Joe stared at the anomalous section of the glossy white wall. A meter-wide sphere had been carved out of it, and native plants and rocks filled it like a terrarium. He approached the niche carefully. Something moved in the foliage.
He leveled his pistol and watched as a small orange creature crawled slowly along the edge of the area. It hesitated to leave the small space, circling around and then finally coming to a halt.
“What in the hell is going on here?”
Joe squatted and contemplated the chitinous creature. It had a round shell and short spines that stuck out at intervals to move it along. Three thick pincer arms came out of the front. In all likelihood it was the same creature that had tagged along on his robot’s leg. Joe could smell the musty plant odors, reminding him of what it smelled like on the surface.
“I recognize you,” Joe said to the small creature. “Finally found a spot that reminds you of home, huh?”
The edge of the floor ended abruptly at the perimeter of the sphere. It reminded Joe of the edge where the corridor became a cave. The floor smoothly ended, unscarred, as if it had been constructed to hold the soil and plants. The wall had a depression in it, continuing the shape of a sphere from the depression in the floor, and Joe could see the layers of building material. Each layer had been smoothly cut at an angle, giving way to the next, deeper layer. The groove had not been built into the wall, it had been cut or melted in.
Joe rose and walked around the unusual sphere of vegetation. He realized, as the odors became imperceptible again, that the air in the complex smelled clean like it did in spaceships, rather than like the pollens and molds that laced the air of the surface. He surmised that the complex had an efficient air filtering system.
Joe continued down the corridor, then into another hallway, holding his pistol ready. He had decided to sling his rifle over his shoulder, since it would be harder to wield in a surprise situation than the sidearm.
He came across the fire control station that the directory had hinted at: a large room with manual and automated fire fighting equipment. Two large red robots sat in maintenance bays in the center of the room. They looked vaguely humanoid in the torso, but the bottom halves of their bodies were treaded like tanks. Wires and hoses were attached to the machines as if they were people on heavy life support. Like every place he had encountered in the installation thus far, the walls were immaculate—free of both dirt and scuff marks. Joe suppressed an urge to mar them in some way. He glanced briefly at storage rooms and a media lounge before moving on. When he didn’t find any exit in that section of the complex, he turned around and started backtracking.
Joe soon realized something was wrong. He entered a room that he had thought was the fire control station, but somehow he must have gotten turned around; he found himself in a complex room filled with twisting pipes and air ducts. He turned back to figure out where he had made a wrong turn. He searched for several more minutes until he was sure he had rechecked every door in the area, but he still could not relocate the fire control station.
Joe stopped in a corridor and kicked the wall in frustration.
“This is bullshit! Where the hell am I?”
Somehow the walls around him kept shifting, changing. Whenever he left an area, things moved, including walls and doorways. Most importantly, the exit had moved. Was it waiting for him someplace else, or had it disappeared altogether?
Joe knew that a virtual environment could feel almost exactly like the real thing. But he hadn’t connected to any equipment that could be feeding his senses a fake complex like this. He wondered if the UNSF scientists had completed a remote projector that could seamlessly put someone into a virtual environment without their consent or knowledge.
“That stupid black disk, maybe…”
What if the black portal had rendered him unconscious? Then he could have been hooked up to a virtual reality system before he awakened. Except that the robot had returned through the portal and reported the corridor beyond.
“Okay, is this some kind of experiment?” he asked loudly. “I’m supposed to figure my way out of here?”
No one answered.
Joe had heard rumors of experiments conducted on Space Force grunts, unscrupulous biological and sociological trials that had sounded creepy and brutal. He had always discounted them as dumb stories, purple paste that soldiers told each other over poker games to see if they could get anyone to believe them. Now he was not so sure. The idea that he had somehow been put into a virtual environment could explain a lot of what he had seen.
He checked his link’s VR timer. The timer had been designed to track people’s time in virtual environments and notify the authorities if the user spent too much time there. It was meant to be a control to keep cyber junkies from dropping out of society and spending all their time in fantasy worlds. Joe’s timer said he hadn’t spent even a minute in a VR today.
The link interface was supposed to be too closely interlaced with the human brain to be replaced by a virtual impostor, but Joe supposed that the UNSF probably had ways around that. For that matter, even a rich civilian could probably get around the timers. Most people of meager means like Joe believed the VR time limits did not apply to the rich and powerful.
Joe took a deep breath and decided to keep searching for the exit, real or not. Even if the exit moved around, he couldn’t find it by just remaining stationary. As best as he could tell, he never saw anything changing while he watched.
Up ahead, Joe saw another sphere of plants. He walked up slowly. This time the anomaly dominated the center of the corridor. It was the same size as the previous one. He approached slowly. An orange creature crawled amid the foliage.
“What the hell?” Joe asked himself.
He looked at the creature. Was it the same one?
“Time for a little experiment,” he announced to himself.
Joe opened his pack and searched through it. He brought out a tin of food and opened it up. Working carefully, he held the tin over the orange creature as it crawled about. He dumped some of the soup out onto the shell of the small thing. Part of its carapace was dark with the liquid, and a few tiny chunks of vegetable matter stuck onto it. Then Joe walked around to the far side of the sphere and set the tin onto the floor.
“If I see you again, I’ll recognize you,” Joe said to the creature.
It continued to crawl around the edge of the vegetation, looking for shelter. Joe turned back the way he had come, leaving the crab-thing and his tin of soup behind.
He made a point of keeping the wall on his right and followed the corridors carefully, without opening any doors. After moving through three or four connecting hallways, he turned back and retraced his steps. The hallways had remained stable, although he swore that some of the doors had already disappeared.
When he came back to the corridor where the sphere had been, he saw that the room had changed. The little section of plants was gone. He started opening doors and searching around. He did not have any luck at first, but he kept trying, swinging back and forth, rapidly checking hallways and rooms.
At last Joe came across a small area of plants again. They were growing out from under a table in the center of what looked like a mess hall adjoining a large kitchen. Joe ran up and moved the table aside to get a better view. Once again he saw a brightly colored creature crawling around in the plants.
Joe kneeled closer and examined the creature. A dark stain and a smashed carrot chunk marked the side of its armor.
“Aha! You are the same one. And somehow your environment follows you around!”
The creature crawled out of the plants and moved toward the wall along the smooth floor. It headed into a corner, turned around, and headed back the other direction.
“It only follows you around when I’m not here,” Joe corrected himself.
Joe stood up and looked around the dining room. He felt like a bug under a magnifying glass.