed to buy before the HDF intervened to reclaim ownership of the place. The idea was to get a teleportation point for him inside the facility so that he could access it in the future, and the best moment to take someone who had no right to be there was now.
His phone rang, a text message telling him that it was finally time. He teleported away, and reappeared on the side of a country road, surrounded by nothing but fields and frozen bushes. He had burned a lot of mana to get here, but the place was not so far as to require the use of his out-of-map teleportation ability. He was very close to Tryte, the farthest place from Temalas City he could teleport to.
His mother was waiting for him on a helicopter she commandeered from the Quadrangle, perched on its sleek black railing much like the helicopter itself looked like a bird perched on the uneven ground of an abandoned field. She looked positively badass, with her black hair fluttering in the wind and aviator glasses hiding half of her face.
They took off without issue. The tempest of the last few days had cleared, leaving only blue skies and a biting cold that was so harsh not even the shield around Albert managed to keep it all out.
“They are all puppets without a puppet master. The whole Quadrangle staff is like that. All of them except for SpaceOps.” Samantha said on their way to the Quadrangle. SpaceOps, she explained, was currently in hiding and jumping around with his teleportation as much as he could. Soon it would become impossible to track him, because all he needed to achieve was a single jump to an area without satellite surveillance and he was free.
Back to the topic of the mindless Quadrangle staff, the thought disturbed Albert quite a bit.
“What will the HDF do with them?”
“I have no idea.” She said, yelling over the wind and the noise of the helicopter blades. “They will take them away, that’s for sure. As to what happens afterwards… I don’t know.”
“I see.”
“I know you don’t like the idea. But there is nothing we can do to help them.”
She was right, of course. He could feel that she was slightly annoyed at his implicit show of empathy but not as much as he expected her to be.
“There’s something else. Look.” She said.
She handed him her phone, taking it out of her pocket in one fast motion. It was unlocked and displaying a text chat, but it had a custom UI that didn’t match any operating system that Albert knew. He read through it, eyes narrowing more and more with each line he scanned, coming back to re-read them to make sure he was getting the message right.
“What is this?” He asked. There was reason for concern.
“It’s the Quadrangle, asking to be rescued. Crazy, I know, even for me.” Samantha said.
“But saved from what? The HDF?”
“Yes. It’s scared the HDF will do something to it.”
“Will they?”
Samantha sighed audibly. “I did worse things than this myself. Not to the Quadrangle, though, and it knows it. It knows that once I’m gone… I wouldn’t be surprised if the HDF resets it just to be sure it isn’t infected. They don’t treat it as a sapient intelligence.”
Albert heard the first part of the sentence but decided that he didn’t want to know what kind of things his mother did, worse than killing what looked like a conscious being. He knew that she was brainwashing people like PsyOps and SpaceOps, and he dreaded the idea of following the train of thought because he wasn’t sure it would take him to a morally acceptable conclusion.
When the fate of the world is at risk, is it acceptable to break a few rules? What if those rules are basic human rights?
What if the ‘people’ you are doing bad things to aren’t human?
Instead, he went back to ask about the current situation. “Is it normal? That the Quadrangle asks you of all people for help?”
“I’ve always been nice to it, you know?” Sam said, a bit offended. “I might have groomed it a little with my… persuasion tactics, but I never meant ill will towards it. I was among the very few people who treated it like the sentient building it is.”
“And it wants you to help it.” Albert stated.
“Us. Not just me. It mentions you in particular. It knows you have special means.”
“Can we even move a building?”
“There is no need to. The Quadrangle is not the building. At least, the thinking core of it isn’t. What you see is more like its outer shell. My predecessors coerced it into growing into the shape it is now, but the core has always been separated from the rest. And we know it can do much more than just be a building, although it always refused to do so.”
Albert hummed. “It’s like a dungeon core. Do we steal it?”
Samantha shook her head. “Eventually. Not yet. We are not equipped to deal with the wrath of the HDF as we are.”
“But—”
“Stop. Let me finish. I have a plan. That’s why I have been spending so much time in the Quadrangle, doing preparations. What do you know of GPT artificial intelligence models?”
***
Two people slithered around the Quadrangle, careful not to be seen by anyone, not even by the mindless husks roaming the building, in fear that information about them might be retrieved by the HDF once they scanned the minds of the compromised personnel. They moved quickly, helped by the building itself to reach every single point of interest as quickly and as efficiently as possible before the whole place was swarmed by the HDF.
They didn’t have much time. Sam had abused her own power as much as she could to delay their arrival, and even though she now had the help of the Quadrangle she knew that soon her deception would be found, and then shit would hit the fan. In fact, once the superiors found out about this particular instance of abuse of power, they were bound to go looking for others.
And they were going to find them. Not even having the Quadrangle on her side would save her. She had groomed the poor building into being her own little slave, making it latch emotionally onto her and – for some reason she did not fully understand – onto Albert by extension. But the HDF had plenty of competent people who could extract information out of a rock if needed, let alone a dungeon core, as her son called it.
Then they would find out why Tryte happened and that they weren’t informed of it until after the fact.
Then she would be fired.
One of the precautions she needed to take before this happened was making sure they couldn’t go father than that. Something her father did back in his day, as the first and only former head of the BSA to have not suspiciously died in the line of duty mere days before retiring. She would do all that once her son teleported away. There were only a couple more rooms she needed him to add to his teleportation map, after which he would be left free to return home and do his system quests and she could move onto doing stuff that she didn’t really want Albert to see.
In moments like these she was doubly glad that he had a system. Not only was it making him stupidly strong in a small amount of time, it was training him and – most importantly – it never ran out of things to do. Albert could spend all day doing quests and she was sure he would end up with even more than what he started with.
“Okay. This was the last room. You can go back.” She said, forcing a smile. She was not really in the mood, but Albert didn’t deserve to be treated badly. He was not one of her lackeys, he was her son.
Her son smiled back. “You be safe here, alright?”
She cocked her head. “Of course. I’m three steps ahead. Plus, you can always come to rescue me if I fuck up, right?”
Albert chuckled at what must have been her very first attempt at humor. She wondered how her own father managed to lighten the mood with a good joke whenever it was needed. Perhaps it was because he was a dick and didn’t care if he was being inappropriate.
“Before I go, look at this.” Albert said, then gave her a sheet of paper.
[New Quest: Leviathan Diversion I]
- Acquire 25 kilograms of pure elemental iron.
- Step 1/?? for the construction of the Time Severed Containment Field to house the Eggs.
- Reward: Skill autolearn: Earth Shard.
“Is this a system quest?”
He nodded.
“This how you see them?”
He nodded again.
“Well, this is very interesting. A containment for the Eggs, severed from normal spacetime, would nullify their effects on the world. It would set the invasion back by weeks, months even!” Now her smile was genuine. “Besides, I wouldn’t trust the eggs to remain here after I am gone. Elemental iron might be difficult to obtain, but not impossible. Now go.”
The smile evaporated from her face as soon as Albert was away. The lines around her mouth tensed up as her muscles and tendons responded to her new state of mind. For it was true that when he wasn’t with her, she was an entirely new person.
Following the latest topic they discussed, she asked the Quadrangle to take her to the room with the Eggs. She was there less than five minutes later, breathing quickly after having reached the room at record speed. All this in high heels.
“Well, this is not looking good.”
As she feared. The Eggs were gone.
“Show me when they were taken.”
VIDEO UNAVAILABLE.
“Why?”
IT WAS DELETED.
“Shit.”
I KNOW WHO TOOK THEM.
“Really?” She flashed a toothy smile. “Do tell. Who and when?”
IT WAS SPACEOPS. IT HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER PSYOPS TOOK CONTROL OF THE FACILITY.
