We Leapt Into the Sky

Chapter 16

Kendra sank to the ground against the wall of the cavern, clutching her knees to her chest. She sat, frozen, as she stared into the gloom and listened to the soft noises echoing through the chamber. Fear settled in her chest.

Far off, a soft scraping noise came closer and then stopped. A light blinked. The machine approached and reached for her hand with a metal arm. There was a jolt, and thoughts entered her mind. 

The machine showed her parts of the ruins she had never seen. They had been doing construction in the upper caverns, and she was given a progress report, a strangely matter-of-fact sequence of diagrams showing buildings and carvings and columns. Kendra imparted a question in return, an image of her abdomen and the decay there. The machine gently grabbed hold of her shoulder and pulled her up. It led her back to the chamber where she woke, opening the hidden door with a press of its arm to a point on the wall.

Then it flew to the pool of liquid, and a thin tube emerged from its arm. It drew up the liquid through the tube and blinked its lights at Kendra. She cautiously touched the substance. It was greasy and viscous. Her eyes on the machine, she smeared a handful onto her abdomen, and it sank in like water on cracked dirt. The terrible cracks knit back together into skin.

Lifting its arm again, the machine gestured for her to connect with it, and its thoughts entered her mind again. The liquid was nutrition, fuel that could repair her body. She cupped her hands together and drank from the pool. The fuel's texture was foul, oily and strangely smooth, but it didn't taste of anything. Kendra scooped handful after handful of it into her wounds until the skin was fully intact. She took another drink and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

A second machine entered. It floated up to her, blinking and bumping her shoulder in a gesture that was almost affectionate. Dents and scratches marked its metal shell—it was the one she had pulled from under the rock.

"I need you to tell me what happened," she said, lifting her hand to the machine and repeating the question as best she could in images. The machine chirped and floated away, turning back to make sure she was following. They moved down a hallway and through a second door that required the machine to interface with it before it opened.

Blue light suffused the room, emanating from swirling shapes and patterns carved into in the walls and floor. Some resembled the carvings from the other ruins, with shapes of flowers and leaves overlapping each other in intricate designs.

Across the room, the lights and circuitry were concentrated on a rectangular structure that jutted out from the wall. Kendra approached the console. It was made of rock inlaid with circuitry but lacked buttons or an obvious display. The machine that led her here trilled softly before departing.

A cluster of lights on the console drew her eye, and she reached her hand toward the interface point. Static electricity ran through her fingers as she touched the console, intensifying into a sharp jolt as bright light flooded her field of view. The light coalesced into a white space surrounding her. Lines and shapes flowed through the air, and her neck burned as though someone watched her.

"Is anyone there?" Kendra asked. "Do you understand me?"

"Purely linguistic translations are limited," a voice replied. "More data is required."

"Who am I speaking with? Are you an AI?" she asked.

Kendra's forehead burned. The voice replied in words that felt like they'd been carefully picked from her thoughts.

"Curator. System governs preservation of artifacts," it said slowly.

"Can you access any external networks, satellites, or other communications systems?" she asked. Kendra associated a mental image with each word: the computers back in the lab, the link to the satellite, their comms. She envisioned packets of data flowing to a satellite and then out into the universe.

The system responded with a nauseating series of images, as though dragging her through a maze at high speed. Data passed from each node in the ruins to the computer. She saw the main cavern followed by other caves and ruins she didn't recognize, but nothing suggested a link outside the plateau.

"Enough," she said. "So this system is closed; you can't connect to anything outside the ruins. What about me? What allows me to interface with the system?" She focused on her memory of the light in her hands and the cracks in her abdomen.

The images offered in reply were confusing. The machines built and repaired the stone walls, interfacing with the ruins and communicating amongst themselves. They used their fuel to repair themselves and remain functional in order to take care of the ruins.

A word entered her mind: caretakers.

"The machines, you call them caretakers. I can understand they repair the ruins. But I need to know what happened to me. What do you want from me?" Kendra asked. Frustration surged through her, and it was difficult to ask her questions in a way this system understood.

Her scalp prickled as the system sorted through her mind like a person riffling through a pile of papers. It responded with images from her own memories. She and Bria measured the ruins in the desert. She and Seph climbed the cliffs. She and Antony sat together on the roof. Then, she and Antony were falling into the pit of crystals, and before they hit the ground, he was standing in the research station as his arm fell to the ground.

A jolt passed through her, a warning, a sign of danger superimposed over the crystals and the ruins.

"Corrosion," the system replied.

"But what are they? Why are they corrosive?" she asked. "We've seen the caretakers remove them, coat them in plaster and take them away."

"We cannot destroy energy," it said. "Only contain."

"So you—the caretakers sense an energy from them, which you try to contain. To keep them away from the rest of the ruins."

"You, Kendra," it said, "remove corrosion."

"You've been in my mind. In my memories." Her eyes narrowed. "Is that why you and the caretakers helped me? Because you can understand from my mind that I was here to research the ruins. To learn from them. But I don't know what the corrosion—what those crystals are. We were never able to understand them."

Her forehead buzzed as her memories played before her. She stood beside Antony in the room they shared. "I'd do anything to keep seeing things like this," she said. "Learning things no one else in the world knows." Then she sat on the roof with him. "I want to keep doing this. Seeing places, discovering new things."

And then she was in the cave as the ceiling fell around her. She felt a sharp pain as she was enclosed in stone, entombed, unable to tell whether it was dark or her vision was fading. Then the pain turned dull, fading into nothing. A wisp of a thought entered her mind: There's so much more I want to see.

Kendra gasped. She hadn't remembered those moments until now. "But what did you do to save me?"

"Restoration," the system replied. "Restore ruins, restore Kendra."

She frowned. "But what does that mean? Your restoration wasn't compatible with my biology—it's not exactly normal for someone's body to turn into dust."

"Kendra restored," the system replied simply.

Her head ached as the white blankness in front of her dissolved back into the console room, and she sank to her knees.