THE TWO FOLLOWED A crude trail leading to the first building at their left. Heavy digging equipment, brought-in from outside the dome, had mangled the bioplas slabs that were originally constructed there, cracking most of them and pushing them deep into the ground.

“Lots of red dirt around here,” Daisy observed. “I assume the hill this was cutout from is mostly comprised of that red sandstone around Durango. Think I see some mudstone and trace amounts of coal as well.”

As they came upon the first damaged building, Sord halted to survey the surroundings from this new angle. “Holy crap. Judging by this mess, they must have used everything in their toolkit to excavate this area.”

“But didn’t you say it all collapsed within itself? The buildings surrounding the lab?”

He shook his head. “Yeah, which explains why they had to bring in all that equipment we saw. I assume they focused on digging through the rubble to try to find . . .”

Sord stopped, hesitating to fully realize the thought emerging in his mind. “To find the body, or bodies.”

“You mean they aren’t sure if it was just your dad that disappeared or others as well? Surely they would have discovered other people missing, too.”

“Well, I never asked for detail. Honestly, I don’t think my mom wanted to talk about others dying in this mishap; not in my presence, anyway. It’s a blur. I simply recall she let me play video games constantly for a week, and she rarely ever has allowed that little pleasure otherwise. I assume she let me do that to lessen the impact and give me time to digest the situation.”

“Wow, you know, I’ve never played video games. My dad never would allow it. That Prosperity Stoic ethic to live within your principles and carefully manage your pleasures. Do you think it worked?”

“I’m not sure,” he mumbled. “No video games or other distractions can take your mind away from an unfortunate event like that. Personally, I’d now prefer to go for the adaptive shock of taking it in all at once, the whole thing. Grieving and getting it past me. Plus, I guess it’s easier to move beyond any doubts about the realities of death when a body is identified. When the person you cared about is obviously dead, never to return, you are left with no other options with that type of shock. No hope. No chance to turn back time. Forced to accept the circumstances. The certainty.”

“But she didn’t . . .” Daisy interjected, tears dropping from her eyes. “I mean, he didn’t go like that, all at once?”

Sord put his arm around her. “Sorry to get so deep. Guess I was going way beyond that ‘one second of self-absorption’ principle.”

“No you weren’t,” she countered. “You’re just describing that it’s more difficult when you don’t know the circumstances or outcome.”

“Yeah,” he replied, wishing he had brought tissues with him. “Shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“This is exactly why we’re here, no? To uncover the mystery of what happened at this place, right under our feet. This red-hued amalgam of bioplas chunks, dirt, buildings, excavation, and sunshine. I just love being here with you,” she said, wiping her eyes, “and the scientist in me screams out to examine the evidence. So let’s get moving, Sherlock, because we have much to discover.”

They climbed the slight incline to reach the open floor of the structure beside them. Biopolymeric walls were curled outward in contorted shapes.

“What could cause that?” Sord asked. “Have you ever seen bioplas do this? I mean, I’ve seen the stuff melt at very high temperatures, but it looks just the opposite. It curls inward.” He grasped the wall and slowly ran his hand downward. “This is almost as if it was a backward burn, what would happen if you could reverse the melting process beyond the original state of the substance.”

“Geez, Sord, maybe you have some science genes in you after all.”

“Ouch!” he yelled, stripping his hand quickly away from the wall.

“What happened?”

Blood dropped from his palm. “Something sharp on the wall. Damn!”

Ever the scientist, Daisy grasped Sord’s clenched fist and opened it.

“Don’t look!” he pleaded. “I don’t want you getting sick.”

“Silly! It’s not a deep cut by any means but clearly one that needs a bandage. You don’t happen to have one on you, do you?”

“No,” he replied, his face anguished.

“Big boy, I’m afraid you’re going to have to live with the blood and pain then.”

She immediately searched her small purse and extracted a white cotton pad in a clear wrapper.

“Is that what I think it is?” he grinned.

“Yes, Dearie. Women have periods, and I am a woman. It doubles as a bandage when required. It doubles as lots of things.”

“But won’t you need it?”

“Not my time right now, and don’t worry about me. You’re the one bleeding semi-profusely. I’m the one trying to stop it. Besides, we must avoid spilling too much of your red ink around the place. I don’t want somebody coming here later thinking there was a murder. Then we’ll really be in trouble. Plus, your own body should quickly repair itself. I’d say it could use three or four stitches right now, but if I wrap it tight enough, you should be good.”

“What will you tie it with?”

She dug further into her purse and extracted a long, elastic hair band. “Right here. Now, do you want to watch while I do this, or will you be the one to vomit?”

“No, no. I don’t even want to see how deep it is. I’ve had enough experience with cuts and bruises lately. Doctor Daisy can take care of me, and I promise not to report you to the medical licensing board, not unless I get septicemia or some disfiguring malady.”

“My, oh, my. What did I say about raconteur a while ago? You are an exaggerator extraordinaire,” she teased.

He looked away as she bandaged his hand and secured it with the hair band.

“This is fairly tight, so your bleeding should stop soon. How’s the pain?”

Sord knew he had to be tough in the face of hardship. It was the Prosperity way. “I’ll manage.”

“Such a strong macho man!” she taunted. “Broken bones ripped through skin. Contusions. Deep racnine bites and claw marks. And now, the most devastating of all. A little cut!”

“Hey!” he laughed. “Enough already. You say I’m the tease. What about you? Quite the reverse. A beautiful tease.”

She smiled. “Shall we head back into this building now and discover where it leads?”

He nodded, and they moved down the hall into the darkened interior of the building. Rounding a corner, they encountered a large, blue industrial door.

“Well,” she began, “here we go. I’m going to try it, even though the coroner may conclude I had blood on my hands when I opened it.”

“Coroner?”

“Yes, the one sent to the scene of the crime we are about perpetrate.”

His eyes widened. “What crime is that?”

“Oh, I imagine what’s behind this door is likely a hoard of angry mechs planning to overtake Prosperity. It’s locked on their side but not on ours. They’re just waiting in silence, having heard every word we said with their super-sensitive, augmented auricles. They already smelled us coming with their sophisticated olfactory sensors the moment we stepped into the dome. There’s an army of them on the other side, and this is their moment to overcome. To invade.”

Sord’s head was tilted to one side. “What a character!” he thought. “Such imagination. I can’t believe I let so many days go by since we first met, long ago, and I missed all this wonderful craziness and wit.”

She continued. “Given you are now injured, and I am the most capable of defending us from this menacing onslaught, I’ll open the door and face the music. If you survive and I don’t, please tell my friends I was not afraid.”

Daisy pushed the door bar downward, and it sprung right back. “Hmm,” she observed, “appears someone wants to keep out the teeming hordes.”

She tried again with the same result. “Well, Dearie,” she concluded, turning towards him, “the mechs will apparently have to wait for someone with a key.”

“It’s probably all for the better, Daisy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I. . .” He looked up at the top of the dome, considering whether he should bring up the ‘l-word.’

“I am so enthralled with you and can hardly keep from embracing everything about you, including your amazingly huggable waist.”

She held up her hand, noticing the barely perceptible motions he was making toward her. “I understand, but taking such a chance while anyone might come through that tunnel? Well, this is not the spot to do it.”

“What did she mean by that?” he wondered. “Is there some other spot?”

Grabbing his hand, she led him back down the hallway toward the depression. “I’m telling you, Dearie. I want this as much as you, but I am compelled by all we’ve learned and will manage my emotions appropriately despite the crazed hunger I’m feeling right now.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “We could always go back and eat in an hour or so.”

Daisy stared at him matter-of-factly. “No, not my point, Sord. I am hungry too, as you are, to caress you in multiple ways. My mind is swimming in this insane euphoria, but that must be controlled.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “I get it. If you can do it, I can hold back, too – but I don’t know how long.”

“Let’s complete our mission,” she commanded. “Work before play and all that.”

His eyes widened elfishly. “Does this mean there will indeed be play later?”

Still walking a step in front of Sord, she firmly nodded.

***

The two wound back through the edifice and emerged again to the opening of the depression. Their eyes panned the periphery but they saw no evidence of others in the vicinity.

“Let’s try this one,” she commanded, shimmying downward over large, broken chunks of bioplas intermingled with piles of loose gravel and boulders.

The next building was twenty meters away. When they reached it, they realized it had a similar design and construction to the one they had just left.

“I’m guessing most of these umbilicals are the same. I assume there’s a similar access door into this one,” Sord observed as they walked the hallway.

They came upon the same type of door, and Daisy tried pushing it open to no avail. She turned to Sord.

“It appears the excavators of the post-event site at least had the moxie to lock the doors so that young adventurers like ourselves couldn’t get into serious trouble.”

“Hmm. Yeah. Looks as if the bulk of these ruins are just hallways leading to the main structure in the middle, wherever that connected with.”

“Yep. These buildings were all connected to that main facility that’s no longer here. Probably offices or storage for items like scientific equipment are in these arms of the octopod.”

They walked back again toward the center of the depression.

She pointed to the various structures. “See how these entrances all look the same? The question I wonder about is this: why did they construct such long hallways to the heart of the facility? It makes you question what they were doing. I mean, they must have had this lab in the center, using God knows what kind of equipment. But maybe, just maybe, they didn’t want their offices and other administrative areas too close to whatever was in the lab, so they built these long hallways. Do you have any idea what could have been the heart of this thing?”

Sord nodded his head. “Not sure if this helps, Inspector, but my dad always left his metal stuff at home, including this watch and his wedding ring. I recall that kind of bothered my mom, and she’d joke about Dad having a lover at work, which I didn’t quite understand the meaning of at the time.”

“Oh,” Daisy noted, her eyes widening. “That tells me the lab, maybe even the entire area, was off-limits to metals. I’ve seen similar environments where you’re using big magnetic coils or fields and you don’t want your arm or leg pulled off completely if you’re a mech and happen to pass too closely. Same for a metal watchband cutting clean through the wrist. Your dad didn’t have any augmentations did he? I’m thinking mech-type, metallic appendages, motors or even subdermal chips or similar.”

Sord shrugged. “Nope, not that I know. He was basically one of the first families to found the whole Prosperity thing, and you know how they are about using unapproved augmentations of any kind.”

She nodded. “Yeah, we all get that same teaching from day one. ‘Physical augmentations, genetic manipulations, AI-integrations, they’re all fine when managed carefully after appropriate considerations and deliberations.’ You think there would be an easier way to explain that to a three-year-old, or at least that’s when the dogma started being drilled into me, anyway. That and the rest of the Prosperity Stoic narrative.”

Sord stared across the expanse. “Yeah, same here. At least they’re truthful about it. At least they admit, ‘This is our narrative, our belief system. We currently lack the ethical competence to advance our technological capabilities at a faster pace.’ I don’t know about you but I kind of agree with the thought, especially considering the unfortunate history of the last hundred years.”

He leaned over to catch the scent of her hair. “Do you realize you have the most perfect, beautiful ears?”

“Not yet, big boy. We both know where your mind is going. Let’s do this first. We must check the other structures to discover if the doors are unlocked. If not, I see a place down there to rest, right in the center. It looks like a little dining area. Catch that?”

He scanned the center of the depression. “You mean the low point? Sure. Appears the workers created a place to sit down and relax. It’s deeper, though; probably thirty meters below where we are now. You want to sit there, or do other things?” he suggested, smiling wryly.

She took a deep breath. “Oh, you! Relentless. We are not doing any of what you’re thinking out in the open for every nanobot to take in. Yes, let’s go sit there. Too bad we didn’t bring water, though. All this walking has made me thirsty.”

“We might find a fountain.”

They then searched the remaining buildings around the depression, checking each arterial to access deeper structures.

“I guess we’re shit out of luck, Dearie. Locked doors everywhere.”

“Wait!” he cautioned. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

He pointed to the black backside of a rectangular object fifty meters away, near the entrance where they arrived. “I think we might have found a dispenser!”

The two scurried down a slight decline, stepping carefully over more broken and shattered blocks of bioplas interspersed with red soil and clay.

“That’s it!” he exclaimed as they approached the unit. “Free water and food. And it’s plugged into the wall.”

“Well,” Daisy stated as they strode up on the dispenser, “it doesn’t appear to be perfectly-stocked. Do you like that fruit and nut mix? God, what I’d do right now for a good old candy bar.”

He pressed the buttons and two glass bottles of water emerged along with trail mix packages. “Just tell me if a raisin gets stuck to my front tooth, okay?”

She smiled. “Let’s go visit our little table and chairs now. It’s time to get off our feet and ponder the universe.”

“Daisy,” he griped, half-seriously, “I am anything but satiated. My brain is fighting my arms to keep from embracing you at every moment. I may look placid to you, but there’s a lunatic raging inside me. A fight for emotional sanity is ongoing, and the sanity part is losing ground.”

“Okay, Dearie,” she assured him, placing her arm around his waist momentarily. “We will find a place and time for that soon. But I need to first peer inside that racnine-resistant brain of yours and determine if there’s anything more than just a wonderful sixteen-year-old within.”

“Uh-oh. Am I about to be tested for something?”

“Yes. The test is one of wills,” she replied with a laugh. “Can you actually sit with me, adoring me, imagining our future time together, envisioning my body in flesh to flesh contact with yours, and still hold an intelligent conversation?”

Sord threw his hands upward and laughed. “My God. No more, please. I’m having major trouble coping. I get it, but this is taking all the discipline I’ve learned from God knows how many years of instruction to temporarily repress my attraction towards you.”

“Understood, but all good things come to those who wait, correcto? We can delay a little while longer,” she advised, tugging at his elbow to direct them toward the center of the depression. “This is my test as much as it is yours. As you and I were taught, we can never take for granted the little pleasures we afford ourselves. Choose them carefully, willfully, then enjoy them, but never dwell on them. So for now, let’s not dwell, okay? As Victorian as that might sound, I want to know Sord’s mind, and I want you to know mine.”

“Um-hum,” was all Sord could muster as he juggled the water and snack packages while following her downward toward the center.