Chapter 18
Eighteen
Ellie
"There," Ellie said, stepping back to look at her work. She didn't have the delicate hands of an engineer. That much was painfully obvious. But the patchwork she'd done on the piece of wall would hold. "I think that's done."
Pilot scuttled over to her, the clicks of his feet on the now mostly clean tile echoing in the massive chamber. "It'll hold. It just looks horrid."
She wasn't going to argue with him about that.
The welder they had found was very old, and it spat flames in fits and spurts rather than a consistent white flame like it was supposed to.
That led to her having to go over the same places far too many times, and globs of metal decorated the outline of the door frame, rather than a smooth line like a professional might have done.
But it would hold. And that was good enough.
Leaning down, she scooped him up in her hand so they could head back to the new chamber they had revealed. The sand had hidden more than just this chamber. Apparently, there were other corridors where other people had lived.
"Do you think there's clothing in there?" Ellie asked, heading over to the door that kept them away from the rest of the secrets.
"Who knows? I worked on the settings to make sure we could bypass the coding that keeps it locked," Pilot said as he climbed up to her shoulder and then perched there like a metal parrot on a pirate's shoulder. "I just... I'm not sure if we should go in there."
"Why?"
"We don't know what we're going to find." Pilot paused for dramatic effect before then adding, "It was their living quarters. I don't think it would be out of the ordinary to expect there to be some dead bodies in there. I think many people remained here until the very end."
She’d never seen a dead body. That was concerning, certainly. But also, she wanted to get out of this wetsuit and into something that would be more comfortable. Something like she'd seen the other scientists wear.
A clean, pressed shirt that would hug her waist. Pants that would comfortably fit around her thighs and maybe make her legs look a little longer than they were. She wanted to feel pretty in clothing that was meant for real, living people. Not just dolls like herself.
So she stood in front of the door and asked, "Pilot, how do I open the door?"
He sighed, a strange mechanical sound, before answering, "The password I set is butterscotch cookies. That's all you'll have to say. It recognizes your voice activation."
"That's an odd password for a droid to pick."
"My creator was a fan of them."
And he had paid his respects to his creator in the only way he knew how. By keeping Fairweather alive.
She knew how important it was to droids for the living to still be living. They did that by never forgetting who had made them, long after their mortal bodies had decayed on this planet.
She patted the top of his head before saying quite loudly, "Butterscotch cookies."
The door slid open with a long hiss, revealing a room beyond that was somehow perfectly preserved. It was a living area, just like Pilot had said, although very ancient in its style.
Rather than mostly metal accents and clean lines, this place had once been filled with color.
A rotting quilt was even hanging on the wall, clearly once filled with brilliant blues and yellows.
A wooden table had three broken legs and leaned on its side next to it, and the chairs were just as bad.
But those looked like they had been broken intentionally.
Someone had been here before. They’d likely taken everything of value.
She stepped into what must be a kitchen.
All the doors were ripped off the cabinets, some of them hanging on by a single hinge, but most of them had been strewn about the checkerboard black and white tile.
The fridge stood open, the electricity long turned off in this room, but it didn't matter because the food inside was so ancient it was nothing more than dust on the shelves.
As she moved through the living quarters, she found a door that was still open. The bedroom beyond was in better condition than the rest of the ransacked place. That was where she found the body.
The skeleton had wasted away in the dry air.
There wasn't even a hint of skin left on it, but the hands were still placed on the person's chest in an almost reverent manner that made Ellie think even the grave robbers who had come in here hadn't touched the body.
There was a tablet still resting on the bed beside them.
"You said you were looking for clothing," Pilot reminded her as she reached for the tablet.
"And answers."
"But mostly clothing."
Apparently, the droid didn't like looking at dead humans. Neither did Ellie, but this wasn't much of a human anymore. The skeleton gave the room an almost holy air. Like she had stepped into a tomb rather than a bedroom.
Tapping on the tablet, she blew out a breath at the dead battery. Of course it was dead.
"Pilot? Can you connect to this?"
"Absolutely not."
"Just do it for me, please. I want to read what's on here. What if there are more schematics for the building?"
That did the trick. The droid extended a wire from beneath his crab-like body, grumbling about how disgusting it was to be connected to something that was just resting next to a dead body.
She plugged him in and the tablet burst to life. It wasn't anything about the facility, but a diary, it looked like.
"Entry 213," she read aloud. "The facility is dying, just like me.
I wish there was more we could do to preserve it, but the sands have started to take the building back.
I have overstayed my welcome in this wild place.
Perhaps I should have gone to the sea with the others.
Yet, there will always be a part of me dedicated to my work here.
I am the last remaining scientist. I am determined to find the cure for living on land. "
Ellie paused, her eyes darting over the words. She sank down on the bed beside the skeleton, reading as fast as she could before setting the tablet down on her lap.
"Pilot... You both said this was a research facility, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"You didn't tell me they were experimenting on humans. They wanted to make a being capable of living on land again."
Pilot climbed down her arm and then bounced onto the floor.
He clearly did not like being anywhere near that body beside her.
"This facility was dedicated to preserving humanity at any cost. They had seen that the undine were capable of living in the sea, but the scientists who worked here were of the mind that there was no possibility for humans to survive long term in the oceans because of the undine people. "
She took a deep breath. "So they decided to experiment with other DNA? Knowing that the planet was going to get exponentially worse as the storms sucked all the moisture into themselves? They know all that would be left was a desert until the rains came every year? And then only floods."
Pilot bounced his body. "Exactly."
But if that’s what Sanctuary had really been… "So what is it that Proteus is trying to do?"
"He wants to see if the scientists completed their work. And then he wants to show the undine that he is the god they remember. It will keep them in check while he learns the state of the planet. The humans must move here, regardless of safety."
Her entire world seemed to spin to a stop. "But what if the scientists succeeded? There could be people living on the surface."
"That was always the hope. Perhaps even some humans survived.
Those who worked here were also building bunkers.
Places for people to outlast even the worst outcomes.
They were the wealthiest people, of course.
Some of them split off from those who built the quadrants in the sea.
" Pilot bounced a little, almost like a nervous movement that he couldn't keep still.
He needed to get out of this room, but she needed her answers. "So they were experimenting on creatures like the undine? Were there any creatures even here to experiment on? Species like the undine, who were already more capable than humans?"
Pilot shook his head, his entire body in denial of what she said. "No, they weren't experimenting on other creatures. They were trying to create them."
They were trying to create new life in this cursed place. A being who could live in harsh climates like this, without fearing the storms or how a depletion of water would affect their bodies.
She scanned through the woman's diary notes again, seeing more and more horrific things popping up as she read through them. "They tried every animal they could," she muttered as she kept reading.
It seemed like they were obsessed with fixing what they thought of as broken.
But humans weren’t broken things. Humans just weren't meant to live on a planet that looked like this.
They weren't supposed to survive massive hailstorms and hurricanes that hung over the land for months on end.
None of this was ever supposed to have happened.
But the biologists here hadn't had much luck, it seemed. There were a lot of animals they tested, but human DNA was so specific, it was impossible to create beings out of it.
Pilot made a whirring noise and headed out of the room. Ellie followed him, trailing along behind with the tablet still in her hands. "What happened to their experiments? It looks like when she was alive, there were some viable ones, but they all died in infancy."
"Splices," Pilot muttered as he headed through the trashed living room.
"They called them splices. Abominations of man and beast. Most of them took after the latter.
Some of them were so mangled, but had the brilliant mind of a genius.
Others were viable in life, but they were little more than monsters.
All of them had to be put down. Over and over again. "
"How do you know all this?"