[ The water doesn’t rush away from them so much as it just vanishes from around them. Lights seem to blink on in a wave, like falling dominoes, and resolve into the server towers they belong to (or whatever; they’re everywhere down here, and Simon can only assume they’re servers).
It’s not the most polished room down here, even taking the post-impact deterioration into account. The lighting is dim, bright enough to make out the contents of the room, absent enough to make you feel insecure. The floor is uninviting concrete, painted with ROBOT CONTROL TEST AREA in road-marking yellow, smack-dab in the middle. In the middle of the square that encloses the text is a Pilot Seat. There’s a desk to the side with a running computer.
The whole room has “employees only” written all over it, so... you know, if anybody who ever cared about that was here, they’d probably be even more uncomfortable.
It feels bigger than Simon, at the opposite end of the room from York when the distance was much smaller a moment ago, remembers. His heart leaps into his throat. ]
This isn’t—
[ PATHOS-II is surreal enough as it is, and happened long enough ago, that he has to do the fastest backtracking reconstruction in his head of what he did in here to identify it as Theta. He turns in place, finding no rift behind him, either. ]
no subject
It’s not the most polished room down here, even taking the post-impact deterioration into account. The lighting is dim, bright enough to make out the contents of the room, absent enough to make you feel insecure. The floor is uninviting concrete, painted with ROBOT CONTROL TEST AREA in road-marking yellow, smack-dab in the middle. In the middle of the square that encloses the text is a Pilot Seat. There’s a desk to the side with a running computer.
The whole room has “employees only” written all over it, so... you know, if anybody who ever cared about that was here, they’d probably be even more uncomfortable.
It feels bigger than Simon, at the opposite end of the room from York when the distance was much smaller a moment ago, remembers. His heart leaps into his throat. ]
This isn’t—
[ PATHOS-II is surreal enough as it is, and happened long enough ago, that he has to do the fastest backtracking reconstruction in his head of what he did in here to identify it as Theta. He turns in place, finding no rift behind him, either. ]
We shouldn’t be here.