Mask of Humanity

Nicolai and the other two stared at the deer. Nicolai thought they looked very proud, and vibrant, and fitting. No deer roamed the earth they’d left behind. Not truly. You could find them in expansive zoos and wildlife centres, carefully designed habitats where they could live carefully designed lives. Every animal with a name and social media pages. A sight for humans to come and gawk at. Those deer no longer lived in nature because there wasn’t a nature to live in.

In contrast, there was something very real, very solid, very alive about these nameless deer.

‘They’re beautiful,’ breathed Beth beside him.

The buck’s head whipped around, ears twitching, and its eyes settled onto Nicolai. Then, from it extended a Soul Sense that brushed out and touched the tip of his own, which came as an absolute shock. Nicolai was unable to react, blinking in confusion at the spiritual extension the deer was feeling his own with. With some soundless signal all of the deer tensed up and stared in his direction.

These creatures were Cultivators, in some manner? Nicolai’s eyes widened at the thought, his worldview shifting. With a flash of movement the deer all jumped and ran out of the clearing. The big one, the buck, followed behind the others more slowly, casting one final glance in Nicolai’s direction. There was something faintly challenging about its eyes and the pride of its stance.

It tossed its head and followed after the others.

‘Wow,’ said Beth.

He glanced over to see her eyes huge and round, like a child at a zoo. Jo beside her was smiling, watching Beth. Nicolai nodded. ‘Yes.’ He couldn’t help but agree with her. The childlike awe and excitement he felt from her Soul Sense was infectious, though in truth not all of it came from her.

‘They’re all over up here, those deer are the animals I see the most of,’ Jo interjected. Her expression turned thoughtful. ‘Look like they’d be good to eat.’

‘Eat?’ Beth hissed, scandalized, her voice rising. ‘We can’t kill them!’

‘Shhh,’ Nicolai cautioned her, then added, ‘we might have to eat them. Depends how expensive food is from the Trade Link. I don’t want to waste points on meals when we could simply hunt.’

‘That’s barbaric,’ Beth muttered. ‘We only just got to this world and already you and everyone else wants to depopulate the native species.’

‘Nature is barbaric.’ He chuckled, enjoying the thought. He’d only needed to actually hunt animals for food a handful of times in his life, and unless he had actual need to do so, he otherwise never had and never would. He’d always looked down on those who hunted for sport. Killing dumb animals with a rifle was no challenge, and only held legitimacy in his eyes if it was part of a wider fight for survival, man against nature.

If he were to engage in some kind of manufactured hunt, he’d rather hunt something that could hunt him back.

‘Let’s go.’

They moved on, and on the way encountered a few more animals. Something which looked like a fox but with multiple tails that came and went in a flash, surprising Nicolai and Beth as it was completely invisible to their Soul Sense. He would have tried to catch it, if it hadn’t been so fast. He would like to know how it hid itself.

They saw many birds, the most impressive of which was a vulture-like creature that must have weighed thirty pounds, perching on a large branch and ripping at the corpse of something. It saw them coming and flapped noisily into the air, wings stretching wide as it disappeared away with its meal.

On the ground was a profusion of smaller creatures, rarely seen but they could be felt with Soul Sense. All of them had tiny Soul Senses of their own and would flinch away, fleeing. Nicolai identified most of these creatures as being similar to rodents and rabbits and ferrets.

Overall, Nicolai found the small jungle atop the castle idyllic. Beautiful and interesting and vibrant, full of life. This beauty was marred when they reached the halfway point of their journey.

As Nicolai and the girls crept forward, Soul Senses moving ahead with equal care while the drone came to roost, a number of people came distantly into their view. Two groups, facing off.

On one side, the more numerous group wore ragged clothes and scavenged armour, wielded melee weapons alongside quite a few bows, all readied with arrows nocked. On the other was a much smaller group but armed with guns and wearing earth-style clothing. They looked like Chosen, a fact which seemed to be the basis for the ongoing argument, one that looked ready to flare into open combat.

Standing before the more numerous group was a brunette woman with a bow, who was lashing the Chosen with her words. ‘—not getting our Seeds, or our food! This is our hunting grounds, and if you try to push us out, you’ll be paying a price in blood! Get back with the rest of your kind, corpo scum.’ She spat onto the ground.

At the head of the other group was a tall, well-muscled man loosely holding a sub-machine gun. He raised a hand in a gesture either warding or placating. ‘I told you, we’re not Chosen, we—‘

‘Not Chosen? Then where’d you get the guns?’ bristled the woman.

‘We used to be Chosen. We split with them. Now we’re doing our own thing. That includes hunting here. This place is big enough for everyone to catch what they need.’

Nicolai was watching carefully, and he saw a few strands of the lesser, Seed-type Soul Sense emerging from some. No danger, he and the girls were far too distant to be found by Soul Sense. There was no signs of the more powerful Soul Sense he and Beth possessed, which meant none of these people had integrated their Seed, which meant none would have Cultivator’s eyes able to see his Soul Sense from a distance.

‘Oh? Then how about you prove it. Give us one of those guns, and we’ll accept you aren’t Chosen. No Chosen would do that.’

The man laughed. ‘Nobody would do that, Chosen or otherwise. We’re surviving out here and we need all that we have. I don’t want to waste the bullets on you.’ He sneered. ‘Not like you’ve anything worth taking. But if you want to see the difference between guns and bows…’ He spread his arms, displaying the submachine gun out to the side. ‘Be my guest.’

The more numerous group were all bristling, tugging on bowstrings and fingering the handles of blades and hammers. The woman scowled at the man then glanced back at her companions, considering. ‘Whatever,’ she snapped, then flipped a hand at the man. ‘Just stay out of our way.’

The man snorted at her, watching as the other group moved off. After a short time they’d disappeared, and he gestured to those with him and they all moved off in a different direction.

‘You think that guy was telling the truth?’ asked Jo into the silence, once they’d gone.

Nicolai shrugged. ‘There was a schism of some kind in the Chosen a day or so ago. Might be he is.’ While watching the confrontation, he’d considered stepping forwards and announcing himself. He intended to trade, once he found the Trade Link, and it would be good to get some contacts. The people without guns would clearly be keen on buying some. The “not Chosen,” if they could be believed, would no longer have a way to procure more ammo, another need he could fulfil. But right now, with just him and Beth and Jo and only two guns between them, he figured it was best not to reveal themselves. Stepping out and saying “I know of a Trade Link and can sell things to all of you” while outnumbered and outgunned was unlikely to end well.

They continued forward and arrived at a large, spiky bush that Jo squeezed into, Nicola and Beth following, until they reached the centre of it where it opened up a bit and Jo pulled aside a tarp covered in leaves and dirt, revealing a square hole into the stone of the castle, a ladder within.

‘We need to talk about hiding this better,’ said Nicolai, eyeing the hole in the ground.

Jo frowned at him. ‘I feel I’ve done pretty good. No one would come into the middle of this bush without a reason, and I’ve hidden it well.’

‘You came into this bush, at some point, for some reason, didn’t you? But that’s not the major issue. The major issue is the path you’ve made all the way from the stairwell we emerged from right to this bush. We’re going to need to do something about that and start coming to this place by a different route every time. Imagine if someone comes up those stairs and starts following the path, until it ends over there, right by the bush. If it were me, I’d look around to see what it was leading to.’

‘Huh,’ Jo muttered, staring back the way they’d come. ‘Alright. How do we cover it all up, then?’

‘I’ll show you. Later.’ He smiled at her and gestured to the hole. ‘Lead on.’

They descended via ladder, which took some time. It went quite a distance into the earth, and at one point Jo and Beth had to stop for a breather. Beth’s body had been strengthened by the integration, but it seemed this had only brought her to around the same level of fitness as Jo, whose body was strengthened from weeks of exploring and surviving. Despite her improvements, Beth was still a little wasted and weak from her time stuck in bed.

At the bottom they touched stone in a narrow hallway lit by one torch, flickering with yellow light, and Jo led them a short distance until the hallway turned into a circular room which opened onto a chasm in the stone. A slender bridge crossed the chasm, which they passed over. Reaching the other side they found another corridor which opened into a room lit by a dim, pulsing blue light.

Jo stopped, turning to them. ‘I think the Chosen are on the other side of the collapse, somewhere. It seems like the Trade Link is very large, and so is the collapse. I haven’t heard any sounds from the Chosen, and perhaps none would reach, but even so I think it is wise if we are quiet in here.’

‘Understood,’ said Nicolai, Beth nodding beside him.

The room they entered was expansive, a wide and dim area. The stone floor was covered in odd tendrils of some dark material, blue lights running through them, the source of the blue glow. The far side of the room was dominated by a great black wall descending from the ceiling to the ground, slightly curved, bisected lower down by ridges of metal poking out from it like spokes of a wheel, forming little cubbies around its exterior. In each cubby, something like a console was built into the column. Like the tendrils on the ground, the black column also flickered with waves of dull blue light, and let out a faint hum. It seemed somehow alive.

The ceiling had collapsed right over the black column, this collapse running the length of the room, and even to the sides. It seemed that at one point this room had been significantly larger, but most of it had collapsed. The area they were in had not, thus giving them a comparatively narrow area within which to access the Trade Link. Fortunately, the black column, the Trade Link, seemed entirely unharmed, just mostly buried. Nicolai felt that if it was a large circular object, as the faint curve seemed to suggest, then it must be huge, hundreds of metres wide at a minimum. Somewhere, on the other side of the collapse, the Chosen must have access to their own slice of the Trade Link.

Nicolai had checked his map carefully after stealing the map data from that fat Chosen he and Johan had killed quite some time ago, and had seen some details of the area he believed the Chosen had made their base. But it seemed the fat Chosen had not personally gone into the Chosen’s side of the Trade Link, as it was not revealed on Nicolai’s map. That would have made life easier for Nicolai.

As it was, he could see where their base was and knew the rough direction of where their access to the Trade Link should be. He briefly checked his map in this moment, and saw that now he was in this room with their slice of Trade Link, they were only about five hundred metres from what was revealed on his map of the Chosen compound, lurking in the space behind it.

‘Here it is,’ whispered Jo needlessly, picking her way over the tendrils toward the Trade Link.

Nicolai followed, noticing his breath coming a little faster, his heartbeat elevated over the norm. At long last, he’d found it. A grin pulled at his face. But first, he reminded himself, there are some checks to perform.

‘One moment,’ he said. He moved carefully around the room, searching for microphone or camera bugs, for bombs or anything else. He even activated the Searchlight ring and played it over the area, but nothing was revealed. This was an important place. If someone had found it, unbeknownst to Jo, they might have left some tricks or traps. He would’ve. But he found nothing.

‘All done?’ asked Jo as he stepped up to her.

He nodded and she turned to the Trade Link. ‘Here, I’ll show you two how it works,’ she said. He moved up just behind her, Beth by his side, the two of them peering over Jo’s shoulder. She stood in front of one of the consoles, a pane of black glass covering an outhrust, angled piece of the Trade Link. She placed her right hand against it. The Mark on the back of her hand glittered, shifted, then strings of it erupted out and rippled across her fingers. Streaks of golden lightning poured from her fingers and dripped onto the screen.

After a final frenzy of activity her Mark shone bright, and a pillar of gold surged from her skin to the screen, and where it touched dozens of lines of zig-zagging gold crawled out and over it, then zipped back and the console began to glow while her Mark went quiet.

Jo moved her hand over it, fingers tapping. ‘You just touch it with your Marked hand. It explains the rest.’

Nicolai frowned at the screen as Jo tapped at it. To him the screen looked like a blur of light, but she moved as though pressing buttons, moving things.

‘What do you see?’ he asked her.

She paused, turning to glance at him. ‘All the… you can’t see?’

‘It’s just a blur to me.’

‘I just see a smear of light,’ chimed Beth from beside him..

‘I guess it’s got a privacy feature.’ Jo shrugged.

Nicolai might have suspected her of hiding something, but with the Contract he could relax. He moved to the side, approaching another console. Probably relax. His Soul Sense kept tabs on the other two as he eyed the console. Before touching it, he took a moment to check on his Node and found its Oma depleted by about thirty percent, so drew out an Oma crystal and refilled his Node. This led him to perform a quick check.

User Interface 376 | User #53,217

- Cultivation

Total Nodes: 1 Major, 2 Minor

Available unconstructed Nodes: 0 Major, 3 Minor

- Nodes in progress;

Right Lung (Finalising: 3%)

Left Lung (Finalising: 3%)

Completed Nodes;

Heart (Flawless) (100/100)

Only 3%. It had been hours since he’d finished forming the Nodes. It seemed that progress would be slow. Dismissing the UI he ran his hands over the console before him.

As he did so, his Mark flickered, and he moved his right hand towards the middle of the screen. When he touched it, his Mark burst into the same frenzied little storm as Jo’s had, forming arcs of golden lightning that moved over his skin to rain upon the screen, rising to a sudden burst of light that sent zig-zagging lines across it. His Mark turned quiet while the screen began to glow.

Accessing Trade Link…

Interface type found…

User identification found…

Points found…

Permissions found…

User loaded.

Welcome, User #53,217, to Trade Link Access.

You have one (1) Market available.