A figure floated in the air in the centre of the room. Its arms were held out wide as though it were falling from a great height and was attempting to stabilize its descent. Its head was arched backwards, mouth wide open as if frozen mid-scream. Its eyes were closed. Slender tendrils of white tubing led from its splayed fingertips and from contact points around its skull into the ship's superstructure. The Mind was a physical entity? It had projected the image of one to her, but she'd assumed that was an impression conjured up for her own understanding. How long had it lain there, closed away, dimly aware of the ship and its surroundings but cut-off, unable to communicate or intervene unless the direst emergency threatened?
The figure didn't move, didn't react.
“It is like you,” said Selene.
“Yes.”
“It's been lying here all these millennia, locked away in stasis.”
“A situation much more restrictive than my own. At least I could traverse the dead star system. This one has been in a cell all this time. Its mind was supposed to be able to roam the stars.”
“Concordance did this, when they first had the ship. They couldn't trust the Mind to follow their orders so they locked it away, blocked its comms pathways back upon themselves.”
“The cruelty of that is hard to bear,” said Surtr. “I do not know how damaged this entity will be.”
They still hadn't stepped out of the familiar passageway into this odd, forbidden grotto. It felt like a step into another world. She thought about her many conversations with the Dragon. She'd conversed with the more superficial layers of it countless times as they navigated the galaxy. She thought about the tremors and shudders that had run through the Dragon's bulkheads as she forced it to fly through Dead Space to the Haven. What trauma had she caused this being by her actions? Yet, it had never fought her, or stopped her, or attempted to harm her in any way. It had awoken to rescue her when they were plunging into the Coronade gravity well, despite the clear cost to itself.
She stepped inside. Her footsteps echoed loud off the curved walls, the sounds being thrown back at her from odd angles. An odd smell lingered in the room, even with the atmosphere from the Dragon's decks equalizing out. There was a hint of acrid plastic to it, she thought, a chemical tang. She walked up to the figure. Surtr followed her, stood beside her. The room was, she noted, tall enough for Surtr to stand within.
The floating body still had not responded to their presence. Standing, it would be tall: somewhere between her and Surtr in stature. Its body looked decidedly more organic than Surtr's, its skin apparently flesh rather than some analogue. Natural or artificial? Perhaps, again, the distinction wasn't useful. The entity's face wasn't moving, but it didn't have the fixed, metallic lines of Surtr's visage; this was more like a living person, with two eyes, a high, small nose and that mouth, silently screaming. It was a face that looked like it could flex and express emotion. The skull was the familiar elongated shape.
The rest of its body was smooth skin, without blemish or hair, but it was very definitely gendered. The visible penis between its – his – legs made that clear. The Warden had referred to the Dragon's core as a he, a fact that had seemed odd at the time. Organs of procreation seemed a strange detail to add to an entity constructed to pilot a metaspace starship; there could be no possibility of social interaction on a physical level. The Dragon was fundamentally alone. The detail at least suggested that this was a product of, or a mirror of, a biological species. Or, had some part of him once been an organic entity? Long in his past, perhaps this had been a living, breathing person, a Tok individual whose body and consciousness had been radically altered to transform him into a ship's core.
She'd told Surtr that the Tok had all died out, which had to be true, but clearly some vestige of them survived in entities like this. Perhaps he had undertaken a journey like her own: transcending biological beginnings to grow into something larger by acquiring significant technological augmentations. She'd kept her dual nature, but how much of the original person was left in this being, if it was there at all? She wondered, also, if the changes made had been a blessing, a destiny – or a curse. Had he sought out the alterations made to him, or had they been imposed upon him in some way, as they had been on her?
She wondered if it had been light in the cell all this time, or utterly dark.
Surtr placed a hand onto the head of the prone figure. She picked up the surge of some energy being expended, but she couldn't identify its nature. She reached out with her own mind, sending gentle comms calls into the core with her flecks. As before, there was a flicker of response, a moment of recognition. Then it disappeared.
“Can you help him?” she asked out loud.
“He is weak, but I believe I can. A fresh infusion of entropy-spirals will make a difference, although he is too far gone to be fully returned to his former state. His life has been ebbing away for a long, long time.”
She nodded. This had been just a ship to her. “Do what you can.” She stood in silence as Surtr worked away, doing whatever it was doing for five minutes, then ten.
Eventually, it spoke again. “The entity you think of as Radiant Dragon is emerging from his fugue now.”
“Will we be able to converse?”
“If he wishes to. He has suffered much.”
Colour was definitely returning to the pale flesh of the figure before them. She could
