The World Which Is, CH 94

It—they? Don’t answer. I’m not sure how to think about them. Base is a him, because he told me so when I was old enough to understand the difference, but are all military bases like that? Or is he unique?

I’m also not sure how to proceed. I hadn’t thought beyond confirming my suspicions. Especially if they didn’t cooperate.

Still, they didn’t outright kill us, which they could easily have done. I’ve seen some of Base’s weapons, and they could have deployed stuff like that at any point if they wanted us gone. We’ve been within their influence all this time, after all.

“Okay, this is new.” Brandon heads for the core.

“Don’t touch it,” I warn before he’s close enough to do that. And I default to ‘it’. way to go Dennis.

“Why? Looks to be valuable, so this is what Poop’s after. We take it to the club and that’s all over.”

“I don’t think that’s it.” If I remember Grandpa Louis’s stories, the core isn’t something someone can just throw in his inventory.

“If it isn’t, what is?” Silver asks.

That’s the question, isn’t it? Unless…

“Does anyone Xander works with have a military class?”

Brandon looks at me over the core as he walks around it. “I don’t know. But I doubt it. Although he has money, so he could hire anyone he needs. Why is that important?”

“Because if he is after this, he needs one of them.”

He looks at me in confusion.

A look at my logs, going back to when we entered, and confirms it. “Did you get a notification we’d entered the ruin?”

“Of course I did.”

“You had a pop up?” I hadn’t expected that, since I didn’t get—

“I always get them when I discover a new ruin.”

That’s too dismissive. “But did you see it?”

“I’ve had that minimized for years.” His eyes flick about. “Just give me a minute. You could look for your own, you know. Every explorer get is the first time they….”

Now his hands join in the flicking, moving to scroll through the lists, swiping to other tabs. A lot of my friends use their hands too. First time I’ve seen him do that

“Where the fuck is it?”

“There isn’t one.”

“There’s got to be one, Dennis. Every new ruin triggers a message.”

This is going to be easier if I can get them to communicate. “Okay. I know you don’t have much reasons to trust us. But we don’t want to harm you. I know you’re a military core, because my best friend, of sorts, is one. My grandfather’s his commander. I didn’t come here knowing you’d be here.” I bring out Aaron’s journal. “We followed the really obscure clues in this—”

“You have Aaron’s journal.”

Brandon backs off like the ground suddenly opened up under him.

The voice is male and comes from around us. Base always makes it come from one of the speakers he sets as decorations, so it’s less confusing for us.

“How is he?”

I run a hand over the cover. “He’s dead.”

“Oh. I guess he didn’t have the time to tell you about me when he handed you the journal then. He always said he’d pass it along to someone who’d take care of it.”

“He didn’t—” how is he going to react to how I got it? How is he going to react if I lie and he finds out? “I found it on his corpse. He sort of saved my life that way.”

“He saved me too.”

“Dennis, care to explain what’s going on?” Brandon asks, staying against the wall as he walks around the room to my side. “How do you know about…this?”

“I told you about Base, right?”

“Yeah, but I thought he was someone you knew. You know. You’re best friend who has all those movies?”

“He is. But he’s the military base around which Court is built.”

“So he’s a building? Like this?” he motions around us.

The chuckle spreads.

“He isn’t the building, Brandon. He is the entire town. He reaches a lot further than Base does. So I’m guessing he’s much higher level. Base hasn’t really tried to gain levels since settling down. The small experience he gets come for the part he has to play during monster waves.”

“I don’t get it.”

I look at Helen, who looks just as confused. Silver shrugs. So no help from the stories she might knows.

“Alright. You might be better placed to explain it than I am. All I have are what Grandpa Louis and Base told me. Can we start with your name?”

“My name is Adrian Dardanus. Call me Dardanus.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer we use Adrian?” Silver asks.

“That was my commander’s name.”

“You named yourself after your commander?” I ask before I can stop myself.

“No, that’s who…. Just what has Base told you about himself?”

“That he’s the military core. That Grandpa Louis became his commander, and that they worked together to free themselves and the people held captive by the cult, once they realized that Base could transfer himself to Grandpa’s power armor and remove the limitation on how far he could go before he lost consciousness.”

“They were able to leave?” Dardanus says thoughtfully. “Adrian never thought about that. For all the science fiction we’ve read and seen, the idea of a power armor didn’t occur to us. Okay. So he didn’t tell you this part. When Adrian touched the core and became its commander, it sort of made a copy of his personality. I started becoming aware of stuff around level three. By five I knew who I was, and everything that was going on, and introduced myself to him. Those initial conversations were fun,” he says sarcastically, “but with our background in science fiction, personality uploading wasn’t that difficult to accept in the middle of everything else going on.”

And suddenly, so much of how Base acts around me makes much more sense. I’d always figured he let me get away with stuff because he’d watched me grow, but if he’s a copy of Grandpa Louis? It also explains why he lets dad boss him around. He probably feels the same guild over my mom’s death Grandpa Louis does.

“Oh, thank the system.” Brandon has a hand against the wall, other to his chest.

We look at him. Helen concerned, me and Silver curious.

“I’ve just worked out why the messages from the automatons were strange. Why they lied. You wrote them. The system isn’t going bonkers.”

Dardanus chuckles. “You scared me when you started freaking out about that. I had no idea how I was going to keep you here if you decided to run off.”

“Why would you want to keep us here?” Helen asks, tone growing suspicious.

“Because that’s what’s supposed to happen. You enter a ruin, you explore it until you find its heart, claim it, and then you leave.”

“But you aren’t a ruin,” I point out.

“It was Aaron’s idea. The best way he could think of to hide what I am. I did not want a repeat of what happened when the others decided Adrian shouldn’t be my commander.”

“But you’re already hidden,” Helen says. “We didn’t see you until we were…well, inside you.”

“But you did end up here.”

“We had Aaron’s journal,” Silver points out.

“But Aaron figured that it was just a question of time until people expanded again. With Louisville not that far up the road, he thought that if I didn’t want people fighting over me again, I should have them thinking I’m something different. He told me how ruins work, and that was simple enough to make.”

“Except you got stuff wrong,” I say. “The theme doesn’t work.”

“It works perfectly fine. Post apocalyptic robot take over is a popular trope. Lots of books and movies about them.”

“You missed the notification,” Brandon says. “If I’d been paying attention, I’d have known right then something was wrong.” He looks at me.

“What? This is literally not the second ruin I’ve come across, and the first time, I was already in the middle of it when I got the notification. And this isn’t something I’m ‘training’ to do. So I didn’t know to be aware for one when we entered.”

“Okay,” Helen steps forward. “You two are getting sidetracked. Why would anyone fight over you, Dardanus?”

“Because he’s a military core,” I say when he doesn’t. “He can make and unmake anything he has a blueprint for within his zone of influence. And…” I realize something. “He probably doesn’t want another commander to replace him.”

“They can’t do that,” Dardanus says. “After they murdered Adrian, they tried. They could order me, but they couldn’t replace me.”

“Did they know it was possible?” Helen asks. She nods at the silence. “If whoever comes next understands how your kind of core works, they might be able to do it.”

“More reason for them to think I’m a ruin, don’t you think?”

“What happened to the people who were here?” I ask. “From what I read, there was a city around you.”

“They’re dead,” he says matter-of-fact.

“Did you….” Silver trails off.

“Of course not. At least not the civilians. Most of them fled after the system appeared. Freaking out or changing. The military took control of the rest. It went fine at first. They banded together, gathered supplies. It’s as part of that exploration Adrian found the core. He touched it and became its—my commander. I wasn’t conscious for those first levels, but things were still going well by the time I was aware. The monster waves weren’t too strong. But that changed. They didn’t work it out, but as I gained levels, they because stronger. Then supplies ran low. Those in charge had to make hard decisions. Adrian and I disagreed about letting the civilians fend for themselves. That made us the enemy, but I was the one who controlled everything, so we had the advantage. Until Adrian, and I, grew overconfident and someone we thought was an ally murdered him. I avenged him, but someone reached me before I could do more and took control. It wasn’t perfect, so I was able to get rid of a few of them without anyone realizing it. Not that I needed to bother. They quickly turned against each other. They did a better job of killing themselves than I ever could. Then I was alone.”

“The monster waves?” I ask.

“They kept coming, so I made soldiers to take them down. I had a few people show up over the first decade, and each time it was the same. They took control of me and tried to turn me into a weapon to destroy their enemies. If I’d been easy to move, or anyone of them realized there was a way I could be transferred to something like a power armor—”

“Or a truck. Base was in Grandpa Louis’s truck the entire trek to Alberta and then Court.”

“Yeah, I could keep something that simple running. But I don’t want to think the kind of damage I could be forced to do. So I started thinking of ways to make it harder for anyone to find me. Science fiction came to the rescue again and light deflection dome to my rescue.”

“How did Aaron find you?”

“Isn’t that in his journal? I know he wrote it down. That man wrote everything down. If there had been a page limit in that thing, he’d have needed a dozen of them.”

“Most of it’s locked behind a quest I haven’t finished. Stuff came up that force my hand.”

“That Xander fellow?”

I nod. “He put a price on my head when I wouldn’t hand over Aaron’s journal.”

“And you decided to come find me…. Why?”

“To piss him off. We thought he was just after a ruin Aaron kept secret. We figured that if we found it first and brought the news to club, he wouldn’t have a reason to keep wanting me dead.”

“You thought that,” Brandon says. “I told you it might not stop him.”

I shrug. “Now, though, I’m not sure what he’s after or how to make him stop.”

“Oh, he’s probably still after the ruin Aaron hid from him,” Brandon says. “Remember, he doesn’t know any more than we did until we met Dardanus. But as soon as he steps through that distortion, he’s going to know something’s up.”

“I’m going to adjust things,” Dardanus says.

“It’s not going to be enough. He’s got twenty years of exploring ruins where I don’t even have ten. I picked up on the inconsistencies, even if I kept trying to make them fit. He isn’t going to do that. He’s going to work out what’s wrong and way faster than we did, come to you.”

“You can help me be a better ruin.”

Brandon laughs. “I don’t know anywhere near enough to do that. Not against someone like Poop. He’s an asshole, not an idiot.”

“It’s not like he’s on his way here,” I say. “We had a hard enough time finding Dardanus with the maps in the journal and the research we did.”

“Except people can tell him what we researched. And he already knows about the Nox. Once he looks in the books you looked through, it’s not going to be long for him to realize the mistake we’ve all been making. Again, asshole, not idiot. And he’s motivated. He wants what Aaron hid just because Aaron hid it, at this point.”

“So what? There’s nothing we can do?” I ask, not liking where this is going.

“About this Xander Poop character,” Dardanus says. “Is he six-two, about one-ninety-five pounds, black hair. Dressed in good quality travel armor?”

“I have no idea about those measurements,” Brandon says, “but if that means he’s a beanpole, add a beard, and you have him pretty well.”

“He might have shaved,” Dardanus says.

Before we can ask what he’s talking about, an image appears between us and him. Xander, standing at the edge of the city, with tough looking people appearing on his left and right.

“Okay,” Brandon says. “How the fuck did he get here so quickly?”