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Save Point: The Flawed Reality

The Greater Srenen River City - Underpass

The tunnel is, there is no other word for it, uncanny.

Sethkill has led them down a surprisingly steep section of hill, most of it under cover from the air by a huge branching overhead motorway bypass, into what must be an old historic section of the city, given the way it resembles the same identical layout seen in what could laughingly be termed modern times in the Neumarket shopping district in Auckland, a bridge shooting off one ridge and across to another in the far side in the distance.

Cleo fights off a strange familiarity as though she knows exactly where she is, even though that's nowhere near here. Is this how the Dragon feels, as it looks into other times and places? If so, it's not a sensation she enjoys.

The bridge is huge and concrete, on giant rectangular double-pilings designed to last forever, and it shows in the way it hasn't been removed like everything else in the Greater Srenen River City, to accommodate new transformations to a less sophisticated infrastructure for a more advanced transport network. Everywhere else the buildings are slim and graceful, the ground surface rebuilt to better accommodate pedestrians on foot, or more accurately the sethura bifurcate equivalent.

It's fascinating to see an honest to goodness city of the future, a real one in which the inhabitants come first and the technology has been forced to shape itself around them, even if at the current moment most of those inhabitants are staying home and watching the excitement from a dream-couch of some kind, if she understands Sethkills ramblings correctly. There are still roads, but the paths they can take aren't limited by the ground, rather by the interference with line of sight and risk to anyone underneath in case of drive failure, so the placement is entirely different and you can't really tell where some of them are, or might be. Conspicuous open spaces edging onto large overhangs, with minimal railings, seem to be unseen flight paths that take the place of bridges in the rest of the city, occasionally accompanied by spindly but presumably very strong pedestrian walkways like long spiderwebs, in the sense of structures evolved, rather than designed, to create the minimal weight to support the load.

Although the one sometimes marks out the unseen other, they provide approximately zero aerial cover, which is why Sethkill seems to be using his own knowledge of the hidden paths and byways of the city to lead them on this complicated and winding route down the hill under the old bridge. The bridge and the nearby buildings and shops all seem to feature a distinct design sensibility, old modern she decides to call it, and seem to have been saved from development by a combination of historic interest and, in the case of the bridge, the fact that it would probably be a total pain in the ass to demolish, even with whatever advanced dissembly techniques the sethura have.

It's like an all stone-and-wood old quarter, carefully preserved from medieval times, with narrow streets and irregular cobbles, only this time is her own. And just like its medieval equivalent there have been compromises, animated and neon signs against ancient stones near newer red-light districts, brazen plaques pinned where famous events happened in the now safely distant past, power lines showing up in all manner of odd places.

The bridge having been kept, it's now anachronously being treated as part of the landscape, with lines of, she doesn't really know what to call them, temporary structures lined up along each edge atop it and in some cases underhanging beneath to give more storage space and square footage. It seems they're like tents, or a scaffolding of pipes and wood and canvas, or one of those odd shrink wrapped building sites that have been popping up lately in the past few years, only taken to their ultimate logical extent. Without saying why, she would be willing to bet that they are perfectly sound and completely safe. Possibly it's the way they don't so much as sway or ripple in the wind, exhibiting not the slightest relative movement.

There's also something about them that reads shop, or market, they way they have signs and free colourful banners attached, admittedly in shades more attuned to the sethura eye. Various plants have been deliberately cultivated to grow and drape down over the sides, in some cases in truly enormous hanging baskets, disguising the dated utilitarian look of the underlying structure. Once the bridge was no longer needed for traffic, it seems to have been infested by mercantile growths like some ancient bronze-age stacked-stone river crossing, moss and mold overtaking the mortar beneath the money-changers booths.

The shadows beneath the preserved underpass, and all of the plants and historic walkways, make for plenty of cover initially, but less as they approach the lowest point between the ridges, where another road at right-angles has lent itself to the preserved outline of a shopping district, a cast of the original preserved in another material long after the fact, they are forced to try and use those broader awnings which seem to be a hallmark of the style for continued shelter from the skies.

"I sure hope you know where you're going," claims Cleo skeptically, as Sethkill indicates with a hand gesture that they should cross the long open alley formed by the old road, which still seems to act as an entry and exit point for vehicles to get in and out and pick up deliveries, assuming she understands the signage right. Her translation software is getting better, using her subconscious as its neural net to learn meaning and assign it, and some of the sethura text is now accompanied by speed and vector assertions that seem to be intended to allow the drivers to make navigational decisions in the trickier shared environment of final set-down.

Please keep clear is the same in any language, and gets written in the same place.

"Time to see the sights. Most exciting tourist attraction!" explains Sethkill, with a look of absolute conviction and certainty. He makes an incomprehensible hand gesture which seems to be sethura for 'everything is cool' and which would dislocate the average human hand.

"Oh, well that's all right then," says Terrowne optimistically. "Now is definitely the time for a sight seeing tour. Nothing has tried to kill us in almost half an hour."

"Why do I get the feeling I am about to be taken for a ride?" sighs Cleo. She manages to imply all sorts of things without ever saying them with the phrase, given that she is often taken by strange werewolves for one sort of ride late at night to remote places, and then for another sort of ride on whatever dirty pack-den mattress is available. Admittedly it's hardly safe but it thrills her.

Sethkill perks up visibly. "Yes! Taken for a ride! Excellent shortcut! Get out of the city and see the countryside!" He seems relieved that they have understood him.

"See, he has a plan."

"Yeah, if only we knew what it was.

"Well, he's making more sense than he was..."

After a bracing and swiftly casual stroll across the road, trying to look unobtrusive and attract no attention in case high-altitude whatever has been re-tasked, they get back under the awnings on the other side of the old road and head up along the valley floor, expertly leveled at some stage to the point where the upward incline is barely noticeable, millimeters in the length of city blocks.

The occasional wedge-shaped StormFront fast flyer still carooms overhead, circling around in sweeps to try and pick them up, silent except for the unavoidable wake displacement of air being pushed around them as they accelerate and maneuver. There are occasional distant sonic booms as one of the flyers ascends rapidly upward to break the speed of sound above some legally mandated level and then levels off to hurtle away, redeployed to another part of the city or perhaps just to take a short break and trade off shifts, but the main part of what can't really be called a battle has moved off toward the Srenen waterfront, the Walking Fish engaging the StormFront units intermittently with its rattling base cannons and a limited supply of scavenged and launchable weapons.

If the Fish has even a tiny part of the same powers as the Dragon, they may find it a lot harder to stop than they think, constantly lucky, always moving at just the right moment for them to miss an easy target. Terrowne, considering the tactics he would employ, thinks that the Fish is drawing off the enemy and will allow itself to be backed up against the river, then drop into the purple waters and engage some sort of cavitation boost mode with the bass cannons to zip upstream, exploiting the fact that the Srenen is a broad commercial waterway and can't really be mined or have hunter seekers dropped into it en masse without creating all manner of havoc. They'll have no choice but to split up and try and cover as much of the rivers branches, tributaries and ancient piping as they possibly can, chasing after the bigger threat.

Sethkill leads them up to a peculiar road feature which can be seen, from the remaining outlines of its original shape, to have been intended to somehow divert the entirety of the traffic from the main road off into four narrow-lanes, which proceed directly toward a particularly steep section of the cliff-face of the opposite ridge, between the support pillars of the bridge standing hugely to either side. It's built as though it was a tunnel, but the whole circular face of it has been sealed off with a wall of solid concrete of some kind, abruptly intersecting all four lanes so they go nowhere.

In the very center at the bottom, a pair of small double-doors, and Cleo is starting to get a certain sort of vibe from this tunnel-that-isn't. As they descended the slope before, they headed off at an angle away from the bridge, and then by traversing the main road, ended up directly under it once again. By being where it is, the tunnel is directly under the bridge, on land already owned by some transport department, avoiding the inconvenience and expense of commercial purchase.

It smells of civic bureaucracy and the questionable allocation of funds, plus something else that she can't quite place yet. Apparently even an advanced future city can fall foul of planning failures on occasion, which she finds oddly heartening, given that pretty much the rest of the entire thing gives her a slight sense of inadequacy on behalf of what's mostly her species.

There is signage on the tunnel, above the double-doors and posted to the sides, but it's added on and clearly an extra to the original design, whatever it was. Nothing translates except something that seems to be a list of visitor opening times.

The bridge and the stands of plants built up on their terraces of bark, combined with the shops that have crowded in from either side to try and take over an unoccupied parking and sales space, are excellent cover and it's easy to get up to the wall, which hums.

Wait, what?

Yes, the entire wall hums. Cleo leans up against it in passing and is startled by resonance through her shoulder, then puts her ear up against it and listens. It's slightly warm and makes a low sound like powerful engines far away. She touches it like a safe-cracker, dextrous pads using up the same skills that make her such a terrible weapon of war or redeeming lover.

"There's something in here."

Sethkill, meanwhile, has waited until clear skies, and has then wandered calmly over toward the more reasonably scaled double doors in the center of the four empty lanes, and is trying to get inside somehow. Exactly what he's doing is confusing in the same way lock-breaking tactics of any era would be confounding to the one before, as the surprisingly easy way in is only apparent after someone figures it out later. There's no visible anything, not even a control surface.

Either he already has or knows how to fake some sort of access, or possibly has visited this place before and spotted a weakness in the security. Maybe he's even legitimately allowed to visit it for some reason. Either way, there's a clunk as some sort of heavy clamp or bar disengages, the door swinging open boringly on one side.

Cleo is disappointed. She was hoping that it would slide aside in some cool way, like the airlock style doors on the Temple Of Life in ancient Khem. Unfortunately lowest bidder government work is the same everywhere and this is both cheap and really old, judging by the actual concrete, plus the fact that there are real hinges.

Inside it's, well, dark. They duck inside swiftly under Sethkills outstretched arm, then he lets the door swing closed fully and lock again, before switching on the lights.

The space revealed is absolutely huge. The lights start coming on sequentially one at a time, and it just doesn't stop, a line of illumination coming up and then running on and on into the distance until it disappears around a curve somewhere far, far away. The air is sort of still, the held breath of a huge underground space waiting to pounce...

Where exactly did that thought come from?

The space around them is, decides Cleo, much like an industrial museum, or an airport departure lounge. A much larger space has been partitioned to make it more human, or in this case sethura, but the outlines of something bigger remain. There are displays and diagrams and pictorials with text, all on free-standing screens designed to fill up the space, and an assortment of potted plants, probably of selected species that that grow quite happily in the dark, to keep the air fresh, at least at this end. Large blocky pieces of solid-state machinery sit about enigmatically on the floor with slots and sections cut out of them to allow the visitor to examine how they work, which would be more helpful if she could make heads or tails out of them.

A second inner wall partially blocks the view of the main tunnel, but it only goes up a little higher than her head and the rest is unobstructed, with an inner door that is open, unsealed. To either side a smaller room is attached to the wall, and around the inner door is what looks a lot like the classic metal detector and body scanner seen at an airport.

Experimentally she leans through it and it makes detection noise as it notices that her chassis has been upgraded 'with better headlights and an improved roll-cage' as they once put it to her. Sethkill quite gently but firmly grabs her by the shoulder and pulls her back out of it.

"Okay, museum of ancient tunnels," Terrowne summarizes. "Now what?"

Apparently inspired by their earlier understanding of what he was trying to say, Sethkill goes all out to try and make it clear. The fact that it involves engineering and has a specialized vocabulary associated with it seems to help, since it limits the range of all possible word choices.

There are also plenty of props for him to point to.

"Early experiment in higher-dimensional conduits," he explains, indicating a diagram that mostly resembles an aggressive squid surrounded by glyphs it is trying to grab or possibly eat. He seems to be attempting to translate. "Mistakes were made! They should not have attempted to fry bacon naked! It was unwise!"

"...and there goes the brief window of sanity."

Sethkill moves the next display. "Many apprehensions that the length of the conduit should match the distance covered. Clearly wrong! Zeno's paradox all over the place. Subjective failed!"

The second display features an unidentifiable chunk of what might once have been a transport vehicle of some kind, only it has been folded up like a pretzel, despite having no visible damage of any kind. Not a single crack or scratch mars the perfectly polished surfaces.

"It is bad news to be a fast-moving metal object in here?" guesses Cleo, after a long pause while they try to figure out what the hell he is on about. She's utterly confounded until she remembers the metal detector and puts all the unrelated angles together.

Sethkill ear-flicks delightedly, excited that he is getting better at communicating again. He moves happily on to exhibit three, which shows a descending graph and a group photo.

"No credits remaining. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars!"

"And they pulled funding for it, obviously, because you couldn't drive through it without getting turned into a heap of scrap," Terrowne concludes.

"Wait, we're going through there?"

"Oh yes yes yes!"

"But I am absolutely loaded with metal bits."

"No running on the side of the Bradbury swimming pool. Please proceed with caution."

"Is it just me, or is it terrifying that I'm starting to understand him?"

Terrowne, meanwhile, is thinking hard and eventually makes a guess on his own. "You came here as some sort of training thing, didn't you? You were going to be part of the crew for a ship which transits between realities, so they bought you here to experience what it was like. And they never fixed it, because it was cheaper to leave it in place than to untangle whatever mistake they made, so here you have a sort of ready-made training tool just waiting to be turned on."

Sethkill looks suitably enigmatic.

"And that's why their security is non-existent and you were able to get through the door so easily. There's nothing to steal and you have some sort of lifetime pass that was never revoked."

"It is time to activate the machine!"

"What? Oh, yeah, we need to turn it on. I'm guessing that it exploits geometric extensibility, so the tunnel is as long as it needs to be to reach the destination?"

"That way which can be spoken of is not the path of the way."

"I'll take that as a yes. Where's the on switch?"

"Two pierced nipples to pull on and a hot dripping pussy to ride."

"Oh, how very sweet of you Sethkill. You're such a charmer!" exclaims Cleo, flitting her eyelashes at him and patting his shoulder affectionately, without missing a beat.

Sethkill patiently points to either end of the room, where behind the free-standing exhibits, two recessed white ladders set into the walls extend upward into the tunnel roof.

"Yes, I know it's not his fault. Some neurological conditions lead to loss of impulse control and an increased likelihood of the sexually explicit. I've lived just as long as you have, remember?"

Although, she notes to herself, it's interesting that he just said two, instead or four or six, which are equally relevant numbers if you're a sethura. It's almost word for word the content of a simple pornographic ad she once read in the back pages of a copy of Wayfare magazine sometime during the late nineties, text-only but all the more intriguing for it. Eventually she'd caved and spent a lot more than she'd expected for eight surprisingly exciting billed minutes, which is why the wording has kind of stuck in her mind since. Maybe he's picking up on it somehow?

Ah, good old Wayfare. 'We accept ass, gas, or grass'. A publication devoted entirely to naked girls, motor sports, and smoking whatever you could get your hands on - but mostly naked girls. It's a shame they've gone entirely digital these days, she was only one dick away from being their target demographic (instead of one click, as is now the case).

"Perhaps as in mechanical engineering?" Terrowne prompts. "Plenty of suggestive terms in there. All those male-to-female connectors, pipes getting laid and holes being drilled-"

"-but it sure does sound dirty, doesn't it?" Cleo appends, sounding obscurely satisfied.

"Yelp if we press the big red self-destruct button," Terrowne suggests to Sethkill with a sigh, and heads over to the far ladder to take a look for himself.

Since he's taken that one, it leaves her with the nearer ladder behind the opening sequence of the exhibits. The two seem completely identical, with nothing to distinguish between them, not even any sort of sign or label, white rungs in good condition and cleanly enameled, ascending up into a plain flat-polished metal trapdoor. Like the rest of the tunnel, they seem to embody very primitive industrial utility and there is no advanced technology visibly involved.

She climbs the ladder with ease and pushes open the trapdoor, which stops at the vertical and up against the wall to keep it out of the way. Above is a control room of sorts, also very minimalist in its layout, with some fairly basic control panels, display screens, and the sethura version of a chair which makes allowances for folding up an extra setting of knees and resting them comfortably on a soft padded fore-surface. The control room duplicates the low wall and windows above design of the main room below, so she can see out into the tunnel from the operators positions, and if she looks sideways, there's a view across a small gap into the opposite control room on the other side, with Terrowne looking about at the controls in exactly the same way she is now.

They each spot one another at the same time and he throws her a quick wave of the hand.

When she looks down at an empty space on the floor, also brushed bare metal, that seems like it should have something occupying it, she rapidly spots exactly what Sethkill was talking about. It's a series of several circular grooves in the floor, each one out proportionately closer to the next as the circumference becomes wider. Attached to the innermost circle is a thick metal ring, perfectly sized for grabbing and pulling on, that stands perfectly upright in its rest position because of the way its base is recessed into a groove in the second circle out.

It's perfectly and simply functional, and just happens to look exactly like the outline of a pierced nipple with a steel surgical ring through it if you're that way inclined. Obviously you're supposed to grab the ring and pull it upwards to turn on whatever power source drives it, like pulling up an absorption rod in a fission reactor, only far more manual.

She sees Terrowne looking down at the same point in the floor in the opposite room, where there must of course be another identical ring. It has to be a safety interlock, requiring two operators to pull on it simultaneously to prevent accidents.

As she leans over close to it she gets a fright, when she feels a tug at the flesh of her chest, but it's only on the outside. Initially she thinks her own nipple ring has somehow ironically caught up on something, maybe the inside of her vest, but then she realizes that there's something resembling a magnetic field being exerted upward in a straight line directly above the innermost circle, that pulls inward toward the center point. The field is impossibly constrained and, in fact, downright impossible to begin with, given that the set she's currently wearing are her favourite heavy rings, biased oval loops inside loops with a rippling tactile pattern down the outsides, modified out of a pair of solid silver earrings by a little judicious polishing and smoothing.

They shouldn't even have a significant magnetic moment, and yet she can feel it pulling stridently on her skin. The device must generate the field as an incidental side-effect of its operation. Lucky she accidentally swung a tit out over it first, before it could grab at something more substantial.

The other ring and her reinforced ribcage and sternum do not seem to be affected, despite being, by definition, closely nearby. She carefully pulls back away and then, conscious that she is wasting time and that Terrowne is probably expecting her to match his motions any second now, unclasps the top of her vest and experiments. The force of the pull is enough to drag the ring out to a more horizontal orientation, and lifts her entire breast up by the nipple to stretch it outward from her body when she pulls away. Sethkill has been right twice now.

She draws her sword discreetly and tests with the effect with that as well, observing with interest as this peculiar thing pulls at it, trying to keep her eye on both the blade and the unseen point of attraction at the same time. The result is like playing tag with refrigerator magnets and inevitably the sword is suddenly dragged in point first, until she uses both hands to pull it free again, having successfully determined the outer perimeter. This is one possessive anomaly.

Curiosity satisfied and cheap thrills enjoyed, she tucks herself back in and carefully stands to one side, extending her tail downward to hook it under the ring. There's a little biocompatible alloy in there, an extension of the far more heavily reinforced vertebrae that link her major spine, but still nowhere near as much as there is in the rest of her torso and chest. She could probably pull out if she accidentally stepped directly into the field, but better safe than sorry.

The least furred, terminal part of her tail before the tuft at the end has little concealed skin ridges built into it beneath that fur, and an improved tactile sensitivity, meaning that she can accurately wind it around things and pick up reasonably sized items, or correct her course as it trails around things when she moves. But having a bare patch at the end of her tail where the fur has worn off is something she finds personally unattractive, so she keeps this human-disconcerting usage to a minimum, except for small things when she's at home.

Today it may come in handy, providing not too much force is required to activate the mechanism. She shares several quick glances with Terrowne, so they can synchronize their shared efforts, and then draws upward, pulling out a couple of feet of fine chain after the ring, like a belt-fastened key holder, before it finally catches and the central circle rises up, followed after a couple more inches by the surrounding disc, and then finally the broadest one after that.

It's very well balanced, really, and only a minimal effort is required, as soon as both sides are now in motion. She releases the ring and it just hangs there, a slightly confounding behaviour until she realizes that all of the links in the chain are being forcibly aligned with the center, which means that none of them can tip sideways to allow the whole thing to fall down. It just sits there like it was floating instead.

The faint humming pervasive to the room, noticed earlier when leaning on the external wall, has increased as they raised the interlock, and the system appears to be active and powering up. Cleo watches with interest through the main observation window, as what she can only describe as a flaw develops against the length of the tunnel just beyond the metal-detector frame. It's as though reality was just an image from an old silent film, shot in beautiful monochrome, and the projector is now burning through it to show colour and depth. She blinks, unable to process the effect, and the tunnel stretches itself out, becoming longer and shorter and twisting itself into varying curves until it settles, like a self-coiling garden hoses extending as it fills with water.

The whole thing retains a certain dream-like significance that makes it difficult to look away, and she finds herself still watching it until her line of sight is cut off by the floor when descending the ladder again. Little details like the repeating, slightly curved geometric panels of the tunnel walls, or the way the lights form a perspective line against the roof, are imbued with false importance, certain mesmerizing brightness and sharpness compared to everything else.

The faint tugging re-occurs, but this time through all of her, in the direction of the opened flaw.