Unity by Carl Stubblefield (epub read online books TXT) 📕

And nothing happened.

Gus struggled to pull out of the cube but met resistance, as if he were under countless blankets pressing him down.

No, no, no!

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Dust in the Wind

Gus lifted the flame up as high as he could, trying to give himself as much light as the poor lamp could muster. The arm holding the lamp was trembling in anticipation of his demise and he put his other hand down to stabilize himself. There was a small grating noise as his fingertips brushed against something depressible on the floor.

Squinting, Gus couldn’t make out below him, but his fingers frantically probed for something, anything. His fingernail caught the end of a flat ring, flush with the ground, and he pried it up in desperation. The lamp flames were dipping lower and the masses of bugs swelled in response to the shrinking light.

Gus pulled up hard on the ring, twisting and turning it. Anything to move it or cause it to react. There was a loud bang, followed by a series of other noises overlapping. The white noise of falling sand, the squelch and crunch of bugs being crushed. Plumes of sand filled the chamber and Gus buried his mouth and nose in his shoulder to avoid inhaling the mess. A pungent scent as whatever ichor inside of the smashed bugs wafted out in the musty, sand filled air.

After a tense second, blinding beams of sunlight flooded into the chamber, highlighting Gus like a spotlight. The wave of scarabs was almost upon him, and they struggled to flee from the bright light as it burned down into the chamber. Smoke began emanating off the carapace of the slower insects, knocked aside by the flight of the others. Others flailed about, having fallen on their backs. They tried in vain to rock onto their feet as their hairy legs writhed in the burning sunlight. More sand began draining away, and the swath of light increased dramatically. Motes of dust and sand shone blindingly in the room and Gus pressed his eyelids tightly shut to give them time to acclimate.

The sound of scrabbling scarabs receded to a dull, distant murmur that faded to silence. Gus opened his eyes to see the bugs were gone, no evidence of their presence besides tracks in the sand extending from his position to the exit. Pulling the collar of the tunic to cover his nose and mouth, Gus rose to his feet and looked at the chamber, which looked totally different when illuminated by the noon-day sun. The sand and dust quickly settled, and Gus saw that four large stones had fallen near the edges of the room, exposing windows to the outside.

Though he had felt like he had descended a great deal, the opening above appeared to only be twenty to thirty feet above him. The weight of the stones had also lowered the entire floor of the chamber, revealing grates into which the residual sand fell, making a faint *shush* as it sifted into the darkness below. Gus shivered again, glad the openings were small enough that a scarab couldn’t crawl through. The whole ordeal had made his skin crawl and twitch, even though he knew the bugs wouldn’t brave the light.

A cramp in his hand made him look at his hand. He still clung onto the ring with a death-grip. He finally let go of the ring, letting it *clank* as it fell. Gus’ pull had lifted a foot-high cylinder out of the floor. Shaking and rubbing blood back into his hand, Gus saw that the center of the stone cylinder was hollow. He crouched down to look into the opening and saw something nestled in the shadowy recess.

Looking around, he found the discarded lamp buried slightly in the sand where he had dropped it and used it to probe into the opening. A large yellow gem the size of a lemon began to glisten as the hot desert sun played across its facets. As Gus picked up the gem from the sand a prompt filled his display:

Welcome Dr. Flak!

Followed by another menu with Journal Entries, Trials, Results, Protocols, and other tabs with techno-speak so complicated Gus could only guess what they contained. Gus checked the Journal first, perusing the first entries.

I believe that I have found the ideal storage medium for my further work. With the breaches in security that allowed the unscrupulous to profit from my work on mammalian integrations, I will be much more careful as I progress in this new direction. The medium of Quorian cubes is one that has always fascinated me, and more so now that their creator has passed. The knowledge of their creation, unfortunately, has passed with him, but I was able to glean much on their function and programmability before his demise. I was able to find three other cubes, all inferior ones with only a couple of sides active and functional. One was specialized to the point that it has lost all plasticity and could not be altered.

Still it provided a structure and blueprint that I have been able to extrapolate to practice and learn how to modify the cubes.

This cube, where I will store my life’s work, will be the epitome of all I learn. My most precious knowledge, hidden away from those who would attempt to take it again. My first goal would be to lock access to each facet under each successive side. Inability to unlock the environments sequentially will provide additional security. I know the cubes cannot be hacked in the traditional sense, but as experience tells me, often your worst enemies are those closest to you.

To wit, I’ve locked the first layer of information with a test that only I should be able to navigate. Supers will find that their abilities will not function in this virtual environment unless they are one of the few who possess an inherent ability. Even then, it would need to be