The road continued for half an hour, winding occasionally to the northeast. The mountains acted as guard shields that held back the most intense of the desert winds, so there were stretches of road only covered by a thin layer of sand- the dunes here were shorter and slower to shift.
When the road let out on a vast parking lot seven times the size of Andistronica proper, Deca might not have even noticed if it wasn't for the single, rusting shuttle bus parked in the corner. Its windshield and windows had been shattered, decay was setting in, especially at the boundaries between the different pieces of its shell, and its wheels were varying degrees of flat, lending it a lopsided, dejected appearance. The seats were covered in dust and the dust was covered in sand.
"Hey," said Reca, pulling Deca out of her focused assessment of the old bus. "Look over there."
There was only one thing to look at: the massive, sprawling, windowless gray complex that towered above Deca to the east, the one with an ancient sign emblazoned with a familiar name: NUKECORP. It was so spacious that, from the vantage point of the parking lot, the duo could only see one of the corners- it was marked by a strange claw-like device that sprouted from the sand a short ways off from the building itself.
Deca noticed that a large warning sign had fallen over next to the path to the building proper. After some quick sand-spinning, it became readable:
ONLY SHUTTLE BUSES BEYOND THIS POINT
VIOLATORS WILL BE ELECTROCUTED
"Do you think that warning still applies?" asked Reca. Normally, a fallen sign outside of a deserted building in the desert would be easy to disregard. There was the working electric fence earlier, though...
Deca shone her headlights towards the path and flickered her internal lights twice. It was a game of charades, and the phrase was 'you go ahead and I'll follow you'. Maybe that was heartless- what if Reca got electrocuted? But one of them had to go. It was too late to give up. Reca had come all this way just to see this place, and she would see it- even if it was the last thing she ever saw.
If there ever was a golden opportunity to use her breathing exercises, this was it.
"I'll see you on the other side," said Reca. Did that mean...? Deca wouldn't dwell on it for too long.
The girl stepped onto the path. No electrocution yet.
She took another step a few seconds later. No electrocution then, either.
She turned around and gave Deca a thumbs up. 'hurry up,' Deca signaled.
Reca ran off as fast as her little legs could carry her. If she was going to be electrocuted, she would be electrocuted with adrenaline still coursing through her system. Maybe when she blacked out she wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between the adrenaline and the electricity! Well, one of them would be very painful.
Ten paces- no jolt. Fifteen paces, no jolt. Reca was about to pass the claw off of the corner of the building. Sixteen paces- nothing. Seventeen paces- nothing. Eight-
A horrible, awful, electric sound burst from the claw. Before Deca could even rush in, a crackling dome of white-hot energy emanated from the building. It was going to hit her and there was nothing Deca could do about it... except close her eyes and wait for everything to be over. Reca was doing the same.
They both opened their eyes ten seconds later. Reca's jaw hung open, and not because she had lost control of her muscles, either. The electric dome hissed and sparked on all sides, but not within her. She was in a small bubble of unaffected space within the dome.
She watched in awe as a path appeared in front of her like magic. It was a tunnel that stretched through the electricity and up to the door of the complex.
"Hurry up, girl," said a booming metallic voice with just a hint of apathy. Reca almost fell over from shock alone, but she managed to totter in place- if she had fallen, she would have come into contact with the shivering high-voltage energy wall behind her, and she refused to give up her chance at survival.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me again once you're inside."
"Why can't you tell me now?"
"I'm currently holding the thundersphere back so you can survive. It's taxing, you know. Or maybe you wouldn't- you've never done anything taxing in your life."
"What do you know about my life?"
The thrumming walls begun to close in on Reca. She had no choice- she had to follow the voice's instructions. Despite its tonelessness, she felt something deeply disconcerting within its cadence- a willingness to kill.
Reca took off towards the entrance, which loomed above her- big enough for the shuttle buses and far too big for one person- and threw herself at it, skidding past the doors just as they begun to slide open. The safe bubbles in the dome vanished, and then the dome itself flickered away- it was like it had never been there at all. Before Reca had the chance to look for remnants of the energy, the doors closed behind her.
The room was a large, empty garage illuminated only by a sunroof that occupied most of the ceiling.
"I'm in," she huffed, "So tell me who you are!"
"Me? I'm everybody," said the voice.
"I need a real answer!"
"I'm nobody, too."
"And here I was, thinking I'd get some useful information out of you!"
"Fine, fine- I suppose I'll give you the answer you want. When I was created, I was called Rix Two. Now, though? Rix One is long gone, and so is that name. Right now I'm... let's just say, I'm NukeCorp."
"Huuh? But NukeCorp is..."
"A corporation, yes. Let me rephrase that- I am this building, or the consciousness that dwells within it. I have no body except the one you stand within right now- I have no veins but the copper-plated wires that run through the walls around you. I have no heart except for the generator in the center of the complex, and I have no life except for solitude."
There was a hint of emotion in the robot's voice- spite? Anger?
"My job was to know everything and be everywhere. Now my job- the one I give myself- is to keep on living."
"You knew everything?"
"No one person knows everything. I came pretty close, though."
"Would you say you know a lot now?"
"A lot? Fool. I know more than any human could ever hope to know! I have seen sand swallow cities, I have seen the walls of hell crumbling! I have seen so much that I tire of seeing anything at all."
"So you probably have answers to my questions, then."
"It was my job to have answers back when this place was alive."
"Let me just test you first," said Reca. She wasn't sure what to make of the voice- was it really all-knowing, or could it be that it overestimated its own knowledge? "Where did I come from?"
"Andistronica."
Reca's pupils shrunk. How could this thing have known? Had it been watching her all this time?
"How... How did you know that?"
"Are you familiar with your old village leader?"
The one who had marked up the map. Maybe he had come past this place in Deca- or, rather, the van Deca was controlling, if that really was what had been going on.
"I think so."
"Did he never tell you about his past?"
"He died before I was born."
"Mmmm." The trace of artificiality in NukeCorp(?)'s voice made its thinking noises sound like distant mechanical humming. "Okay, then- I suppose no one else ever told you, did they?"
"Told me what?"
"If you don't know, no one told you," said the voice matter-of-factly. It was playing with her- it had to be.
"Can you tell me, then?"
"Of course. That guy used to work for me! Or, really, he used to work for Rix One, but I was always doing her work for her, so he effectively worked for me. Real weird one, that guy- he was-"
"Hold on!"
The voice stopped. Reca wondered if it was even still listening. She waited for a few seconds in silence.
"What?" it asked. She sighed, partially in relief and partially in frustration. This was brand-new information, and even though it was only one piece of the puzzle, she found that her brain was having a hard time meshing it with everything else she knew about the world.
"The settlement leader worked for you before the apocalypse?"
"I just said that, didn't I?"
How old was the settlement leader? Moreover, how long ago did the apocalypse actually happen?
"What was he- I mean, you said he was odd-"
"He was always slacking off, but not in the usual way. I mean, most of the employees would go out to smoke or drink or... well, I saw some things I didn't want to see, I'll just say that. But he pilfered materials from his assigned lab and brought them to a maintenance closet in the southern wing and did his own little experiments! He was obsessed with the intersection between biology and technology- not sure how he went into nuclear physics in the first place, but you know..."
NukeCorp- Reca mentally referred to it as NC to differentiate it from the corporation it represented- may have been an aloof, world-weary AI, but it still couldn't resist rambling.
"...he was always talking about how he'd make robots who could withstand anything and go anywhere, and he said they'd be like humans but just a smidge better. He wasn't talking to me about this, just his coworkers, but I heard everything- not as if I had a choice."
"Wait- I have another question."
"Ah, and I was almost halfway finished with my story."
Halfway? How long was the story? She considered asking NC to continue, but ultimately decided that her actual mission was more important. She took a deep breath, cleared her throat, and almost felt NC roll its nonexistent eyes.
"How did the apocalypse happen?"
No response.
Ten seconds- that was always how long it took for something to happen. Ten seconds came and went, and then twenty, and then twenty-five. Reca's blood boiled. She was finally talking to someone with answers, and they wouldn't- or couldn't- answer the most important question of all?
"Answer me, you... darn coward!"
She covered her own mouth. 'Darn' was a bad word! But it didn't matter. She was angry, and when people were angry, awful things came out.
"I could give you a million answers," spat NC.
"Really?" said Deca. Was this what hope felt like?
"As for correct answers... well, that's another story."
Reca let out a blood-curdling scream and pounded the floor with all the percussive force she could muster.
"How? Tell me how! Tell me how you know everything but you don't know this one major thing that I've been trying to figure out for... for weeks!"
The phrasing wasn't as impressive as she had meant for it to sound, but she hoped her boiling tone would convey the message for her.
"I don't have a real answer for you. Maybe it was one of the three horsemen after all, or maybe Rix One was right and it was something entirely unpredictable."
"The three horsemen? What are those?"
"You've been working on this mystery for weeks," hissed NC, "and you don't know the most basic possibilities?"
"No, I guess I don't. So would you fill me in?"
"The three horsemen were the three most likely causes for the apocalypse back when the media frenzy over it was happening. One, nuclear war. Two, hell overflowing. Three, dimensional decay by way of the glitchniverse."
"I get the first two, but what about that third one? What the heck is the glitchniverse?" Reca took an opportunity to use the only other swear word she knew.
"Another dimension, parallel to this one but all fucked up," responded NC. Reca didn't recognize that second-to-last word, but she assumed it must have meant something like 'messed'. "It was supposed to collide with this one. Nobody had ever seen an interdimensional collision before, so there were a bunch of competing theories about what would happen. One one hand you had people who said it'd pass through harmlessly, being parallel and all. On the other hand, there were the doomsayers who thought it'd destroy our reality."
"And... it didn't destroy our reality, did it? So we can rule that out?"
"Not so fast. When the collision happened, NukeCorp's scientists detected warped spacial pockets full of collision artifacts."
"Hm," said Reca, feigning understanding.
"Look, I'm just telling you what I know, and as I said- I don't know how the apocalypse happened."
"But you see everything! Surely you saw it happen!"
Reca considered that NC could be lying. If NukeCorp had nuked Wastelandica into submission, of course they wouldn't be quick to admit it, right? There was still more information to gather.
"It wasn't an instantaneous thing. Do you think the deserts moved in right away? Or that Wonlandica became Wastelandica overnight?"
Wonlandica?
It made sense that Wastelandica had been called something else before it became a wasteland. Her surprise wasn't at the revelation of its old name but at her own failure to even ask the question of what it had been called before. She had taken its name entirely for granted!
"No... but did you see what made the desert move in around you?"
"The wind. Now, let me let you in on a little secret- we had wind before, too. It's just that back then we had a cleaning crew to take sand off the roads... and the fire mechanism wasn't broken."
"Huh? Fire?"
"Rix One invented it herself! Ah, I say that because she usually needed my help to invent things back then. It's an underground machine that detects sand on the road above and burns it away. Let me tell you a secret, though- if something is covered heavily enough in sand, the system can't tell that it isn't made of sand. That led to a few... oopsies, and we had to disable it half a year in! All that funding right down the drain. I reenabled it a few years ago to keep the byway clear after the last of my auto-cleaners broke down."
As NC went on, it seemed less and less like a disgruntled computer and more like a person, one who had gone without someone to talk to for years and had been driven mildly insane by the silence.
"Basically, this place always looked like this. Big, foreboding, surrounded by a desert and then by mountains. I didn't see anything change, except for... well, when everyone left!"
"Tell me about that," said Reca, giving into her own curiosity and offering an olive branch to the rambling robot.
"It was a summer day sorta like this one-"
"But it's winter right now, though."
"Really? My clock reset when the internet went down. I just figured it was too hot out here to be anything but summer. Anyways, on a summer day sorta like this one- this winter day, I mean- I got the first major batch of resignations. There had been a few here and there- people who wanted to prep for whichever horseman they thought was coming, though I doubt any of them made it- but this was major. I'm talking twenty, thirty percent of the company up and quit. It was huge!"
Reca thought back to the man in the blue house. He probably didn't work for NukeCorp, but if he had made it, maybe some of the others had as well.
"Rix One asked me to let her do her own work, which was rich since I had been doing her work for her at her request for years. She tried to lock everyone in the building 'cause they were all taking their stuff back- the lab equipment she'd paid for with all that nuclear research money- but I decided I wasn't going to take her shit anymore."
"Oh." Reca didn't recognize that word, either, but she could pick up the frustration that NC was radiating.
"I let 'em get out with it since the prophecy said-"
"Huh? Wait a minute! You can't just mention some prophecy and then breeze right on by it!"
"I thought you knew about the prophecy! It's honestly incredible to me that you don't."
"Look, stop it with the shame and just explain it to me."
"Where to start? Well, a long time ago- and I mean a long, long time ago, a long time before the apocalypse, even- I'm talking a really really long time-"
"I get it."
"Well, it was an ancient prophecy from an oracle who claimed to be from the future. She predicted a bunch of stuff- earthquakes, coups and the like- and she gave a date for when the apocalypse was supposed to happen. She said she'd tried over and over to prevent it, but that she thought it was impossible after a billion attempts."
"And she didn't say how it was gonna happen?"
"She said she didn't know."
"She knew the exact date, but not the cause?"
"Look- that stuff happened a long time ago. Robots didn't even exist back then! And time travel hasn't been invented yet, as far as I know. Trust me- I've tried to invent it myself, but you know, it's not as easy as rocket science. Maybe she wasn't even from the future. Maybe she had psychic powers, or maybe she was just delusional and lucky."
"And then the apocalypse happened on the day when it was supposed to?"
"Yep- or rather it started on that day. Society fell apart, people left cities, took what they could get their hands on, and hunkered down."
Something about that description rubbed Reca the wrong way. She closed her eyes and tried to think. It was odd... a conclusion flitted into and out of her grasp and then vanished before she could verbalize it.
"You asleep?"
"No! Just thinking."
"About where you'll go from here, I bet."
"That's wrong."
"You can't prove I wasn't right."
"I'm not worried about proving anything to you, okay?"
"Then let me continue."
Reca rolled her eyes.
"I let everyone leave since I thought the prophecy would come true, and sure enough it did. Rix One got so mad at me that she tried to rip my consciousness core- the one she invented! right out of the mainframe to kill me once and for all. Heh eh eh..." It chuckled, but the laughter came out hollow and tinny, trailing off into silence. It was waiting for her to ask what happened next, but deep inside her stomach she already knew.
"...What happened then?"
"Well, there's a reason the most important components of the mainframe are locked within a bulletproof electrified case. If she hadn't tried to kill me, maybe she'd be the one talking to you today. She always thought she was immortal. Nobody's immortal- if you take anything away from this whole conversation, let it be that. Not even me. Out of everyone I've ever met, I'm the closest to immortal. But I can die, and I will die someday- well, I think so." NC laughed again.
"Gotta have hope, right?" it asked her.
She wasn't sure how to answer that. She countered with a question of her own, just as it had done earlier-
"If you don't know how the apocalypse happened, do you know of anyone who might?"
"That's a tough one," it said, letting out a pain-inducing mechanical grinding noise. "Well, before everything went south, there was this group called the Re-Oracles."
"Some sort of ancient fortune telling coven?"
"No- a fact-checking website."
"A what?"
"Like a site on the internet."
"The what?"
"Forget it. Just- it had employees in every major city in Wonlandica, so if you can find a city that's still standing, you should be able to find someone who was on the team, or maybe one of their descendants. I can't say for sure they'll know anything, but if anyone has the truth, it's either someone I've never heard of, or them."
"Do you know of any cities that are still standing?"
"None around here. This base was meant to be isolated, after all- most of the employees lived in vans in the parking lot."
"I guess that explains the size."
"If I had to hazard a guess as to a city that'd still be around... I'd say Pandemonia. That place might as well be indestructible!"
"Sounds like my kind of place," said Reca. "And where is it?"
"I suppose I should stop being surprised about what you don't know," grumbled NC. "Pandemonia is the capital city of Hell."
"Oh... huh? Hell? We just came from Hell River! Do you really expect us to go all the way down there?"
"You can stay here for the rest of your lives for all I care. I'm the only piece of technology that's left in this place, though, so good luck figuring anything out."
"Our lives...? Oh, you're including Deca."
Rather than saying anything in response, NC slid the doors open again to reveal Deca waiting just outside. Guided by instinct, Reca and Deca hurtled towards each other- if it had been a scene in a movie, it would have been in slow motion with sappy music playing and a glowy filter.
"I think we have to go," said Reca. "We'll head east and then south, back to the river, and we'll see what's out there beyond the desert. Right, Deca?"
Deca was unsure, but she had heard the conversation and wondered where else there was to go. She flickered her interior lights hesitantly.
"I'll see you off, then," said NC. "Oh, and Reca? A defibrillator is supposed to be used on someone whose heart has already stopped. Don't make that mistake again."
"You- were you the one communicating with me in the control room? Why didn't you say anything?"
"The speaker system back there is broken."
Sounded about right.
"If you ever need a roof over your head, come see me again... well, actually, don't count on it. Maybe my time will come soon! Maybe this place will be empty- and I mean really empty- when you return."
RC sounded overwhelmingly too excited at the prospect of death. Was this how immortals- or near-immortals- were?
"Don't count on it yourself," responded Reca, sticking her tongue out.
She almost expected it to say something else, perhaps a snide comeback or at least a farewell. It was silent, though, just as it had presumably been before they came.
"C'mon, let's get out of here!"
Hadn't Reca been afraid of traveling to Hell earlier? Deca rolled her nonexistent eyes and started back towards the parking lot. Pandemonia was a long way from NukeCorp- it wasn't even on the map- but if it held the answers Reca needed, Deca would gladly go there. She had nowhere else to be, after all.
NC, with its millions of camera-bound eyes, watched the duo leave. Things would be quiet- too quiet- again soon. Was it a relief? It couldn't tell.
It remembered the settlement leader- it remembered his dreams of building humanlike robots- it wondered if he had ever managed.
As it watched the duo pull out of the parking lot, it suspected that maybe he had.