Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 42 - The Lost Tales
They were deep underground; earlier he had brought them to the entrance to a large cave with a ridged stone floor that sloped down into the darkness. Had he been using his human nose K-Rox would have smelled the stale sulphourous stench rising from a warren of subterranean tunnels leading down towards the guts of the planet.
Other Krusher9 bots flitted around the caverns in a whirl of hyperactivity, K-Rox watched as they carried and fetched various bits of weaponry to and from hidden destinations.
K-Rox watched as a bot that looked like a crab with too many legs sporting a vaguely humanoid body, scurried past the two of them carrying what looked like some kind of articulated phase cannon. As the metal arachnid passed the two of them, it pumped its legs causing it to shoot up forty-five metres silently and smoothly to the cave ceiling where it paused briefly hanging upside down, before dashing off into a previously unseen crevice.
He hadn’t noticed Amorphia sending out any thinCasts announcing them of his arrival, however none of the Krusher-bots seemed to mind his presence in their secret lair. K-Rox vaguely noticed that had he still been in game mode, he would have broadcast this position to his fellow drop team.
His awareness was drawn in towards the gel-filled sac in which he lay, as he remembered planet fall, hurtling towards the ground, the feeling of the Krusher virus ripping through his mind, synchronising itself with the QSID immersion. He remembered the sheer joy he felt as he screamed the attack to his comrades. Jemima’s incoming thinCast snapped his attention back to the salamander’s external sensors.
“Are you OK? You kind of drifted off there for a second.”
K-Rox took in their surroundings, they had come to a large open dome-shaped room which stretched far enough into the distance that he had to use the salamander’s infrared sensor range to see the far walls. The ceiling was a lot lower than the rooms from which they had entered, and K-Rox detected that the atmosphere was different in here.
“You can get out of the suit down here, the chamber is hermetically sealed and the atmosphere is nano-controlled to suit human-basic needs.”
K-Rox hesitated momentarily, the initial thought of leaving the salamander’s biomechanical womb filled him with apprehension. He felt a connection with his exoskeleton that he had never before experienced, K-Rox realised that it was the Krusher9 immersion codes that were making him feel that way.
The three-metre ceiling was too low to allow him to exit the suit in the usual way, so he flipped the salamander onto its back and coiled its tail towards the stomach.
As he did so a small section in the belly hissed and segmented open, at the same time dozens of nano-filaments started to detach from his body. It reminded K-Rox of the feeling of getting out of his immersion pod back home . . . which led him to think of his body lying in that very same pod a quarter of a billion kilometres away on the Central Pacific Island on planet earth.
The salamander’s belly lay flowered open leaving it looking like a high-velocity projectile, had pierced through it and left a huge exit-wound gaping in its middle. K-Rox stood up and emerged from the space, dressed only in carbo-stretch underwear, the thick liquid smart gel already filtering itself away from his body back into the salamander.
Jemima contemplated how vulnerable he looked as she watched the embryonic scene unfold in front of her, his soft organic body juxtaposed with the hard metal carapace of the exoskeleton.
“What is this place?”
He stood on the cavern floor in front of her, she now towered over him, before answering him Jemima folded her four legs and crouched down so that their heads were on a similar level.
“This is one of the recruitment stations, within the game some of the attacking forces are brought out of their fighting-trance and recruited to the home side. If you get this far, it’s where the whole point of Krusher9 is revealed.”
“Isn’t the point of the game obvious? Kill or be killed; right?”
“Not exactly Kay, the point of Krusher9 is to a large extent the reason you’re here now. It’s not a game K-Rox, it’s a symbol of a struggle that has been going on for two centuries and is still going on now, unseen and unheard as thousands of us toil away underneath the Qblock.”
K-Rox stared into her eyes, those same eyes that he’d stared into a thousand times before, as he tried to take in what she was saying to him.
“It’s a war K-bot, we are in the middle of a silent war and Asimov’s the key.”
Previous Chapters
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 41 - The Shadow Of Death
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 40 - The Ancient Path Of Memory
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 39 - The Reality Adjustment
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 38 - Vengeance Requiem
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 37 - A Life Less Lost
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 36 - The Quantum Paradox
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 35 - Identity Crisis
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 34 - The Devil's Advocate
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 33 - Memory Reparation
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 32 - Reclamation Inferno
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 31 - Memory Boot Initialised
Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30
Original artwork by @fr3eze
Original words by Cryptogee
@cryptogee, is it not dangerous for K-Rox to be out of his mechanical shell? The level of trust he has for Jemimah is incredible for him to come out of his shell while she still resides in hers.
What a tangled digital web we weave!
His trust is borne out of love, maybe he is being naive, maybe not . . .
Cg
"Stale sulphurous stench"
Nice Alitteration and Hendiadyoin. Your story is worth being read for the nice vocabulary and rhetorical eloquence alone.
But the story is the Heart of course, and the "silent" war and Krusher9 "game" very much resembles our current time period, I think. War doesn't necessarily involve weapons and uniforms, it can take place on many levels, and wars beyond the physical level very often can be much more devastating.
@cryptogee You have received a random upvote from @transparencybot for not using bidbots on this post and using the #nobidbot tag!
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asimov's ghost great book to read
by reading books reading skills increase which are most beneficial in this world nowadays