Read Online King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) by Michael John Grist - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael John Grist
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again.
SO C
The Sunken World is moving. It shifts and plunges, turns and involutes, and the only way So can render it as a map is with the movements built in, a kind of scrolling, shifting image of great complexity, with ripple effects that trigger other ripples in a constant swirl of Brownian motion.
"Essentially, it's rotting," she says to Doe and Ray, when the model is built. They are standing at the peak of this mud hill, outlined in their stark mud-spattered black uniforms against the tortured dark skies. Only moments ago they were in a private conference on blood-mic, lieutenants conferring, and So thinks she knows what about.
Me, and Far. Thinking about them being missing scares her. She's still cold and wet, and that scares her too, but she's a marine and marines don't show that kind of fear. They don't run for their lives, despite what her new uniform says. They stand and fight.
"So it's deflating?" Ray asks, interrupting So's thoughts. "Like a rotten pumpkin?"
"Yes, but not only that," So goes on. She fires some graphics to all the chord, simplified, because the full simulation is too much for their HUDs to render. "First you see the rotting, which is yes, a kind of compacting downward, or inward, like the flat plane of a galaxy pulled by entropy and gravity."
Ray frowns. "So not like a pumpkin?"
"It's enough like a pumpkin," So answers. "You can think of it that way. Everything we see now around us is the Molten Core, crushed. We're standing on the outer shell of it now."
"So does that mean we're on the outside now?" Doe asks. "If we're on top of the disc, which was a sphere, were we actually inside before when we were buried in the mud?"
"No," says So, "because it's a spatially resonant flattened sphere, not a straight flattened sphere. Which is to say, it maintains some knowledge of its own sphereness. Watch." She fires another, even simpler simulation over to them, of a globe compressing, and narrates as it unfolds.
"Everything we see around us is the outer skin and the inner skin of the Molten Core, usually a sphere, mulched together." The simulation shows the sphere flattening. "But it's not so simple as that, not just three dimensions rendered down to two, because some structures of the host mind have proven more durable than others. They jut out of the mud-sandwich, which is what the rest of the Core has become. Mud, I mean."
Doe and Ray both gaze at her. "So we're standing on top of the mud," Ray says, pointing down. He is inexplicably physical. "It looks like we're on the outside. But because some existing structures are jutting through, it means we're not actually on the outside? We're on the inside, now?"
The mild panic on his face is gently hilarious.
"Essentially, yes," says So. This is obvious, she thinks, elementary collapse dynamics, but plainly not. Even Doe just looks at her blankly. She goes on.
"We are on the inside, though it may seem otherwise, because the resonant edges of the Core's sphere are not defined by the mud, though the mud does define their hard edges." No further clarity seems to arise from this statement. "Imagine this. There's a tree on the ground, and you build a house around it. Then one day someone smashes the house flat transversely, and the tree with it. So where is the tree?"
Ray frowns. "Inside the house sandwich."
"Yes and no. All the top of the tree is, the trunk and branches, but you're not thinking about the roots. They bed down in the ground still, because they didn't get crushed with the hut."
Ray sucks air through his pierced teeth. "You didn't say anything about roots. I guess they weren't in the house. Maybe a basement?"
"There's no basement," So says, disapprovingly. "That's not possible. For a Molten Core, those roots are the shape it takes in the aether. They still remain, hanging in a collapsed space above or around the mud sandwich, even after the bulk of the Core is gone. That's where we are now."
"So we are inside the
SO C
The Sunken World is moving. It shifts and plunges, turns and involutes, and the only way So can render it as a map is with the movements built in, a kind of scrolling, shifting image of great complexity, with ripple effects that trigger other ripples in a constant swirl of Brownian motion.
"Essentially, it's rotting," she says to Doe and Ray, when the model is built. They are standing at the peak of this mud hill, outlined in their stark mud-spattered black uniforms against the tortured dark skies. Only moments ago they were in a private conference on blood-mic, lieutenants conferring, and So thinks she knows what about.
Me, and Far. Thinking about them being missing scares her. She's still cold and wet, and that scares her too, but she's a marine and marines don't show that kind of fear. They don't run for their lives, despite what her new uniform says. They stand and fight.
"So it's deflating?" Ray asks, interrupting So's thoughts. "Like a rotten pumpkin?"
"Yes, but not only that," So goes on. She fires some graphics to all the chord, simplified, because the full simulation is too much for their HUDs to render. "First you see the rotting, which is yes, a kind of compacting downward, or inward, like the flat plane of a galaxy pulled by entropy and gravity."
Ray frowns. "So not like a pumpkin?"
"It's enough like a pumpkin," So answers. "You can think of it that way. Everything we see now around us is the Molten Core, crushed. We're standing on the outer shell of it now."
"So does that mean we're on the outside now?" Doe asks. "If we're on top of the disc, which was a sphere, were we actually inside before when we were buried in the mud?"
"No," says So, "because it's a spatially resonant flattened sphere, not a straight flattened sphere. Which is to say, it maintains some knowledge of its own sphereness. Watch." She fires another, even simpler simulation over to them, of a globe compressing, and narrates as it unfolds.
"Everything we see around us is the outer skin and the inner skin of the Molten Core, usually a sphere, mulched together." The simulation shows the sphere flattening. "But it's not so simple as that, not just three dimensions rendered down to two, because some structures of the host mind have proven more durable than others. They jut out of the mud-sandwich, which is what the rest of the Core has become. Mud, I mean."
Doe and Ray both gaze at her. "So we're standing on top of the mud," Ray says, pointing down. He is inexplicably physical. "It looks like we're on the outside. But because some existing structures are jutting through, it means we're not actually on the outside? We're on the inside, now?"
The mild panic on his face is gently hilarious.
"Essentially, yes," says So. This is obvious, she thinks, elementary collapse dynamics, but plainly not. Even Doe just looks at her blankly. She goes on.
"We are on the inside, though it may seem otherwise, because the resonant edges of the Core's sphere are not defined by the mud, though the mud does define their hard edges." No further clarity seems to arise from this statement. "Imagine this. There's a tree on the ground, and you build a house around it. Then one day someone smashes the house flat transversely, and the tree with it. So where is the tree?"
Ray frowns. "Inside the house sandwich."
"Yes and no. All the top of the tree is, the trunk and branches, but you're not thinking about the roots. They bed down in the ground still, because they didn't get crushed with the hut."
Ray sucks air through his pierced teeth. "You didn't say anything about roots. I guess they weren't in the house. Maybe a basement?"
"There's no basement," So says, disapprovingly. "That's not possible. For a Molten Core, those roots are the shape it takes in the aether. They still remain, hanging in a collapsed space above or around the mud sandwich, even after the bulk of the Core is gone. That's where we are now."
"So we are inside the
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