This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
No part of the work may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.
Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
ionfyr.net
Also: I might have missed some bits in copying it from my writing platform–Nila’s POV–so, forgive me and or let me know which episode it was where we last left Nila. Remember, this is only a draft.
(From when Nila gets to Pool’s Island)
After the car was beyond line-of-sight comms with Londbridge’s traffic control systems, punctuated with a faint beep from the car’s panel, everything became quiet. The screens outside showed a light grey sky over a darker grey throbbing ocean.
To the faint but rapid patter of light raindrops on the forward and upper surfaces of the car, she drifted off into sleep.
Initiated by the occurrences of the previous day her mind summoned up her own past trauma.
When she was a young teen, she and her friends sat in the dark watching projections streamed into their visual cortexes through gaming symb-jacks, watching internal lower-res holograms of the chaos above taking place on the roofs of the district’s taller housing blocks, far above the toxic smog below.
Food and housing prices hadn’t risen with what wages there were available and workers, including their parents, shook their collective fists at the vast floating behemoths in the sky, the notorious skyships, which represented and projected the power of the World Congress of Commerce.
Nothing helpful would come of it; the powers-that-be could not care less, for the protests on the rooftops. Automation would keep production going, and any jobs that required human hands or minds were easily filled from the vast pool available.
…
The car chimed in the distance, getting louder as Nila awoke and wiped the sleep from her eyes and brushed her matted hair from her face.
Ahead, ten klicks out and approaching rapidly was a small green and grey speck in a blue-grey sea, the sun glinting off high-glaciers (even in late summer) from a low sun, hanging in the southern sky.
Though she had programmed the car to head for the coordinates she had been given by the entity–was she even sure it was human…AI–the car’s map, glowing on the central panel on the dash, was entirely blank. The forward view of the outside, however, definitely showed an island ahead, green against the grey ocean with several craggy peaks rising up, the dead husk of a long extinct volcano.
Nila refreshed the map-screen and yet still nothing but waves. She checked the data again, and it showed the same contours as everywhere else within hundreds of kilometers. Despite the lack of island, the latitude and longitude were scrolling rapidly to the preset coordinates; even if the destination weren’t in the vehicle’s database, the car would arrive shortly to the location where it should exist.
Out of curiosity, and after slowing the car considerably, Nila squirmed and straightened her right leg. Her extended fingers found the hollow cylinder there, a fat ring of wear-polished brass and gold, out of place against the plastic and steel of the car.
Magic rings were rather uncommon on Terra in these days of the 23rd century. This is not to say there weren’t others out there, but if there were Nila had only seen the five she and her friends had come across, and that wasn’t even this century.
She and her friend Pool, while traveling to Siberia in the 19th century had come across, and by “come across” we mean stole, five gold rings, larger in diameter than a typical human finger, certainly larger than her own slender digits, that, it turned out, were a kind of alien technology. Through experimentation, it was discovered that each of the rings had a specific set of functions, and Nila, out of place in the wrong century could activate these functions the same way she could interact with external wireless drives, through her implants and willful commands.
The rings because of their size were mounted on two long rings–two on one, three on the other–that fit Nila’s index fingers. She had the three-ring one now. The other was in safe-keeping elsewhere due to its impractical and more dangerous nature. Her Hunnish friend had dubbed the long-ring holders “nyereg”, meaning “saddle”.
She slipped it on her finger.
View-map -local
Before her, visually overlapping the interior of the car, imprinted on her vision rather than real space, appeared a map of the locality. A point identified the car, and more importantly, a topographical simulation of the island lay in the center of the representation.
It always amazed her how the strange alien tech managed to bring in details that it shouldn’t even be aware of, things that in Terra’s most modern devices would require a great deal of complexity. They had never dissected one of the rings for fear that it would be an irreversible endeavor, so how the things worked was essentially unknown to them. Even some of the functions were barely known.
Add-tags -map-view
One such detail that Nila just couldn’t quite wrap her mind around, was how the damned thing knew the identity code of Luc’s car. The real one as well as the spoofed on. She knew that if she zoomed in enough, she’d be able to see herself sitting inside.
The island had a number of moving dots, all looking like anthromorphs, none like living humans. There was a building complex located in a narrow valley between mountains, situated amidst what looked like ruins, artificial structures built and rebuilt over previous, and out of previous incarnations.
Nila had been focusing on the minute details of her ring-derived map, her face showing concentration and straining to see and analyze what lay ahead (all of it splayed across her visual cortex). She zoomed the image in and scrolled around, looking at the island from different directions and from above, looking at the structure from different angles. So caught up in the small details and indeed the level of detail the ring-map provided, she did not initially notice the name given to the island.
Floating in space, and in her own Brethmanic standard dialect (Nila theorized that it would be portrayed in any user’s native language), was the name of the island.
Pool’s Island.
The dissonance of the coincidence took a bit to settle. Pool’s Island. What!?
The likelihood that this island–an island that did not show up on standard vehicle maps–would share a name with her friend was pretty damn small.
At this point Nila did not know of her friend’s activities, and to speak of current activities when time travel could be involved was both difficult and confusing. Her understanding was that Constable Blackwood Aristophanes Pool was in the 19th century, but she did not know what he was doing then, or when this island acquired its name.
She dropped the velocity of the car to zero. It hung 50 meters over the wave tops, unmoving except for compensating for the push of the wind and rain.
She couldn’t risk connecting to the Net from the car, even if she were within wireless range. Light-node relays did not exist on the open ocean and she was many kilometers from the nearest transit routes (which roughly matched intercontinental cables).
Nila turned, ring still on her finger and map still hanging in her brain and reached through the waves behind her, pulling her rucksack from the depths. It passed through the holographic seascape into clearer view.
Inside, she pushed the stubby steel barrel of her bullpup out of the way, and felt around underneath, beneath her bunched up change of clothes. Then she felt around the side of the pack, rough plasticized canvas against her knuckles until her fingers found the internal side pocket.
It was slender. A black and shiny faceted finger-sized object. One of her external drives, the one she remembered, or thought she remembered saving some encyclopedia to.
Access-drive -local | Search-contents -EncyclopediaBrethmanica -*Pool’sIsland
In a confusing flurry, streaming files and folders flooded her vision, superimposed on the map of the island which still hung in space.
NO FILES FOUND. MOST LIKELY RELATED ITEM: ON THE SUBJECT OF OCEANIC LEVIATHANS IN THE NORTHERN ATLANTIC, B.A.POOL, 58 PAGES, PUBLISHED BY ARTEMIS HOUSE, LONDBRIDGE, 1887 (OLD CALENDAR)
Well, fuck, she thought. Pool was here. But why?
She turned off the external drive and dimmed the map, but left it up.
The car accelerated through the wind and grey rain toward the island, toward whatever that building was.
…
Nila unrolled her black raincoat. It was more a poncho than a coat, and draped over her leather jacket. She had the Kopf-Heckler strapped over her shoulder, magazine in.
The car was set down unevenly on a sort of beach of white and blueish grey head-sized boulders interspersed with smaller rubble from the mountains which loomed above and blocked much of the sky.
A long rusted remnant, the skeleton of something lay strewn across the ground, along the beach around the frigid milky blue water of the small lake.
In the shadows of the cliff, the spray from the waterfall clung in sheets of ice to the face, above the decaying intake of some sort of hydroelectric system. This system butted up against the hodge-podge cylindrical construction opposite.
The windowless mixture of stone and steel and aluminum rose a hundred meters and aside from its shape blended well with the backdrop.
Nila looked around. The air looked clear.
The chill she could feel on her cheeks, below the cup of her goggles spread to her nose and chin when she dropped the breather down to her neck. Clean air.
She took a deep breath. Enjoying the shock of the air running through her nose.
As an afterthought, she slipped into a cleft in the rock face, likely out of view of any facing cameras–though anyone concerned about security would have covered this angle as well. The cleft was barely a meter deep, out of the wind and would generally obscure her for a few moments while she did what she should have done before even landing on the island.
The book was definitely in Pool’s voice: meticulous details and attention to minutia, that latter spilling over into child-like excitement at times. She could picture him hunched over his damned notebook, scribbling with his stumpy pencil like an eight year old.
He was an awkward and sometimes bumbling man, uptight in a way that only the Victorian period could spawn, but brilliantly analytical, and in his own way, noble.
Details scrolled past in her mind. A mechanical thinking machine! Interesting. There was no way it could be like modern AIs (which were all but extinct–restricted, banned, that sort of thing.
The Congress–the World Congress of Commerce as usually rendered in Brethmanic Standard, WCC for short–had fought and won a war against the AI, or a collection of Artificial Intelligences years ago. “Because they were intent on destroying humanity or controlling it or modifying it–the stories differ from one another and some times contradict, but the overall point made by the WCC’s propaganda wings, was that they were bad and the WCC was the best salvation of all possible salvations.
Mere bands of revolutionaries, holed up in the jungles and swamps and frozen mountains could not make headway against the dreaded AI. Unplugging didn’t work because it was everywhere technology was, and by the gods, people needed their technology.
The real problem, she thought, was that it wasn’t so much that the AI was efficient at taking over and running things, but that it was in competition with the then-nascent WCC, depriving its world-spanning syndicate of humans of power, influence and, of course, loads of money.
NIla skimmed over Pool’s descriptions of sea creatures–she knew they fascinated him (again, the little boy) but unless the thinking machine road them around like mythological whales, then they were irrelevant to this adventure).
[make AI driven leviathans relevant in this story]
Blah blah blah, mechanical thinking machine… Pool’s description of his interaction with the thing, and that of this dead captain’s was not terribly helpful, although, through Pool’s description, it obviously made an impression on him.
He wrote towards the end of the piece, which by that point had changed subject from sea creatures to clockwork AI monsters chasing him down the mountain toward the beach, in a way that gave her the impression that he was talking directly to her. There was no mention of how he actually got off the island. Clearly he had gotten off. The book was published in Londbridge.
On my descent from the lair of the mechanical device, fleeing the minions, I would like to have had in my possession a repeating rifle, or, perhaps, prior to that, in its cold and dusty company, a means for peering deeply into its mind in order to discern its true motivation.
Well, it certainly sounded like Pool, she thought. “Repeating rifles and computer interfaces…” well, that sounds a lot like me.
…It is unfortunate, but my pack was not complete, with my other notebook was left behind due to the abruptness of my flight, along with some other, easily replaced equipment. I should have liked to have kept references, indeed, more of the material related to the captain and the construction of the device. It was fascinating to me to communicate with it. I would have stayed with it for longer, had its schemes become known, and despite my planned departure.
At home, in Londbridge or Tesifon, Nila would have switched on her connected-camera view, wired into her visual cortex, which would show the angles and ranges of cameras in the vicinity. Unfortunately, this place, this island was completely unconnected, or at least extremely well shielded from the rest of the Net, and, she herself was cut off at the moment.
So much of her personal gloss, those things she took for granted in the information bath of the home cities was missing here. She had only her hardware–modded eyes, some other minor augments, and her tools, the weight of the Kopf-Heckler.
Nila, done with her lurking in the shadows–skimming Pool’s book only took a few seconds–scanned the gravel shore of the icy lake.
A scan of the wireless bands surprised her.
It shouldn’t have. She shouldn’t have assumed that because the island wasn’t connected to the rest of the world, it wouldn’t be its own network.
The signals were unfamiliar and foreign. While the anthromorph that had led her on and in, back in Londbridge had communicated using recognizable prompts, here the vibe of the system was just strange, as if it had developed in isolation.
So, Pool left behind a notebook, she thought, imagining what havoc it would have played with him. He’s so anal.
She glanced around the edge of the wall, cheek against the frigid, sharp edge of the basalt face.
The structure wedged into the crevasse at the end of the narrow pool of ice-blue water was strangely camouflaged. Panels of aluminum had been arranged in a way that matched the texture of the surrounding rockfaces, so with the grime of years and lichen it would have been indistinguishable from a distance.
A small waterfall fell and splashed over an ancient and derelict waterwheel.
Nila looked up, imagining satellites peering down, or ships off-course drifting over. Would they see anything below?
Somehow, she thought not. The island itself seemed to not exist on official maps, and it was only her rather unnatural map that it appeared.
Weird, but really, non of that matters at the moment. I was invited.
Nila stepped out of the natural alcove and walked to what she imagined to be the front door, stepping over strangely grave-sized mounds arranged in rows on the way.
The large and jagged stones, ranging from pebbles up to ball-court masses, were in no way comfortable, though she could detect a long-past winding route–now lichen covered–meandering through the cold stones.
She approached the front door with the Kopf-Heckler out and draped across her chest, with her hand on the grip.
The wall was metal, lichened covered remains of more than the local dirigible carcass. Decades or centuries of grime covered the formerly smooth and glistening surfaces, turning them a dull gray, not unlike the natural stone walls of the chasm surrounding her.
The path–not hers, but the meandering one from long ago–approached the structure’s wall, but still with no door apparent.
She approached until her boots were on the ancient path.
“Hello,” she said, in normal voice at first, then repeating it louder.
The “door” moved inward, into the structure, as if on mechanical pivots that kept it’s face parallel but moving back and to the left.
She was not expecting it.
An anthromorph stood in the gate. Not the plastic servant types that oligarchs [olegarchs] keep as house slaves; this one was different.
Nila had been around anthromorphs before: autonomous, roughly humanoid mechanical robots, essentially. Some were better than others, having a more human form, as opposed to the clunky military bots. Others were distinctly human in appearance (though for the very long ban on AI development, the appearance was only very superficial: sexbots and the like, for example).
This one was different: it was not trying to be a stand-in for a human person. Yes, clearly, it had humanoid form and features, but it was alien. For one thing, it was metallic with visible cogs and probably fewer glowing internal bits than the one, Ares-like, anthromorph she was vaguely familiar with (if you can call the remote costume of a now-dead, former arms dealer she used to know, “familiar”.)
Take a human form, anthroporphised [obviously the author meant anthropomorphized, but I’m leaving this in the draft because the idea of a thing made into a man-porpoise was at least a little funny] and androgenized, and rid it of both mammalian evolution and aesthetics, then make it from aluminum and brass and bronze (were those old-fashioned coins showing in it’s …breast plate (for lack of better words)?) Then, stick a bunch of glowey glass bits in it and what look to be absolutely fantastic lenses (from a salvaged surveillance vehical) for eyes. This was what met her, it’s two meter’s standing well over her.
“Take me to your leader,” she snorted.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The response to her slightly nervous greeting, took her aback. First of all, she had never been called ma’am before, except by Pool, and then, it wasn’t even a word that was used in modern times, and she could possible spell it the way the benighted rubes of the 19th and 20th centuries did.
It turned its back, leading her inward.
Ion Fyr 