Chapter 3
Three
Proteus
The sea guided him to where his sacrifice had fallen into the void. He knew where to find it, even without her help. The goddess always wanted to make things easier for him, however, and he took her advice with all the pleasure of one who could still speak with a being like her.
She gave him the peace of mind to know that the gift left for him by that depthstrider would be helpful. He could feel it in his bones. But for some reason, the sea hid what it was from his mind.
How strange. He wasn't used to her hiding anything. This time, however, she merely allowed him to continue through the water until he was over an abyss. Deep and narrow, a canyon carved into the earth, disappearing beneath him. It was unlucky for any gift to end up all the way down there.
How could anything survive that fall? Frowning, he darted into the crevice, deeper and deeper toward the core of the sea.
It was warmer in these waters. Not the frigid wasteland where he had seen even ice growing on the ocean floor, no matter how much salt prevented its growth. He was used to the ache and bite of cold, not the blast of heat that warmed his gills and threatened to sear his already worn fins.
Here was undiscovered by most, if not all beings in these waters. There was nowhere for them to escape if a predator followed them. No hidden crevices where they could hide. No comfort they would be able to find until they came close enough to the core.
Light bloomed from deep volcanic vents. Lava bubbled up from them often, giving a strange texture to the ground when it erupted and cooled, leaving a rippling wave of hard stone that guided him closer and closer to the strange object waiting for him.
A metal tube rested luckily on a cooled mound of lava, rather similar in appearance to the coffin he had once been trapped in.
The light of the crimson flow turned it red in his vision, reflecting the light from its metal surface until it almost appeared to glow.
This was not just a gift. It was far more than that.
He swam up to the edge, uncaring that the water here was so hot it made the scales on his tail ache.
It didn't matter. This tube was strangely impervious even to the lava that heated the metal.
Though it was warm, and he could see areas that had finally succumbed to the heat and started to melt, the entire coffin was largely intact.
Even stranger, he could see that the front of it was clear. It was foggy though, textured on the glass, so it was hard for him to peer within it.
He was not going to pick up a molten metal tube without knowing what the depthstrider had gifted him. He refused. Any of this could be a trap, and he would not be attacked when he had just awoken.
Planting his massive hand on the clear surface, he marveled at the sight of his massive claws.
A light turned on within the tube the moment he touched it and dragged his hand down the glass, and the silhouette of his unusually built, dark hand tipped in deadly talons dragged across the face of the woman inside.
Her face was smooth and unblemished, perfect skin as though she'd never had a moment outside of that coffin to contaminate the body within it. Her dark black hair smoothed away from her face, not a single strand out of place, even though she must have had quite the tumble through the water to get here. She had clearly never seen the sun in her life, and he wondered if she’d remain so pale if she had seen it before.
Humans were rarely interesting to him, and this one was only interesting because of her circumstance.
She shouldn't have been stuck in that glass coffin any more than he should have been stuck.
And he supposed he had been asking for someone to help him.
All he had to do was wake her up, terrify her into agreeing to do whatever he said, and then move forward with his plan. This time with an accomplice.
Time would tell if it was a good plan or not. She certainly wasn't going to like it, no matter what he asked her to do.
While he stared down at her moon-shaped face, a small metal leg shifted a strand of her hair back in place.
So the pod was what had kept her alive this long, and what was keeping her safe.
The metal appendage then turned toward the glass, and fogged it from the inside this time.
The frosted glass made it almost impossible for him to see the woman within.
"Curious," he muttered as he leaned down and heaved the molten metal into his arms. "We'll have to see what else is inside you."
It was heavy, but not so heavy that he could not carry it.
Proteus took his time speeding back to the hidden place where Pilot had brought him.
He needed the sea to cool the metal before he picked it up.
But perhaps the heat was the last of his worries as he risked a human seeing the facility.
It could all go very wrong, and then there would be blood all over that clean facility. A tragedy, really.
Besides, he didn't think rushing would make any difference to the woman in the pod. She had been sealed in there for a while now. Unlike him, she did not appear to be awake.
The strange square floating in the middle of the ocean awaited him just as before, with four anchors on each side. Speeding underneath it, he impatiently waited for the hatch to open before throwing her coffin up into the room and following behind her.
The echoing clang of metal striking metal made his ears ring. He flopped into the room at the same time the sound echoed, and immediately his tail coiled. He hated loud noises. Always had, even when he was a child.
And once the echo stopped, all he could hear was a high-pitched shriek that still made the entire room far too loud and far too small at the same time.
Wincing, he glanced up to see the sound was coming from Pilot.
That little droid screamed in terror, and the entire room had to suffer with the sound until Proteus shouted back, "Droid, enough! "
Ah, blissful silence.
Finally, he could relax. The droid stopped screaming, no one moved in the room, and Proteus could think again.
Hauling himself up the side of the coffin he'd brought back with him, he was pleased to see the temperature change had made the mist bead up and drip away, revealing her pretty face. It was so strange to look down at her and see a person. Alive, but not quite.
Her chest rose and fell. Now, in the light of the room, he could see that she was wearing a strange, skin-tight suit.
It was molded to her form, clinging to hills and valleys.
Her body barely even cast a shadow considering all the light that reflected from within her chamber and within the room they were in.
His eyes were nearly blinded by all that light.
"What is it?" Pilot asked, climbing up the side to stand on the glass and peer down at her with those strange, flickering eyes.
"The gift the depthstrider gave me," he replied, disgusted by the lack of help that had been provided. "It is useless. A pod like this could only mean she's been in stasis for a very long time."
Pilot had already extended the tentacle from his belly and plugged into the pod.
The flashing lights on top of the pod stilled, and suddenly the clear section was a screen.
Proteus couldn't read any of the words flying across it, but they were mostly zeros and ones, something he assumed droids were fluent in.
"Oh," Pilot said. Then again, but more drawn out, "Oh."
"What is it?"
"Still learning."
The little droid muttered "oh," about thirty more times before it unplugged itself and turned those elongated eyes to him.
"This is a clone. In Tau, there were many of them used to keep the Originals alive.
But after Tau fell, most of them were brought to the other cities to start their new lives.
Some were to remain frozen, like this one, as they would overrun the cities with their numbers.
But it was also thought to be kinder to not have clones of the same person running around in the same area.
Mentally, they weren't sure that the clones would do well with that. "
"Or anyone else in the city," Proteus murmured as he looked her over.
He had seen all of this on the screens while Pilot had shared with him the last two hundred years. But it didn't explain why the depthstrider had given him one, or why the sea had seemed so pleased that he had.
He was disappointed. The clones were empty vessels. Shells of people who had no memory or personality. They were children who had been allowed to grow adult bodies without ever actually developing.
"Useless," he muttered, turning away from the pod. "I do not need a servant who has never been awake. This is not helpful at all."
"But this one has been awakened," Pilot said, and then started tapping on the glass to activate some message. "Look for yourself."
Proteus leaned over to read the logs that were actually legible this time and realized, yes. This one had been awakened. Many times, in fact. He could see there were almost a hundred logs of this pod having been opened and the person within it awakened.
Knowing humans, if it had been logged that many times, then she had been awakened at least double that.
"Why would they have done that?" he murmured.
Pilot tapped a few more times on some of the messages and then there it was. An explanation. He wasn't very quick at reading the human language—it had been centuries since he'd even tried—but it came back to him fast enough.
Not only had this woman been awakened for a few days at a time, it appeared... "She's been... downloaded? What does that mean?"