The resource-worlds in the sky were transfixing, but the terrain I find myself standing upon as I step through the gate is even more fascinating. There’s a metallic mesh of some sort underfoot, arranged in irregular patterns that would seem to be the result of natural growth rather than deliberate design, but underneath I can see a massive motherboard. It doesn’t resemble anything you would see inside of a computer on Earth, but I still recognize it for what it is. This entire planetoid is one giant computer, and it acts as an external processor for every metahuman whose cognitive abilities are enhanced in some way. Zero, Adamant, and even myself, all rely on this planet to outsource our intelligence to. Our abilities alter the physical structure of our brains somewhat, making us naturally smarter, but there’s only so much meat to work with inside of the human skull, and eventually we exceed the processing power available. When that happens, we tap into this planetoid, which acts as additional computing substrate.

Unlike the water-world or the massive diamond, however, it’s not one giant sphere. This computer is large enough to have something resembling a biosphere. Not a traditional meat-based one, but an entirely artificial ecosystem. There’s plant life all around me, made of silicon and metal, with servos whirring inside of them- literal data trees. Off in the distance, I see a mountain that looks more like a pyramid, perfectly symmetrical, with each layer lighting up in sequence every few seconds.

The spot where I came through seems to be a clearing, but dead ahead of me is a jungle, with hyperconductive cables stretching between towering data trees that stretch directly up into the sky. Their ‘leaves’ are solar panels, soaking up excess energy from the false-stars, though something tells me the primary power source for this colossal computer is internal. It doesn’t seem to be sentient, but it’s clearly capable of some form of self-modification. Perhaps this is what evolution would look like from a mechanical perspective.

With the environment suit recording everything, I’ll have plenty of time to analyze this place later. Right now, I need to get moving, before this place manifests some sort of natural countermeasure to deal with a foreign intrusion. Whether that’s even possible, I have no idea, but I’d really rather not find out. The metal lattice beneath me doesn’t bend under the suit’s weight, which is fortunate, as I’d rather not accidentally give anyone an embolism by destroying some crucial bit of circuitry. Of course, it’d be extremely difficult for me to do enough damage to actually impact this thing’s processes on any meaningful level. It’s a brain the size of a planet- I’m smaller than a gnat in comparison. If I actually wanted to do some harm, I’d have to bring some bigger firepower, and even then I’m sure the damaged functions would just be rerouted to the other side of the planet. There’s no way that a machine this large could be working at anything near full capacity, given the relatively small number of metahumans there are on Earth.

As I approach the line of artificial foliage that marks the beginning of the silicon wilderness, the thought occurs that this bizarre resource-dimension might not be exclusive to Earth’s metahumans. We don’t have any recorded evidence of similar anomalies among the few other species we’ve encountered, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t alien equivalents to our metahumans elsewhere in the universe. If there are, it might be possible to access their worlds through this one, but any experimentation with that will have to wait until after I’ve finished my current mission.

Rather than rocks, there are various geometric metal structures of different shapes and sizes, which I suspect to be something akin to dedicated servers. Those prove fairly easy to avoid, though I do have to clamber over them a few times, when there’s no other easy way forward. Working with the Council very rarely takes me into the few remaining places on Earth that are completely undeveloped, and my weekly nature walks are nothing like this. Rather than being able to follow an already-beaten path, I have to make one, moving in the general direction of the faint radiation signature that marks Father’s final resting place. At first, I do my best to avoid damaging anything, but eventually that proves impossible, as a tangled web of cables bars my path. Sighing internally, and reminding myself that there’s no way any of this is irreplaceable, I activate the machete-blade in the environment suit’s arm, and hack my way through it. The cables are nothing like vines- each one has to be slowly sawed through, before it falls limply to the side, sparking faintly for a few moments and going dead. Maybe there’s some unfortunate meta-genius who’s experiencing a seizure somewhere on Earth, but I seriously doubt it.

As Ulysses said, there’s no wildlife to be seen, nor signs of habitation by intelligent creatures. I do, however, make some interesting observations as I continue through the jungle. The data trees seem to vary in height and width, perhaps owing to age. The larger ones seem to have more ‘branches,’ which look to be interfacing with other trees, in the carbon canopy high above me. The smaller ones have only a few branches, which are slowly reaching out, searching for other trees to connect with. It’s hard to know what function that serves, if the entire planetoid is one giant computer. I’m sure it’ll take years for us to even begin to understand how this place actually functions.

The only thing that saves the trek from being eerily silent is the ever-present whirring of fan blades, somewhere inside the machines that surround me. It quickly fades into white noise, leaving me alone with my thoughts. As I lift a thick cable over my head and duck underneath, Ulysses’ words echo. Maybe Father did know what he was doing when he chose the site for his gate. Perhaps he wanted access to this planetoid specifically. If he could wire it directly into his own head, he’d be able to use the entire thing, simultaneously cutting off every other metahuman, and augmenting his abilities massively. For a moment, I wonder whether that’s why he never came back. The radiation signature isn’t moving, but that could be because his body doesn’t need to move, now that his consciousness is contained within the machine itself. But if that was the case, surely he’d have done something with all that power. No, he must have starved to death, or perhaps been killed by the Vitruvian, before he could figure it out.

If I’m lucky, the Vitruvian’s body will be right beside Father’s, and I’ll get a chance to examine his tech. He was the only other meta-genius Father ever saw as a worthy adversary, after all. But the odds of that are low. Whichever one killed the other would have wandered around, trying to find or build a way back home, before eventually succumbing to exhaustion, hunger, or dehydration. It’s been decades since they went through the gate- there’s simply no way either of them could be alive.

Some twenty minutes into the journey, the suit informs me that the connection to Earth has finally broken, after getting increasingly weaker as I went on. We weren’t keeping in contact before then, but it is sobering to know that if I die now, they’ll have no way of knowing save for sending someone in after me, which they probably wouldn’t do. No sense throwing good money after bad. That being said, I don’t think it’s especially likely. There are no obvious natural hazards here so far. A part of me is still worried that the planet’s self-preservation protocols are cooking up a horrid hunter-killer machine to strip the flesh from my bones, but I’ve seen no trace of one yet. Besides, I’m so small relative to this place that I doubt it would consider me a threat unless I made an effort to present myself as one. The handful of cables I’ve had to cut through are no more significant to this place than a few strands of hair would be to me.

One thing I do my best to keep an eye out for as I keep moving is any kind of visible port. It would be interesting to see what information I might be able to extract from this behemoth of a processor, or how it would react if I uploaded something new. Unfortunately, nothing presents itself. With any luck, we’ll be able to figure out how with some experimentation, but I don’t have the time or the equipment to do anything like that at the moment.

After forty-five minutes of walking, I begin to regret neglecting to bring something with me to play music from. The environment suit doesn’t have anything of that nature built in either, which seems like an oversight. Disabling the suit’s external speakers, I start humming the half-remembered hook of a catchy pop song written before I was born. It’s not much of a distraction, but I’ll take what I can get. The air itself is stale, presumably because there are no actual trees here to recycle it, though being filtered through the suit and my mask probably doesn’t help.

Boredom swiftly becomes the least of my concerns, however, as I suddenly find myself at the edge of a cliff. There’s a canyon between me and my destination, though instead of a jagged rock face, the walls are smooth metal. Far below lies a river of milky-white liquid that crackles with electricity. It’s data-fluid, and the electricity it’s conducting isn’t insignificant either. It’s carrying patterns of information, potentially as complex as entire human minds. If I could see this planetoid from space, I suspect there’d be a number of these rivers criss-crossing its surface, perhaps converging at various reservoirs where the data coalesces. Again, I’m not entirely certain what the purpose of that would be, given that the entire planetoid is already one single machine, but that isn’t the main concern at the moment. Finding a way across is.

Falling in the electrified data fluid would probably be bad, even in the suit. Fortunately, the suit is equipped with thrusters- not powerful enough for actual flight, but sufficient to give me some lift. Combined with the far lower gravity of this planetoid, due both to its small size compared to Earth, and the fact that it’s likely not nearly as dense, I should be able to get across in a single bound. I take a few moments to find a good spot, then back up several feet and run straight for the edge. The environment suit’s weight is cumbersome, but as I activate the thrusters and jump, the impact of the reduced gravity shows itself, and I leap at least ten feet before I start to fall.

Instantly, I can tell I’m going to just barely fall short. There’s only an instant of terror before my rational brain retakes control, and I fire the suit’s grapnel at the nearest data tree. With the surface completely smooth, there’s nothing for the hook to latch onto, so I flick my wrist, hoping to wrap it around the trunk. It does so, catching me before I can fall too far, and I slam into the canyon wall. But already, I can feel the hook slipping, as the tree offers little purchase. Worse yet, the smooth canyon wall has no convenient hand-holds. I’m forced to use the machete blade to claw my way up, leaving ugly gashes in the metal, and badly chipping the blade’s edge, but I manage to reach the top and haul myself over before the grapnel line dislodges completely.

Heart pounding, I drag myself away from the edge and stay seated. It takes a few moments for me to catch my breath. Perhaps as a way of suppressing the terror of having come so close to death, I begin tearing apart my own thoughts, searching for what might have made me think that was a good idea. There were few other options- I could hardly have built myself a bridge, and because the canyon is a straight line, there was no hope of finding a narrower spot further up or down the way. But I could have timed the jump better, or better yet, launched the grapnel line before jumping, so I would have a safety net of sorts in case of failure. Was it recklessness that nearly did me in? Or just bad luck?

Whatever the answer, I don’t have the time to find it. I force myself back to my feet, and check the radar again. Father’s radiation signature is close, just a few miles away. Half of me wants to add this to the long list of reasons to resent him, for forcing me to make this journey just to drag back his body, but the other half wants to accord him some grudging respect for discovering this place, even if he never managed to do anything with it. Sorting out exactly how I feel about him can wait until after I’ve brought him back, though.

The false foliage only gets denser the further towards my destination I go. Not only that, but more variation in the artificial flora appears. Growing around the bases of the data trees are what look like glass flowers, with circuitry inside of the silicate petals. Are they signs of a more mature organism, or perhaps parasites feeding off of the trees for purposes unknown? When I reach out to touch one, it shatters instantly, the particulate shards disappearing into the metallic lattice beneath my feet.

After that, the last few miles pass without major incident. The chipped and jagged edge of the machete blade does pose something of a problem when I come across a thick tangle of cables, but I don’t let it slow me down. After my brush with death, most of the fascination with this strange world has been subsumed with a desire to get this over with. As Father’s signal grows stronger, I begin to worry that it’ll be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to find him. Maybe his body has been deconstructed by this place already, and I’m just following a phantom radiation signature left behind by his weapon. But those fears are soon dispelled.

I find myself in a clearing, somewhere the silicon foliage has seemingly self-consciously retreated from. In the center is a massive data tree, easily the largest I’ve yet seen, with visible roots stretching out in a symmetrical pattern, disappearing under the ground and extending further than I can see. Coiled wires and cables encircle the trunk, with more of the glass flowers poking through the cracks, many of which look to be in full bloom. I look up, to observe its manifold branches, of which there are enough to nearly blot out the false-stars. It’s there that I see Father.

He dangles from one sturdy-looking branch, with wires coiled around his neck, having somehow pierced his synth-fluid suit to worm their way into his body. Nowhere has been more violated than his skull, which is riddled with wires, having cracked the lenses of his mask. I’m reminded of Odin, who hanged himself from Yggdrasil, the world tree, in pursuit of knowledge. But in this case, it seems that the reverse took place. Every last scrap of data has been drained from Father’s body by this place, leaving him an emaciated husk. Is that his this tree grew to such heights, by feasting on an exceptional mind? Or did he connect himself to the largest thing he could find, in the hopes of seizing control from within?

Perhaps I’ll never know. But seeing as he’s already dead, there’s really no harm that I could possibly cause by cutting him down. I engage the environment suit’s thrusters once more, and leap up to his height, before grasping the wire from which he hangs with one hand, and slashing it with the damaged blade. I fall faster, owing to the suit’s weight, and manage to catch him before he hits the ground. The wires went slack when I cut him down, but I’m not going to go to the trouble of pulling them out of him right now. What I will do, however, is tear the ones inside of his head out, so I can pull off his mask.

There isn’t much blood left in Father’s body- I imagine most of it was drained, or simply leaked out, quite a while ago. But yanking out the wires in his brain causes the last vestiges of his cerebrospinal fluid to drip out, as well as a few drops of diluted crimson. When the mask comes off, my mind goes quiet for a moment. It’s like looking into a distorted funhouse mirror. On the surface level, there are obviously his wounds. Dozens and dozens of little pinprick wounds, freshly aggravated, mar his visage. The eyes are particularly hard to look into, ruined as they are. But underneath that, he’s still a twisted reflection. The white hair, much of which withered and fell away long before I arrived. The rotting teeth. The cold sneer that I’ve seen in my dreams since before I was born is nowhere to be found. This isn’t a person’s face, it’s just some thing. Only the lack of wind or rain, and the fact that he was wearing his uniform when he died, has kept him so well-preserved for so long, and even so, he’s barely held together.

I put his mask back on. Whether it’s out of some measure of sympathy, or simply to suppress my own disgust, I can’t say. Removing the rest of the synth-fluid suit will be more difficult, but I’m not concerned with that at the moment. What does interest me is what’s in his utility belt. First, I draw the death ray, which contains the unique isotope that brought me here. It can’t read my DNA through the environment suit, but when I lay hands upon it back home, the gene-locks should deactivate, and allow me to make use of it. I can’t imagine I’ll make it a part of my regular kit, but it could be a useful tool under certain circumstances. Many of the pouches and their contents have been damaged by the wires, but I retrieve a few odd gadgets, some of which have their own equivalents in my belt. After examining them for a few moments, I put them back in their places and stand up.

Part of me had been hoping that seeing Father in this state, finally knowing for certain that he’s dead, would induce some sort of epiphany. Every last trace of him that resided within me would be washed away, or something of that nature. No such thing occurs, but looking down upon his fallen form, the pedestal upon which he resided, even after everything, feels as if it’s beginning to crumble. My mind is almost resisting the revelation, refusing to accept that the Father in my mind is the same person lying limp on the ground in front of me. But when I close my eyes, and picture Father’s contemptuous gaze, he’s sneering with rotted, missing teeth.

Opening my eyes once more, I put the more psychological concerns out of my mind for the moment, and do my best to worry about the current situation before anything else. I still have to bring the body back. Another seven-mile trek, and I have no idea how I’m going to get across that canyon while carrying him. Fortunately, the path I cut on my way here means I’m not likely to get lost, but that’s about all I have going for me right now.

Before I can bend down and pick Father’s body back up, a glowing pillar of golden light appears on the other side of him. I take a step back, raising the damaged machete blade as if it could protect me, and watch as a humanoid figure steps out. He isn’t instantly recognizable, given the long beard and longer hair, but there’s really only one person it could be. He wears a suit of golden armor with impossibly advanced machinery shifting and turning beneath the surface, but leaves his head wholly exposed, to reveal a face currently displaying a stern expression.

“The Vitruvian.”

It feels as if the words come out unbidden. I imagine he’s heard it repeated hundreds of times before. Whispered in relief, cheered by a clamoring crowd, or uttered scornfully by his many enemies, including the man whose name I share, the man whose body now lies between us. Even now, it brings a faint smile to his lips. It’s been nearly four decades, but besides the beard, he looks like he’s barely aged a day since the last time anybody saw him.

“And who might you be?”

Something about the hero’s presence makes it difficult to speak. Maybe it’s the faint, warm glow emanating off of his armor, which seems to drown out the harsh light of the false-stars. He’s not some opportunist or fortune-seeker like most ‘heroes’ of the modern day. This is the leader of the Vanguard, inspiration to millions. A living legend, though most people aren’t aware that the ‘living’ part still applies.

“Conrad Winters,” I reply reflexively. Then, self-conscious, I gesture at Father’s body. “His son.”

The Vitruvian furrows his brow. He’s got curly, almost impossibly voluminous hair, with a golden-blonde coloration that seems like it’d be virtually impossible to achieve without dye, but to my knowledge it’s completely natural.

“His son? You sound rather too young for that to be the case, unless this is some sort of alternate universe— ah, I see. You’re a clone. A contingency plan, I suppose?”

Despite the fact that he’s presumably been trapped here for quite a while, there’s no hoarseness to his voice. Perhaps it’s got something to do with why he’s so well physically-preserved. Maybe his technological genius was merely a smokescreen, and his real power is some form of immortality.

“That’s right. But I have no animus towards you,” I hasten to clarify. “My intention in coming here was only to retrieve his body.”

It seems likely that the Vitruvian was the one who killed Father, maybe even the one who hanged him from the tree that still looms over us. But frankly, I can’t blame him. It’s Father’s fault that he’s been trapped here for the last forty years or so. He brushes past that, eyes alight.

“You have a way to return home? To Earth?”

“Yes. You’re welcome to join me, if you wouldn’t prefer to remain here.”

For some reason, I find it hard to believe that he wasn’t able to construct a gate and come back on his own, considering he’s easily the most powerful meta-genius on record in the past century, especially given the abundance of raw materials here. But then again, it’s not as if he had a workshop available. Surviving at all is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.

“Mister Winters, I would love nothing more.”

The Vitruvian’s presence is so calming that it’s almost off-putting, and I double-check my suit’s diagnostics to make sure he isn’t messing with my head somehow. There’s no psychic interference, though. Just the sense of being around someone who was called a hero when that word actually meant something.

It doesn’t hurt that he makes himself useful almost immediately, by popping some sort of device off of his armor. It self-modifies in his hand, a golden disc that he attaches to Father’s chest. A moment later the corpse rises into the air, and hovers several feet off the ground, following the Vitruvian as he starts walking. I hurry to catch up to him, as he follows the path I cut through the steel jungle. His pace is steady, but I detect a certain amount of anticipation growing within him. He’s been here for so long, I imagine he probably gave up on any hope of going home. And bringing him back won’t just be an act of kindness on my part, it seems likely that he’ll be a very real asset to the Council.

I’m so caught up in my own thoughts, conflicted about being so close to the man who killed Father, and confused with how awe-inspiring I can’t help but find him, that we barely speak for the first leg of the journey. He points a finger at the canyon when we arrive, and creates a holographic bridge that we swiftly cross without issue. I do my best not to stare at Father’s floating corpse as it trails behind us. Eventually, as we’re passing a cluster of tetrahedral server-stones, the Vitruvian addresses me.

“I presume your father’s designs were destroyed after he disappeared, seeing as none of my allies ever managed to find me. You replicated the device on your own?”

“I had a little bit of help,” I reply cagily. This probably wouldn’t be the best time to bring up the Council. That notion is going to take some adjusting to for him, I suspect.

“Mhm.” He pauses, sounding somewhat skeptical. Even though I’ve claimed not to hold any grudges against him, I can’t blame him for being suspicious. Then he brightens, as if just remembering something. “How is my team, by the by? I know it’s been quite a while, but most of them should still be around.”

Casting my mind back, I try to recall the statuses of the rest of the Vanguard. The Vitruvian was the only one I ever had more than a passing interest in, but the others have been in the headlines once or twice during my lifetime.

“Atlas is still active, last time I checked. Kentarch and Neutrino are retired. Oh, and Dryad was a Senator for a while. She’s the ambassador to Arcadia now, I think.”

“Arcadia?”

He’s so far out of the loop that I almost feel like I’m talking to a time traveler from forty years ago.

“It’s essentially a metahuman ethnostate on an island in the Pacific. Pretty small in size, but powerful enough to have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.”

“What?”

I can’t help but laugh.

“Let’s just say there’s a lot you’ve missed.”

Clearly, the Vitruvian doesn’t see the humor. He spends the next half hour or so brooding. During that time, more questions come to mind. If he’s been stuck here for so long, how come this place shows no signs of human habitation at all? Maybe he found a way off this planetoid, and lived somewhere more hospitable, only showing up when he detected that someone was messing around with Father’s body. Or he was simply elsewhere on the computer-world, in a spot he managed to make less sterile and bleak. Eventually, however, I decide on what feels like the most pressing inquiry.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how exactly is it that you’re alive? This environment doesn’t exactly seem conducive to fulfilling Maslow’s Hierarchy, so to speak.”

At first, he just looks confused, and then seemingly realizes what I’m getting at.

“Ah. I activated my armor’s stasis mode. It keeps me from aging, removes my need for sleep or sustenance, and I suspect it prevented me from going insane after the first ten years or so.”

That seems useful- almost too useful not to have some sort of catch. Even the most powerful meta-geniuses have never been able to invent something like an ‘immortality button’ that didn’t come with a hidden downside or major cost of using..

“The aging… is that just gone, or simply banked for later? If you disabled the stasis now, would you age forty years in an instant?”

The Vitruvian frowns.

“I’m not entirely certain. I never had cause to use it for particularly long before I came here. And frankly, I’m in no hurry to find out.”

That’s interesting, especially if it locks him into his current mental state, as well as the physical one. He’s not only the same physical age as he was when he came here, his mindset also hasn’t changed in the ways one might expect if they were stuck in another dimension, completely alone, for forty years.

“Probably best to err on the side of caution, then.”

He laughs grimly.

“Agreed.”

With that exchange, our conversation essentially comes to an end. Not because there’s nothing left to say, but because within the next ten minutes, we get close enough to the gate that my uplink with the other side comes back online. As soon as I hear Ulysses’ voice in my ear, I switch the environment suit’s external speakers off, silencing our conversation to the Vitruvian.

“Winters. What took you so long?” I wait a moment for him to check the video feed, smirking. “Hold on, is that—?”

“The Vitruvian? Yes. Prep a secure site for his debriefing. All available protective measures. We need to keep a lid on this for the time being.”

“…understood,” Ulysses replies, clearly still disoriented by the appearance of the long-thought-dead hero. It’s somewhat surprising that he didn’t foresee this possibility, given his quantum brain, but then again, we had little way of knowing that the Vitruvian’s armor could keep him alive for decades without any food or water.

Disconnecting, I turn the speakers back on. The Vitruvian doesn’t seem to have noticed that I was carrying on a separate conversation while walking.

“We’re getting close,” I inform him. He nods solemnly, and starts walking a little faster, with the floating corpse behind him speeding up to match. Not long after, we arrive. The gate is still open, a flat blue hole in the dimensional membrane sitting in a clearing just outside the jungle’s perimeter.

The Vitruvian observes the gate with undisguised fascination, somewhere between anticipation at his imminent homecoming, and interest in the technological aspect of the portal itself.

“Well? Are you ready to come home?”

The hero smiles, and I can’t help but shiver.

“Absolutely.”