Project: Magnus

“I am look­ing for a piece of the Matrix.”

“A piece of a matrix? Why come to me with this?”, asked Talos as he

“Not a matrix.”

“Wait, you are look­ing for ‘the’ matrix? The World Matrix?,” Talos asked laugh­ing, “Son, thats just a leg­end. A fairy tale told to young bots to get them to sleep. It is not real.”

Aneil shifted in his seat. He was becom­ing most decid­edly uncom­fort­able with the laugh­ing the old shaman bot was doing at his expense. He had been to the Dark Con­ti­nent sev­eral time in the past as a researcher and infor­ma­tion gath­erer. He had per­formed his duties well enough that he had been assigned Lead Researcher for the Noble Project, which was where he had encoun­tered the leg­end of the Matrix.

At first he had dis­missed it as just another crazy story just as the shaman had, but the more research he did for the Noble project the more he dis­cov­ered ref­er­ences to the ancient leg­end. So many so that he had began to won­der if there might actu­ally be some­thing to it.

He sub­mit­ted a pro­posal to the Admin­is­tra­tors but was refused on the grounds that it was all based on here say and cir­cum­stan­tial evidence.

Which meant he was fund­ing this trip with his own credits.

The sounds of the ser­vos whirring in the old bot as he paced around the room brought Aneil out of his mem­o­ries with a start. He real­ized Talos had been talk­ing to him. He glanced up to see him star­ing down as if expect­ing an answer.

“I am sorry, I was not lis­ten­ing. What did you say?”

“I was say­ing, assum­ing this ‘world matrix’ is real what makes you think it is around here or that I could help you?”

“It is real Talos. I've found it. Well, most of it. Accord­ing to the leg­end it was …”

“Bro­ken into a hun­dred pieces and scat­tered across the world. Yes, I know the sto­ries as well”

Aneil stood and waled over to his pack. He extracted a small, intri­cately carved, metal box along with a small cir­cuit chip, ancient things he had found in an old tomb not far from here. He han­dled the chip del­i­cately over the Talos, then opened the box. Inside was red tri­a­con­ta­he­dron shaped object about the size of a closed fist nes­tled inside a blue lat­tice work cage. As Aneil removed the con­tents sev­eral places were vis­i­ble where pieces of the red inner object were miss­ing. Talos sim­ply stared.

“As you can see, it’s not quite hun­dreds of pieces. But it is real Talos. Only a few pieces are miss­ing. That crys­tal con­tains all the infor­ma­tion about the Novatun tribe that lived about 60 kilo­me­ters north of here. Within that infor­ma­tion I have found sev­eral ref­er­ences to the Matrix, or at least what I believe to be the Matrix. There are mul­ti­ple ref­er­ences to the ‘heart that rules the world’ being bro­ken and scat­tered. It con­tained a list of places where the ‘heart was kept’ once it was bro­ken. I’ve man­aged to deci­pher most of them.”

Talos just stared at the crystal.

“Sorry, it is in an ancient for­mat and syn­tax, how­ever you can read it if you use your uni­ver­sal bus port. “

Talos did as sug­gested and inserted the crys­tal into a slot on his left wrist. He froze for a moment as he quickly down­loaded and scanned the doc­u­ments it con­tained, search­ing for the ref­er­ences Aneil had mentioned.

After a few sec­onds he removed the crys­tal and handed it back to Aneil, “Yes, I see what you mean. There are a sub­stan­tial num­ber of ref­er­ences in the doc­u­ments. I assume this was an ancient archiv­ing device?”

“That is my belief yes. We found it dur­ing a dig over a hun­dred and twenty-​​five years ago. At first it was just mean­ing­less infor­ma­tion and we sim­ply cat­a­loged it and put it in stor­age, not giv­ing it a sec­ond though. It was not until I began see­ing more and more ref­er­ences to the leg­end that I went back and res­canned the infor­ma­tion on this crystal.”

“Assum­ing I agree with you and I know some­thing about where the Colos­sus is, why would I help you? Telling you would bring hoards of vis­i­tors to my per­sonal paradise.”

“Because I’m not the only one looking…”

Aneil was inter­rupted by a series of explo­sions out­side. As both he and Talos started towards the door a small rust red bot cov­ered in soot and oil clam­ored through cough­ing and stammering.

Talos knelt in from of the new­comer and took his by the shoul­ders, “Tim­Tim, calm down. What is happening?”

“The Vok,” gasped Tim­Tim just before he collapsed.

“The Vok! You brought those insane bots here?” Talos turned to Aneil.

“No. I was track­ing them actu­ally, but when I real­ized they were headed in this direc­tion I rushed ahead. I had though I would have more time. We must go before they find us.” Aneil said as he turned and grabbed his pack.

“Go? I’m not leav­ing. This is my home now.”

“Old man,” began Aneil as he pulled an elec­tronic device from his pack, “I do not have time for fool­ish argu­ments. You now con­tain a copy of the infor­ma­tion on the chip. Infor­ma­tion the Vok lack but greatly desire. If you stay they will destroy you to get it. Even if you offer it up. You know them, they will assume you are hold­ing some­thing back and tear you apart, vir­tu­ally and phys­i­cally to make sure. I will destroy you myself first.”

Talos stared down the bar­rel of the Sta­tic Gun, "Fine, I will come with you. But be warned, I will not for­get this."

© 2012, anthony. All rights reserved.