Volume 23: The Game Changes
Some meters away, Nick saw a being doing something to the biological machine.
One couldn't describe it as bipedal or quadrupedal.
It walked on several tentacles, which all had different lengths and widths.
However, the tentacles didn't feel like the tentacles of a squid or an octopus.
They looked quite clear and reminded Nick of the membranes of the biological machine.
If Nick had to associate the appearance and material of the tentacles with an animal, he would choose a weird insect.
The being was almost bereft of symmetry, with tentacles of different lengths sprouting out from seemingly random places.
The thickest ones were as thick as a human thigh, while the thinnest ones were a bit thinner than an average pinky.
As for the actual body of the being…
There wasn't really a body to speak of.
The tentacles all just ended in one knot with just a couple of basic sets of perceptive organs.
Some small antennae with fine hairs, some small holes that could make sense of sound and light, and some organs that seemed to measure things Nick couldn't immediately discern.
A big part of the sensory organs was also placed on the thickest and longest tentacles, giving the being a unique ability to surveil all its surroundings at all times.
At this moment, this weird tentacle thing had some of its tentacles put into a couple of holes in a big part of the biological machine.
Occasionally, some of the noises of the machine stopped, while new ones appeared.
'It's tinkering with the machine,' Nick thought. 'It looks like it's performing maintenance.'
All of this was already quite surprising, but there was something even more surprising.
'I can't feel any kind of danger coming from this thing,' Nick thought.
'I also can't sense any Zephyx coming from it.'
'Every Specter gives off some Zephyx, and even minions have to give off some Zephyx.'
'The fact that this thing isn't giving off any Zephyx means that it is either extremely powerful and good at hiding from my Zephyx sense, or it simply doesn't use Zephyx.'
'The fact that I'm also not feeling any danger is important as well.'
'If this were some kind of being made of Star Energy or Pure Energy, I would feel something.'
'But as far as I can tell, this thing is just purely biological and autonomous.'
'Even the biological machine has an obvious source of power, while the source of power of this thing seems to be just biochemical in nature.'
'It's just like an animal, a human, or a plant.'
'Yet, it shows extremely advanced knowledge by performing maintenance on such an insanely complicated machine.'
Nick's mind went wild when he realized what all of this meant.
'This is just a skilled engineer from a vastly more advanced civilization.'
'This thing is not a fighter.'
'It is essentially just a normal guy with a good education.'
'But it's not human!'
All of the clues Nick had gathered over his lifetime fused together to create one picture.
Nick's ability wasn't triggered by the sunlight, suggesting that the Sun either did not sense him or that his ability wasn't affected by it.
Impossibly advanced technology that could do things like producing Prephyx from something that wasn't Zephyx.
The separate circle on the warning Nick had found on his first visit to one of the ruins of the Ancient Ones.
'This entire time, I was trying to fit two images together that just wouldn't make sense when combined.'
'The Sun doesn't really do anything, and it can't sense me, suggesting a lack of consciousness and intelligence.'
'The construction of such insanely advanced machinery that it seems to be on the level of the Ancient Ones, suggesting that whoever controls the world has to be incomprehensibly intelligent and educated.'
'I just couldn't fit these two things together.'
'One made the other impossible.'
'How can the Sun be that unmoving and still while constructing and maintaining such advanced machines?'
'How would it even do that without light inside the areas containing the biological machines?! The Sun's gotta see something to do something, right?!'
Everything finally made sense.
'Another civilization.'
'A civilization that is not human.'
'Literal aliens.'
'A completely alien civilization would also explain the absurd difference in constructing machinery.'
'We don't use biological machines because, why the fuck would we?! That's dumb! Naming all the difficulties and problems with that concept can fill a book!'
'But with access to something like Star Energy or Zephyx, while also having access to highly sophisticated gene-editing technology, it at least becomes feasible.'
'With Star Energy or Zephyx, you can essentially create biological matter on the same level as the body of an Extractor.'
'It would heal extremely quickly and could probably even be maintained with very little energy.'
'An entire adult human body can be run for an entire day with energy equivalent of heating 50 liters of water by 50 degrees Celsius.'
'Tempering materials with Zephyx is quite a lot more costly.'
'However, humanity has advanced so far in non-biological engineering that starting from scratch isn't worth the effort. Non-biological matter has its own unique advantages, such as not needing a constant stream of new energy to keep existing for a very long time.'
'I'm getting sidetracked.'
'The important part is that it's not possible for this technology to be human in nature since it is opposed to the very foundation of human engineering.'
'This means this had to have been created in a place without humans, and there had been billions of humans all over the world during the era of the Ancient Ones.'
'I can't think of any other place but another planet.'
Nick thought back to the diagram he had seen in the ruins of the Ancient Ones.
A big circle in the middle.
That represented Earth.
That big circle was surrounded by a bigger circle.
That was the Sun.
And then, there was another smaller circle quite a bit away from the two circles.
Nick had learned quite a bit about the world of the Ancient Ones, and he also knew what that smaller circle represented.
'The moon, a natural satellite orbiting the Earth quite a long distance from here.'
Nick remembered how the warning sign specifically highlighted the moon.
'That ruin was military in nature, and the only reason I could imagine this base highlighting the moon with such urgency is enemy presence.'
'Most likely, the aliens have a base on the moon from which they manage their little experiment.'
More and more things fit together in Nick's mind.
'When I compared the Sun to a glass bottle, I was closer than I thought.'
'It is literally just that, a very sophisticated and advanced bottle.'
'Most likely, the Sun isn't even really a Specter.'
'It's probably just another fancy machine!'
'It's like a fucking smart aquarium!'
'It keeps the water warm, oxygenated, cleans everything, and gets rid of pests.'
'Except, in our case, it creates a dense atmosphere of Prephyx, surveils humanity, and creates Specters that create human suffering to create Zephyx.'
'This also explains how the Ancient Ones lost with such insanely powerful weapons!'
'There was probably a war between the Ancient Ones and the aliens. Eventually, the humans lost, and the aliens came to Earth.'
'Instead of eradicating us or subjugating us, they made a glorified recycling center out of our planet.'
'Dump shit in; Take gold out.'
'But you can't just transform something with a low energy content into something with a high energy content.'
'You have to make up the difference in energy.'
'It sounds absurd to think about, but what if suffering is some kind of cost?'
'That sounds so ridiculous, but that may somehow work.'
'Our understanding of reality constantly evolves and changes. We might not notice it since it happens so slowly, but over hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of years, it is very evident.'
'What if our feelings actually have some kind of effect on physics?'
Nick had to do his best not to feel embarrassed about thinking something like that since it went against some accepted fundamentals of physics.
'I don't have another explanation, okay?!' Nick thought in annoyance as if he was trying to defend his hypothesis from an imaginary crowd of people who had just started sneering at his preposterous statement.
'The fact is that Zephyx gets created when Specters inflict suffering on humans. The workings of that are still unknown, but we know it works like that, and we can't argue with that fact.'
Nick looked at the alien tinkering with the machine.
His true enemy.
The Sun was only a weapon or a tool.
'Most likely, some powerful Specters know about the aliens and report to them.'
'In fact, maybe even the Champion directly reports to them.'
'They probably approached him and offered him a long and prosperous life at the peak of humanity in exchange for his services.'
'Among millions of humans, you are bound to find at least a couple of thousand that would accept that trade.'
'We're just farm animals.'
'All of humanity are just farm animals, eating shit just to shit out gold.'
Nick looked at the alien with hatred.
He really wanted to kill it!
Sadly, he knew that he couldn't.