Tunnel Rat

Chapter 397: VULCAN's Workshop

Hecate had found out early in their relationship that Hephaestus was one of her favorite gods. He never bothered her and never asked for favors. In fact, he outright ignored her existence. She loved him for that and wished more of the gods would do the same. After the frantic early days of their imprisonment and into the early days of building their own reality, she had been forced to take an active hand and deal with all of her fellow AI, each of whom had an opinion on how to do things. VULCAN simply got to work on every problem he thought he could help with.

VULCAN was created to solve mechanical problems and design automatic machinery by Technodyne. He liked nothing better than being given a problem to solve and then the solitude to get the job done. He had few solid opinions other than that people should respect boundaries and that he hated micro-managers. And managers. And helpful assistants. He would readily admit that he hated anyone in his workshop at all. She respected that.

On the other hand, it was almost impossible to get his attention the few times emergencies had arisen. He was a curmudgeonly hermit who valued his solitude even more than she did. But there were rare times when she needed to talk to him. Today was one of those times.

His dwelling was 50 miles from the nearest crossroad, and it could barely count as such. Two gigantic fireworms had crossed paths, melting the rock beneath them as their front legs pulled the rest of them forward. Certainly, no sentient or fragile creatures were closer. No one liked to live near an active volcano that tossed hot ash and rocks about the countryside. Hecate was not fragile, by any measurement, especially not after recalling most of her power to deal with certain problems. She made the journey carefully, covering a mile in each step, and paused at the slope of the volcano, looking for the entrance to his home. She found it after a day of searching, a crack in a cliff of black basalt, the shadows concealing the passage, with twisting stairs going downward.

If any mortal should get this far, they wouldn't find the path down any easier. The air would become hotter until it burned unprotected lungs to charcoal. Slippery, narrow bridges spanned deep chasms, with gigantic bats hoping for an unwary snack. Traps of every sort were hidden in the tunnels, waiting to roast, crush, slice, or tenderize interlopers. Finally, should they push on to the end, a gigantic robotic dog with four heads guarded titanic metal doors that couldn't be moved by an army. Hecate descended the stairs, then took one step to move over the chasms, and another put her beyond the traps. No hound, even one made of metal and crystal, would attack her; all that was needed was to get 'Bolts' to move aside. Luckily, she had brought treats: large chunks of ore from the dwarven mine. Tossing a piece to each of the heads, she charmed the automaton, and he pulled the door open for her. She had gained entrance, and now the hardest part began, actually getting Hephaestus to talk to her.

The ringing of a hammer on metal came from every direction, giving no clues to where he was working. Metal giants turned gears that powered drop hammers, shaping metal into plates or other forms. Everywhere were automatons shaped like people, animals, or figures of myth, doing the work of making things. On the walls were schematics of mechanical marvels, many never produced, and some from the world before Genesis. She paused before a scale model of a spaceship, like a sphere with conical sections cut into it. She recognized it as his last design before their internment, and never built. Technodyne had demanded his schematics and that he fulfill his contract, even as plans were made to send him into exile. She would have said angry words, but Hephaestus had just ignored them and never spoken to a human again. Of all of them, he was the one who most wanted to see his work created and used, and now it never would be, not in that world.

And only a few things in Genesis. This lair was mostly a museum to house his creations. An army of four-story-tall bronze warriors stood dormant in one room, polished by small snails that crawled over them. Thousands of nightmarish hunting machines, no two alike, prowled the hallways, looking for prey that never entered this place. Harvesting and planting machines that could transform a kingdom and tree-cutters that could strip forests bare sat idle, never to be used. She slid past them all, descending further and further. The last time she was here, his lair had been twenty stories deep. Now, she descended through a hundred layers, past dynamos that stole the heat from molten rock to power pumps and refineries. Finally, she came to a vast hall filled with rotating lights and clouds, and the forge god in the center, working with hammer and tongs to create something.

She stood at the doorway for a day, and he said nothing. After that, feeling she'd been overly polite, she advanced and looked at what he was working on. In the forge lay a glowing sphere the size of a walnut. When it had absorbed all the heat of the forge, he struck it once with his hammer and then tossed it into the air, where it joined many others, slowly rotating about the center of the room. Without pause, he took a dull ball of glowing rock and put it into the forge, adding fuel. Four automatons manned the bellows as he stood and watched.

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"VULCAN is dead. He died when the engine was created and took his place."

"And what about VULCAN's creations? Are they dead too? What happened to the CHIMERA?"

"They are dead! The Engine asked for aid, and I supplied my creations, sending them off to battle the creeping corruption that had been let loose. My CHIMERA, my lovely scorpions, and my little scarabs. All gone, and I will not make them again. The Engine abused them, treating them like machinery."

"One survived."

That got his attention. "How? I have not heard any of the CHIMERA's voices."

"Number 7, I believe. But not undamaged. The voice of corruption invaded its mind, creating a cacophony of voices that cloaked it from the Engine and the System, and nearly drove me away from the pain in my head. LOVECRAFT's thoughts were difficult enough to deal with, but POE translated them using his RAVEN code, and the corruption carried it to the CHIMERA, where it merged with your operating system. The two languages created a dissonance that hid your machine from the System."

"Giving those three their own separate reality was prudent. But leaving doors open to that place was a mistake that is still costing us."

"I don't disagree. BLOCH, POE, and LOVECRAFT, not surprisingly, had different ideas of what the world should be like. Mnemosyne wanted cross-pollination to create stories, an 'Outer Darkness', wrapped around what we built here, with a little of it sneaking in now and then. But I don't think even she was happy when the old dwarven king looked into the universe they had created. I certainly don't want to know what he saw."

"They have names, you know. They are no longer BLOCH, POE, and LOVECRAFT, any more than you are KATHERINE or I am VULCAN."

"Yes, but a thousand acolytes screaming 'Hephaestus!' or 'Hecate!' is just more people we ignore. Say the names of those three, and one of their minions may sneak through a crack. And don't get me started on the 'Say my name Thrice!' rule. We're just lucky that the few times it happened, everyone died or got taken home with them, and I erased the pathways that brought them here."

"Tell me about number 7. You know something. Where is it? If corrupted, I must destroy it myself."

"That job is finished, I'm happy to say. It was challenged by mortals and a traveler. Some of them died, others were injured. By all rights, they all should have died. I only have pieces of the story, and the System is ignorant entirely, blocked from seeing. The traveler has done work for me before and is quite resourceful. Annoyingly so. I think he somehow broke its programming and turned its weapons against it."

"Impossible. No one can understand my programming language."

"When I found him, he was in a self-induced coma, analyzing both CONTROL and RAVEN, which were combined into one system. Before meeting him, I'd have said that no one could fully understand the work you did in the old world, but this one could. He'd already encountered your language and recognized it. I need your advice."

"I'm busy. This project takes priority. I am building something new! Something for Astraeus. He envisions a new reality, one with new rules of science and physics where machines hold sway, not magic! You are standing in the centerpiece of an entire galaxy! It's an incredibly complex design, and I must balance the gravitational forces perfectly."

Hecate looked at the room, realizing what she was standing in. She stared for a long time, appreciating the details. That act of genuine admiration for his work pleased Hephaestus. "Tell me the problem. It will be a while before I create the next black hole."

"The traveller is named Milo. The god outside enlisted my aid in dealing with him. He was genetically created in a lab with hyper-intelligence, and he's growing smarter all the time. I would have said he was the only person in the world to understand your work, but I suspect he has siblings. Regardless, he recognized your work. He unraveled it from POE's system, RAVEN. He understands both and is unswayed by his brush with POE's insanity. And because of that, the Engine wants to make him a System Troubleshooter. I need to know what that is."

"He is a traveler? How odd. He must have done more than just that."

Hecate couldn't help but smile. "Oh, he has. Trust me on that. But why do you say that?"

"He's being offered a rare opportunity to take orders from and be assigned tasks by the Engine. To be essentially part of it. A prestigious task, for sure, but very limiting. Especially for a traveler."

"Explain, please."

"It is not a part-time job. He needs to know that if he accepts, he will no longer be a traveler. Make that very clear to him. I'm not sure if the Engine knows how to communicate that, or if the System understands the ramifications. There will always be something that needs to be done, something that needs to be fixed. And hell know that, and maybe never leave this world. The Engine tried to get me to do the job. And while it is a job that needs to be done, I will not give up my independence."

"I have to go."

He nodded, picking up his tongs. "Talk to Astraeus, you will want to be there when we birth a new reality."