Exitium: A Time of Rebirth by Patrick Walts

Author:Patrick Walts [Walts, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-20T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Kryuss didn’t appear to pay much attention to Pugna as he told them all about Firewall, The Whispering Woods and the deaths of his people.

He shuffled around the cave, crouching, examining things, and asking random, unrelated questions.

Caldo knew, though, that this was simply how Kryuss processed information dumps. Rest assured, the wheels were turning.

“Are you listening to me?” asked Pugna, visibly annoyed at the flamboyant stranger’s strange air of indifference to what he was saying.

“I can answer every question you’ve presented,” said Kryuss. “First off, your Whispering Woods are a result of the hostile, predatory vegetation native to Galenia merging with the TREE consciousness. It created some sort of uncontrollable…well, for lack of a better term, evil version of TREE. It absorbs and digitally catalogs all life it comes into contact with. Destroying it in the process, of course.

“Except,” he added, “the minds of all of those people are still there, imprisoned within those trees. They can’t be removed. When all of this is said and done, we’ll have to burn it down. Believe me, they’d thank us if they could.”

“And that’s it,” said Bingwen. “Burn it down. Wash your hands of it. Are you so certain there’s no way to salvage those people?”

“I’m sorry, Bing, but are you the tech wizard? Did you invent consciousness transferal? Oh, wait… that was me. Why don’t you go powder your nose or something and let us men handle this?”

Caldo leaped in between them. “Neither of you move. No more of this bickering! Kryuss, continue, but without the derogatory comments, alright?”

“Sheesh,” said Kryuss, wiping his forehead, “I’d hate to have you working my HR. You’re such a fun spoiler.”

“Maybe if he did you wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble, you bonehead,” snapped Bingwen.

Kryuss opened his mouth, blinked, shut his mouth, and then finally spoke. “You’re kind of a bitch.”

Caldo kicked him in the shin.

“Ow! You little bald bastard!”

Caldo kicked him again. “Now please, continue.”

“Fine. Your Firewall, as you call it,” he said, once again addressing Pugna, “those vines covering it play havoc with their sensors. That’s why they couldn’t find you in there, or even go in there. The rockbears eat them, you see. It charges their energy sacs.

“Yeah,” he went on, “seems like you had a real good thing going on there, until your friend came back. Except he wasn’t your friend at all. Sure, it was his body, but he wasn’t inside of it at the time. TREE used him to walk freely into your little village and destroy it from within.”

“You are not at all like what I thought you would be, Prophet,” remarked Pugna.

“Causing disappointment is his strong suit,” said Bingwen.

“Never mind her,” said Kryuss. “You’ve got to get this Prophet stuff out of your head. It’s nonsense, okay? There never were any Creators, there never was a Prophet, never a Promised Land. It was all a gimmick that I came up with to get people on a spaceship. A guy who wrote Lifetime movies helped me come up with the whole premise and backstory, for crying out loud.

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