Seizing the Laboratory
The work was completed without a hitch.
Noah's entire brain was now half-extracted from her head, mounted on the fixation cradle, and connected to the computer by dozens of thin cables. It looked, in effect, as though she had swapped her body for a rectangular computer tower.
Lena wiped the residue of fluid off her hands and grumbled.
"Phew... that is an experience I will never forget. Sticking my hands inside someone's head..."
"Don't be dramatic."
"Would you like to try it too, Mister?"
"My hands are too big for that."
"Damn it. That's a violation of child labor laws."
Lena was putting to use the words she'd picked up from my conversations with Noah. The kid had a freakishly good memory, and apparently she even understood exactly what situations those terms applied to. If she got a proper education from Noah about the old world, she'd soon be holding real conversations. Having one more person to talk to was something to look forward to.
"I'm afraid child labor laws, along with most other laws, don't exist in the Empire."
"Tch."
"It should take about an hour at most, so let's rest for a bit."
"I'll just meditate, then."
"Suit yourself."
Leaving Lena to her meditation beside Noah's reclined body, I kept exploring the area. Once Noah seized the lab, every electronic device in it would bend to her will anyway — so I focused my attention on the analog things instead.
Notebooks, for example. There might be records that, for one reason or another, could never be stored as data. As electronics advanced, hadn't the most important records always been kept in paper form? And humans were, after all, creatures with an ingrained compulsion to leave some trace of themselves behind.
"It should be somewhere around here..."
Taking care to preserve the skeletons as best I could, I rifled through every scrap of old clothing I could find. But no matter how thoroughly I searched, there wasn't so much as a scrap of paper, let alone a notebook. All that remained were metal odds and ends — belt buckles and the like.
Thok!
Tum-tum-tumble...
"Hm?"
As I wandered around, a small pebble caught the tip of my boot and went skittering away. It bounced across the floor a few times before rolling beneath a desk stacked with blueprints. Given the state of the floor, debris lying about was hardly surprising — and yet a strange sense of déjà vu washed over me, and I crouched down under the desk to pick the thing up.
"Wait, this is...?"
What lay in my palm was not a pebble at all. It was a magic stone.
Why on earth was this here?
Still crouched beneath the desk, completely forgetting to climb back out, I turned the stone over in my hands. It was a small, ordinary-looking black magic stone — about the same size as the ones the goblins around the lab had dropped.
I closed my eyes and focused, and the energy of the points stored within it became unmistakable.
"No doubt about it, it's a magic stone. Black, so it must have dropped from a monster of Rank 8 or below. But..."
The sheer amount of points was abnormal.
The stone felt badly weathered after untold years, and even so, the remaining charge came to nearly seven hundred points. That was a frankly absurd quantity. I couldn't even begin to guess how much it must have held originally.
Weren't a monster's rank and its points supposed to be proportional? There's no way something of Rank 8 or lower could carry this many points...
Every black stone I'd used up until now held an average of less than one point apiece. Granted, points and raw strength weren't strictly proportional — but even so, a gap of several hundred times within the same rank made no sense.
In my case, I spend points on acquiring talents. I'd assumed the monsters did something similar — that's why rank and points scale together. But then again, there's no ironclad rule that rank equals strength, is there...? Which would mean this stone's owner possessed a talent far more powerful than its rank suggests.
Some kind of elite monster? Or maybe a champion-type? Hmm. That was the most likely explanation. I nodded at my own deduction.
Either way, it was an unexpected windfall!
Bonk!
"Ow!"
Shaking my head without thinking, I slammed it into the underside of the desk. The find had been so far outside my expectations that I'd momentarily lost track of myself. Rather than my skull, it seemed the desk had taken the worse damage — the shock sent its drawers rumbling open one after another.
"Ah. There might be something in here too, then."
Rrrk!
I yanked every drawer open and pawed through the contents. Unfortunately, most of it was mechanical parts and half-eaten rations. I did get lucky and find a small leather notebook — but even though I opened it as gently as I could, it crumbled to dust in my hands, unable to outlast the centuries.
Agh... At this rate, I'd never find out what happened here.
Beep-beep-beep~♫
I had refused to give up and was still combing through the rows of desks when the sound rang out, and light began flooding the laboratory. Far too many of the fixtures were broken, but even ten percent of them working was enough to brighten the room. Noah's hacking had apparently succeeded.
"Fac--ity seiz-- successf---... Hm, the audio qu--ity is po---. Please w---it a moment."
Krzzzt... krzzt.
Noah's voice was drifting out of a speaker somewhere. But after being left derelict for so long, the sound crackled and cut out at intervals — the speaker was in sorry shape indeed. Then again, considering that several hundred years had passed, the fact that it worked at all was a testament to how impressive future technology really was.
Then again, the design isn't all that different from my own era, surprisingly. Laptops, speakers — sure, the computers looked a little different, but by a modern person's eyes, every one of these objects was instantly recognizable for its purpose. Their internal components had clearly advanced enough to survive centuries of dormancy, but in terms of outward appearance, barely a hundred years of progress seemed to have changed much. Considering how quickly human fashions in design shifted even within a single decade, it was somewhat puzzling.
Rumble, rumble...
"I have arrived."
"Pfft! What is that??"
"It is the only speaker still in working condition, so I made use of it."
As I pondered the correlation between era and design, something round came rolling across the floor, emitting that flat, mechanical voice. Curious, I took a closer look: it was a small robot, roughly the size and shape of a volleyball. Some kind of obsolete model — capable of producing nothing but a toneless, emotionless drone. I couldn't tell what it had originally been used for, but it had what looked like an LED display where its eyes (probably?) should be, letting it flash simple emoticons. It was actually rather cute.
Lena gave a delighted squeak and scooped the sphere up in her arms.
"Sooo cute..."
"◟(`ﮧ´ ◟ ). Put me down."
"Okay."
The moment Noah flashed an angry emoticon and spoke, Lena obediently set Noah(?) back on the floor.
"The seizure of the laboratory has been completed successfully. Because it runs on an independent server, its security was actually looser than what you'd find outside. Routing through the internal lines made the job easy."
"Good to hear. So — was it worth taking over the whole facility?"
"ˆ ⩌ ˆ . Yes. There was far more surviving material than I expected. And since this era is further along than the one I originally operated in, I found some excellent components — with the right materials I can not only repair myself, but make a few modifications as well. This was a facility built to manufacture androids, after all. Everything I need is right here."
Noah produced another emoticon as she spoke. Hmm. In a way, this form actually conveyed her feelings better than her humanoid one had. Lena, apparently thinking the same thing, was wearing a faint smile.
"I will begin the repair and modification work now."
"Go ahead."
"Estimated time: approximately thirty minutes. The facility's remaining power supply is sufficient to cover it."
Clunk! Clunk!
Whiiiir!
The instant Noah finished speaking, the ceiling of the lab split open, revealing a hidden storage bay. Descending from it in orderly rows were mechanical arms fitted with an array of delicate, precise tools. They scurried busily along the grid-like grooves carved into the ceiling, making straight for the place where Noah's original body lay. A few of the arms, apparently gathering raw materials, approached the kneeling bipedal war machine and began disassembling it with some kind of laser.
"Oh, right. Could you search the lab for magic stones? I found one, but I have a feeling there might be a few more."
"No problem."
Rumble, rumble...
Three or four more spherical robots — identical to the one Noah was currently piloting — came rolling out from somewhere. They trundled around the floor, examining everything meticulously. One even extended a pincer-like arm from within its shell and started rifling through desk drawers.
"Impressive. But you don't need to focus on your repairs right now?"
"Ah, this facility's server is quite powerful. More than enough to bring out my full performance. I can partition my consciousness with room to spare. And it's not as though I'm building an entirely new body, so there's nothing to worry about. ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ"
Well, fair enough — Noah had been the AI of a genuine national research institute, not some humble workshop like this. To a human, who can barely manage two things at once, it was an incomprehensible sensation, but to her, multitasking at this scale was apparently nothing at all.
Noah fell silent for a moment, as if adjusting her work schedule... then rolled over and spoke up.
"Speaking of magic stones — please follow me. There is a video record related to that very stone that I'd like to show you. And there is something else I should tell you as well."
"So records did survive? Well, judging by the state of the place, monsters obviously breached the lab. Wouldn't this stone have come from one of those monsters? Judging by the point count, it must have been fairly strong, too."
"That is roughly correct. Still, please watch it for yourself. It contains some rather important information."
Noah led me to the best-preserved section of the laboratory. Even here, traces of human remains lingered, but at least the surrounding equipment was relatively intact.
"So, what am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?"
Wing!
"Oh."
Noah probed something on the desk with a limb extended from her round body, and a huge holographic screen sprang to life. Folders of every kind lay scattered across it in complete disorder, like an unorganized computer desktop. Its original owner, apparently, had not been the tidy sort.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
Seemingly manipulating the hologram remotely, Noah flipped rapidly through the screens. After several folders, we arrived at a directory crammed full of video files, and one of them began to play.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK—!!!
"Waah!"
"Oh dear. Of all things, it has started playing from the middle. I will lower the volume."
The moment the video began, the screen filled with pitch black, and gunshots thundered deafeningly loud — the volume, apparently, was cranked to maximum. Lena, already nervous around the unfamiliar hologram, jumped out of her skin. Noah quickly adjusted the audio, and the ear-splitting gunfire dropped to a tolerable level.
"I will restart it from the beginning. This is a record dated December 20th, 2115."
2115, is it...? The year we'd estimated for when the lab we came out of would fail was 2112. So this is three years after that.
BEEP!
Noah had scarcely finished speaking when the darkened screen flickered back to life in crisp, clear resolution. Shot from multiple angles and split across the vast holographic display, the footage showed the events of this laboratory from a dozen different points of view.
My first time facing a recording from the future — which was also the past. And it began, fittingly enough, with a string of curses I knew all too well.