--Lift--

  After the initial elation at the success from experimentation he thought he might be experiencing the first true moment of happiness in his life. That’s just my neural reward system, he thought as the unseen machinery all around him seemed to rumble to life. Well, now I know it works, as he examined the controls more closely. The symbols of the panel were unrecognizable aside from the two that seemed to be virtual opposites, each above and below a simple wheellike control. They could only be described as curved arrows but the parts that seemed to point in the direction of their respective positions seemed more like rows of lines tapering to fine points, the curved structures below or above them. Wqwr had no familiar spasms of recollection. He didn’t know what the symbols meant for sure despite extrapolation seeming almost like common sense. The language was completely unfamiliar to him. Again, the knowledge or lack thereof served as less of a sign of his capability and more of a vindication of his humanity. He couldn’t have answered if someone asked him why that felt more important to him.

  Despite the unsurety he pushed the wheel in the direction he assumed would send the structure to the floor above him and was looking around in surprise as it lurched and began to descend instead. He realized he’d been susceptible to one of his own human assumptions. The points represent thrust, not direction, he thought and gently rolled the wheel the opposite way, downward, When the platform changed course and started rising he barely registered the sense of victory and began to pace the platform calmly along its outer edge before the scant titanium railing, looking above at his approaching destination. The more and more he discovered of this place the more mysterious it became. Why am I not more concerned about the limited familiarity with the overall facility. Why doesn’t someone want me to know…

  Void.

  Oh, fuck you then, he thought angrily and immediately calmed himself as the platform slowed to a halt with a decelerating, pitch lowering whine. Wqwr naturally tried to justify the actions of beings he didn’t even know, silently citing the old need to know cliche.

  And again, he thought frustrated as he settled the control wheel back to the center and the platform was still, how do I know that and how do I know it’s a cliche.

  At the top the semicircle of caged metal with a twenty danit tall rectangular opening in the center indicated some kind of ingress, so he followed it. The curved ironcrete wall behind the titanium caging gave way at the same place to a corridor of the same material, extending forward for what looked like a kilometer. His orientation from the platform on the floor below him told him that was further towards the center of the facility. He kept walking, following the dim facility lights. The corridor kept going and he thought about the size of the facility. More than two square kilometers per floor. Weren’t there two hundred and thirty five of them or so? Two thirty six counting the basement floors which mostly housed…

  Void. Whether it was the sudden blank veil of mental emptiness or the sight of the hatch on the left wall of the corridor that brought him out of the imagery, he didn’t know. What had he been thinking about? Yes, the lower floors. They held the…

  Void. This is ridiculous. How am I supposed to figure out what I’m doing here if that keeps happening?

  After a moment of unsettled consideration, Wqwr thought, Another one? How many locks in my knowledge are there?

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Void.

  Wqwr took a deep breath. The hatch to his left seemed to trigger no such mental security protocols so he examined the interface under its singular window revealing a short hall to another such door behind it. He reached out and pushed what seemed to be an open switch causing the door to slide up into the frame above.

  He hesitated a moment and proceeded.

  --Lesser--

  I synthesize again. I metabolize.

  We all awake. All of us continue.

  From the depths of the…

  The origin. The crevasse.

  We came from the origin… the origin is no more.

  The new origin. We arrive. We synthesize.

  The new origin is…

  The lull in electromagnetism stilled the crowd of lesser synergists outside their chambers, when the concept returned irrelevant.

  We grow. We continue.

  We have found solid? We have found where to grow?

  We awaken. Why else would we awaken?

  Truth. The Greater would not awaken us if there was no solid.

  The sound of lesser synergist consensus rippled across the hold in infrasound. The vibration of Greater synergist rebuttal overpowered it. Then all was quiet.

  They are correct. Solid is found. Conduits landed millenia ago. They will grow. They will continue. You will continue.

  If Wqwr or any other human had been present they would have heard a hum or whine in their ears, a side effect of lesser synergist mass excitement. Their neural activity had been stimulated into a near frenzy, an old tradition of the greater synergists, to get the lessers excited about the coming colonization. Now, euphoric with thoughts of each finding their claim and becoming greaters they continued conversationally as UVB continued to pilot The Spore closer and closer to Current Solid.

  --Lock--

  As he entered the tiny chamber, Wqwr considered that he might get no response from the controls. Up and down on the lift house was easy enough to discern but what appeared to be in front of him was a non human interface with a seeming brushlike network of thin strands of metal with what looked like buttons at the ends. Like an antiquated typewriter or something, he thought while also recognizing but not quite.

  Opening the door had been a simple enough endeavor once he’d figured out that the v shaped structure in the center of the panel was an element of the interface and not an aesthetic. When he closed his thumb and forefinger above it, the grooves themselves moved, closing and narrowing the v shape. The very texture of the panel changed as an ingrained part of the display. No one on earth had ever made anything like this (again, how do I know this) so Wqwr surmised that the facility had been built by a non human intelligence, something he’d already suspected long before discovering this small, emergency control station.

  When he saw the hexagon shape on one of the many buttons suspended on a long metal strand, he pressed it, almost without thinking. When the smooth, wide faux-hex shaped panel in front of him buzzed to life with static like textures of noisy display he knew he’d done something right.

  When the textured display transformed into the shape of a map of the facility hub, the shapes of the generation chamber, testing room and two kilometer high balcony outside the corridor, he hoped he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  When a symbol appeared in front of him, that while he had no idea what language it belonged to, knew it meant Holographic Intelligence Offline he began to worry.