The address was simply there. She hadn't requested it, and it didn't show up in the mental log all sphere-users kept in a corner of their conscious mind; it was just... there, a memory, a slice of knowledge, fully-formed.

She felt like she'd been hacked.

"Well, that's fantastic," said Cassandra sarcastically, after she told them. "So now I suppose you want us to follow the whims of a mysterious presence that places messages directly into your head. You don't actually think we will, do you?"

Keri sought for something to say. She didn't know what she wanted to do.

Anisa saved her.

"We don't exactly have any better plans, do we?" she said.

The feelers the group had put out whilst Keri flew across the spheres had turned up completely dry. Admittedly it had only been a short time, but every one of their contacts told the same story; the modders had gone to ground.

It happened occasionally, when they felt they were at risk of being exposed to the wider world. They disappeared, reappearing only at a time of their own choosing. Until then, they may as well be in the rootkit, hidden from any mere user.

"You think we should go?" exclaimed Cassandra, eyebrows raising in surprise.

Anisa hmm'd.

"And the Butcher? You aren't worried that maybe it was him that placed the message in our would-be prophet?"

Anisa stared at Keri for a moment, evaluating.

"If the Butcher could get into her corps there's a lot more it would do than simply leave an address. No, this feels... different." She turned back to Cassandra. "I say we go."

Keri felt her grasp on things slipping. She didn't know whether she did want to go, not really.

The idea that something could get into her corps like that, could alter her brain-paths without her consent, was violating. What could be the motive of such an action?

As if reading her mind, Eu spoke up.

"We don't have to go in blindly, dear," said the older lady. "We'll go carefully, and scarper at the first sign of trouble."

"Now you?" Cassandra seemed about to explode. "Honestly, I knew you guys were crazy, but this..."

"You have any better ideas?" said Andreas.

He had been staring out the window for the entire exchange. Keri hadn't even known how much he was paying attention.

"No?" he continued, turning to face them. "Then it's as Eu says. We go in slow and easy. So, where exactly is it we're going?"

"Um..."

They all looked at Keri.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

The structure bulged from the oily water like the shell of some gargantuan turtle, a huge, dark spheroid fixed and unmoving despite the waves that lapped against it from every side. It rose above them even at this distance, higher than many of the habitats of the city despite the fact that the vast majority of it lay below the surface.

The smell of brine, oil, seaweed and industrial by-products mixed together to produce an overwhelming sensation in the onlookers, and the sound of the crashing surf was a constant wash of noise as physical as it was aural.

“It’s like the end of the world,” said Anisa, breathlessly.

They were standing on the coastline, a hard, concrete land that challenged the elements to continue their futile efforts against it, the ocean crashing in ineffective sprays of foam against its walls. From end to end the land was a monotony of greys and blacks, square, brutalist blocks of fully automated factories that churned out the masses of products and toys demanded by absent masters. Massive gouts of water-steam poured from the roof stacks of each building, in such quantities that even on this cool day the air was filled with moisture.

The city lay far behind. It had been days since they left its confines and headed off through the wastes, and the lands this way really were wastes, though not in the same bare, desolate way as the lands around the space elevator had been. These lands were functioning, row upon row of squat, windowless buildings within which industrial processes and manufacturing lines moved at a speed and with an unflagging intensity no human could fully comprehend, but they were dead lands all the same. Nobody came out here. Keri thought they may have been the first people to visit this place in years.

Or maybe not. The location in her mind led them directly through here, and it felt right that the modder would hide in a place ruled only by tech.

They came to Triton early in the morning, the sun framed behind it only adding to the looming power the dark metal exuded. The one-time city of the future turned folly of the past was somehow more real than the tower into the skies had been, thought Keri. That had seemed impossible, tricking the mind into shifting it onto a smaller scale, appearing to sway and warp even when it couldn’t possibly be doing so. Triton, on the other hand, was entirely believable. It was huge, but on a scale a human could understand. It was incredible, but in a way that could be comprehended.

Triton reflected the brutal architecture that stretched along the coastline before it. The complex was a thing of sheer force, a giant swathe of polluted ocean pushed aside to make way for an edifice kilometres in diameter and tens of metres deep. Somewhere far below the waves and extending further outwards into the ocean, far enough perhaps to even extend into water with more than a few metres of turgid visibility, was a second section, longer but far narrower than the first, descending into the true depths.

If that second section still existed, of course. Much of the larger, spheroidal main section remained visible and was at least outwardly undamaged, but what the interior would be like was a mystery to them all.

Triton had been built early on in the Butcher era, one of the earliest tests of their newfound capabilities. In that mad dash for bodily mutilation that so epitomised those heady days, creatures with their entire respiratory tracts replaced by carbon membranes and alloy bodies free-dove at depths unthinkable to most surface-dwelling humans. They carved and welded and fused protesting metal into the shapes they demanded, forced in the thick sheets of thermoplastics that would serve as viewports though there was little to see in these polluted waters, and they dug and smashed and crushed at any part of the sea floor that stood in their way. What they had made at the end of the great effort was a monument to the new world, an epic proof-of-concept that was a greater engineering achievement than perhaps anything up to that moment.

It took many years for humanity to move in. Though the underwater habitat had been designed specifically to address the need for new, untouched living space on a planet so marked and scarred by the mistreatment of a hundred generations of homo sapiens, there were simply not enough people to fill it. The world prior to the Butcher era had not been a kind one, and through folly and calamity had become massively depopulated.

Yet humanity did move in, little by little, and found a place they could flourish. The population within the thick walls grew exponentially, more rapidly than any comparable rate back on land. Soon, a thriving metropolis was born that surpassed any remaining on the outside, a metropolis that became renowned for its art, culture, and social achievements. The next generation of Tritonians rose to take their place amongst the most renowned citizens of the globe, the most respected of its leaders.

But within that growing mass of humanity, unknowable and alien, the Butchers waited.

Triton was amongst the first to go when conflict finally bloomed between man and the augmented, rendered uninhabitable early on. It was said that the population died in fear and pain, locked off from the world beyond and unable to escape as their oxygen slowly ran out, as the ocean gradually retook what it could of its old domain. It was said that the Butchers watched from the water as this happened, and laughed in the deep.

All this went through Keri’s mind as they stared at the superstructure, but one fact more than any other went round and round in her head. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be true, it didn’t matter that nothing could possibly survive from the long-ago time when Triton had been wiped of all life.

It was said that the Butchers remained within, lying in wait for any foolish enough to enter the cold darkness of its depths.