After about ten minutes of perfect stillness, driven by the terror of seeing the entity return, the shock finally began to fade. The silence stretched on so long that it started to feel like its own kind of danger, the held breath before something worse. One soldier, undoubtedly the bravest among them, struggled to his feet. He swayed, as if still crushed by the weight of the tension saturating the air, his hand braced against the cracked stone as though the floor itself might give way beneath him.
Seeing him, his comrades also stood up, their legs trembling. None of them looked at the ceiling, at the gaping wound torn through it, or at the smear of concrete dust and something darker that still clung to the walls where the hand had passed. One of them whispered in a weak, hesitant voice, as if the slightest sound might bring the danger back: "What are we going to tell High Command...?"
The first soldier to rise, assuming the role of the new commander by default, cut him off sharply, "We don't tell them anything. Nothing happened here. Everything went exactly as High Command ordered, the bodies of the mutants were sacrificed to the Divinities. Sergeant Guy died during a surprise pirate raid on the road."
No one said another word. This macabre lie made sense and suited everyone. Too happy to have survived the entity, the squad much preferred risking a slap on the wrist from the brass rather than confessing the truth. The only thing that mattered, right then and there, was simply being alive. One by one, they fell into formation, their boots dragging through the dust as though their bodies hadn't yet caught up with the news that they were, against all odds, still breathing.
From a distance, Atlas watched closely as the soldiers exited through the amphitheater's back door. He had heard everything, and his mind, ever the diligent machine, was already filing the pieces away for later.
Mutants? That must have something to do with our awakening, but it doesn't explain their missing eyes... And then there's this business about Divinities... High Command, an organized hierarchy, a chain of orders precise enough to script a cover story on the spot. Whatever happened to this world, it wasn't chaos all the way down. Someone, somewhere, had already rebuilt enough order to lie about it convincingly.
Emma cut his train of thought short, tugging at his sleeve with a sense of urgency. Turning around, Atlas saw her looking in the opposite direction, back the way they had come. She was pointing at something, and this time, there was no longer fear in her eyes, but rather incomprehension.
Indeed, gazing into the distance, Atlas discovered a startling scene. Not fifteen minutes ago, his memory was quite sharp on this point, the wall and door hadn't exactly been new, sure, but they were still in good condition. But now, the sight before them was of a cracked, fissured wall being overtaken by vegetation at an unnatural speed. Though slow, a few centimeters per hour at most, the growth of the vines was visible to the naked eye, dark tendrils unfurling along the stone with a patience that felt almost deliberate, as if the wall itself had simply given up waiting to be fixed and decided to be devoured instead. It was a bizarre spectacle.
Emma turned to him, still looking bewildered: "We can agree that this isn't normal, right? And yet, it's the most 'normal' thing to happen since the beginning."
She then let out a nervous laugh. Truth be told, it was rather cute when she laughed, if you ignored the macabre context.
Atlas was just as surprised. "It looks like everything seems so old not just because we slept for age, well, it must have been a long time anyway, but also because nature is reclaiming its rights at an alarming rate."
Springing to his feet, he looked at Emma, "Come on, we can't stay here. We don't know what's going on, we need to keep moving."
For him, a crisis like this was entirely unprecedented. Truth be told, here in the Land of the Mind, nothing much ever happened. The entire continent was ruled by the High Council of Knowledge, making it the most peaceful territory for centuries. People complained about exam schedules and bus delays, not about monsters crawling out of the sky. But since waking up, Atlas wasn't exactly the same. He could feel it. It was as if a conflicting personality had awakened within him, although the old one was still there, he couldn't quite put his finger on what had mutated in his mind. The old Atlas would have frozen. This one was already three steps ahead, cataloguing exits.
As he turned to lead them out, something caught the corner of his eye, a dull glint half buried beneath the rubble near where the soldiers had stood only minutes before.
As he approached, the object became clearer. A watch? It's true that, now that I think about it, the soldiers were all wearing the same black watch with a digital face.
He leaned down to pick it up and tapped the touch screen. "There doesn't seem to be a passcode," he mused aloud as the screen lit up, the sudden glow looking almost obscene in the gray, ashen light of the ruined hall.
The background displayed a photo of a man in an impeccable military uniform, holding a smiling woman and two young children. A family photo. Emma, who had walked up to him in the meantime, peeked over his shoulder and breathed: "That's sad... he had a wife and kids. How will they react when they find out he's dead?"
"If they find out..." Atlas retorted, too focused on figuring out how the device worked to notice how flat his own voice had sounded.
There weren't many apps installed. Wait, there's something on the back. On the rear of the casing was a small, triangular mechanism, topped with the engraving of a deer's head. Atlas brushed it with his finger, and a synthetic voice chimed, tinny and slightly distorted, as though speaking through layers of dust and time:
"Authentication failed."
Then, the watch crackled slightly.
"Authentication failed... Reconfiguration... New host detected."
Before Atlas could even react, the mechanism flipped. A tiny needle shot out, pricking his finger to extract a drop of blood. He yanked his hand back with a hiss, more out of surprise than pain, watching a single dark bead well up at the tip of his finger.
"Qualias... Error. Qualia detected. Pleased to meet you, Atlas! I am an artificial intelligence serving the High Council of Knowledge."