The sudden revelation of truth had left Duncan standing in the corridor a bit dazed, his mind toggling between "This is just fucking ridiculous" and "This ridiculousness is just fucking logical." Only after wrestling with his urge to criticize for a while did he refocus his attention on the "screen" embedded in the wall.
After a mont of observation, his expression gradually beca thoughtful.
The Great Annihilation had reshaped everything through "world collision," and the New Hope was no exception. Part of it had turned into "Alice’s Mansion," now floating in Subspace. Yet here, after opening another version of Alice’s Mansion with the guiding key, a "screen" appeared at the end of its corridor, revealing the so-called "master bedroom’s" true nature...
In other words, within Alice’s Mansion, as opened by the guiding key, part of the structure had been "restored" or "recreated" to its original form.
Pondering, Duncan looked up and across to the exit on the other side of the corridor.
What did the garden look like now? And the automaton slumbering within it?
He left the second floor of the mansion, descending the stairs by mory, traversing the narrow corridor beside the main hall, passing outside rooms that had always emitted hushed whispers but were now enveloped in deathly silence, making his way toward the garden.
Along the way, he stopped, drawn by a door in the hallway.
Many identical doors lined the corridor, but one had changed—it glimred with a silvery tallic shine, its edges wrapped with pale blue glowing stripes, like a hatch of so large machinery set into the classical wall. Duncan approached this tech-infused hatch and saw a transparent window above it.
Gazing through this "observation window," he saw a room bathed in cold, colored light, filled with rows of cabinet-style equipnt on large platforms and racks, with cables dangling from the ceiling, connected to enigmatic devices.
The equipnt in the room seed to still be operating, lights flickering across the surfaces of the array like the blinking of tides. However, the thick isolation door seed to block all sound—none of the "server array" hums could be heard in the corridor outside.
Duncan tried to push the door open, but it wouldn’t budge—it seed like nothing more than a "facade" fixed to the wall, with no state of "open" possible.
Yet, looking at the scene behind the door, Duncan grew thoughtful again.
He rembered the whispering voices often heard around the corners in his familiar version of Alice’s Mansion, and the soft music that seed to emanate from empty halls as if a ghostly ball was in progress.
...Could those ghostly sounds be the hums of the server arrays in operation?
With so unbelievable associations in mind, Duncan left the softly glowing tal door and continued toward the entrance to the garden.
The long corridor seed to stretch on endlessly, even longer than he rembered. Yet, the garden’s door, faintly visible in the dim light, always stood within sight, like a beckoning "finish line."—Duncan quickened his pace as if an invisible call urged him to hurry forward.
The corridor receded beside him, and more and more "original structures" began to appear on the contiguous doors and walls—the silver tallic doors gleaming, the spaceship cabin walls inset with lights, and the irregular tal plates. These "remnants of the past" appeared randomly on the elegant, classical facades and ceilings as if scales of a dragon were shedding, exposing the steel skeleton and power cables beneath...
And finally, the seemingly endless corridor ca to an end. The "garden’s grand door," made of countless stained-glass pieces, stood silently before Duncan, the classical patterned door fra faintly glowing with a pale blue light. A flickering screen embedded itself oddly among the colored glass—
Navigator Unit 3 Core Server/Central Nervous Cabin
Standing before this door, Duncan paused for a mont before slowly reaching out.
The "garden’s grand door," just as he rembered, opened effortlessly—it as if it had never been locked.—A vast, dimly-lit space unfolded before his eyes.
He saw a hall, its far end shrouded in mist-like darkness, obscuring its shape and limits, with many obelisk-like black shadows standing within that "mist," their lights blinking uncertainly. The only clear feature was a circular platform at the center of the hall.
Countless tangled pipes and cables descended from the sky, connecting to an oddly-shaped bulge on the platform with faint lights flowing between the cables, like fireflies converging.
The entire structure resembled an eerie and unimaginable "tree," with lights flowing through each "branch" as if alive.
And at the root of this bizarre and tangled "tree," the automaton sat quietly at the edge of the platform.
She was awake.
But she didn’t speak, nor did she react to the unexpected visitor entering the hall—the automaton, identical to Alice, just sat quietly on the central platform, clutching a white sketchpad tightly, her unfocused eyes staring toward the direction of the door.
She seed to have been waiting in this "standby" pose for a long ti.
Duncan took a deep breath and cautiously stepped toward the automaton sitting at the base of the "tree of cables."
As he crossed a certain distance, the automaton finally reacted—she turned her head slightly, her gaze shifting from the door to Duncan.
However, that was the only reaction; the android still did not speak or show any expression, not even focusing her eyes. She simply adjusted her gaze quietly, following Duncan’s steps, like a true, lifeless, and thoughtless puppet—with only the most basic "motion-tracking" feature.
Yet as he watched the scene, a strange sense of eeriness erged in Duncan’s heart—this naive android finally demonstrated a bit of the peculiar and unnerving traits expected of it.
He approached the android, looked down at it, and the android, expressionless, raised its head and slowly adjusted its eyes to follow Duncan’s movents.
"There is no path," the android suddenly said.
Her abrupt voice echoed like an echo in the hall shrouded in black fog.
Duncan was thinking about how to communicate with this "awakened" android and was montarily taken aback upon hearing it speak, instinctively responding, "There is no path? What do you an there’s no path?"
"Guiding the New Hope to jump to a safe space region..."
The android turned its head stiffly and slowly, its gaze seemingly tracking the servers hidden in the black fog or so old images that had vanished from this place. Its monotone and hollow voice emitted and echoed around—
"Guiding jump to gravitational focal point... Transition engines disabled, star chart malfunction... Standard starlight deviation... Cannot locate reference points, destination decoding failed... There is no path..."
It seed to pause suddenly, as its eyes slowly widened, as if waking from a nightmare—
"There is no path, Navigator Three apologizes to the entire crew of the spacecraft, there is no path, I apologize, there is no path, I apologize, there is no path..."
The android began to repeat itself incessantly, as if trapped in so sort of frozen state, apologizing and broadcasting over and over. A low noise abruptly arose from the thick fog in all directions. The android raised its head again, blankly searching for sothing in the darkness, its tone growing increasingly urgent: "There is no path, there is no path there is no path there’s no..."
The noise turned into a piercing howl, sothing massive trembled and fell within the black fog, and an eerie vibration filled the entire hall. However, just as the android seed about to lose control, Duncan, in desperate urgency, pressed her shoulders—
"Alice!"
He called out almost instinctively, pressing hard on the android’s shoulders while repeating, "Alice—can you hear ?!"
The android abruptly stopped, seemingly reacting to the na it heard. She turned her head sluggishly, a trace of liveliness appearing in her lifeless eyes.
The ear-piercing howl and tremors around the hall gradually subsided.
"Captain..."
She looked into Duncan’s eyes, speaking in a sowhat glitched voice, as if a severely rusted and aging robot were rebooting.
Then she turned her head from side to side as if "acclimating" to sothing, and her voice beca a bit smoother: "Captain, are you hungry?"
Duncan: "..."
...How did this naive one wake up and the first thing it rembered was this?!
"I’m not hungry, and now is not the ti to eat," Duncan quickly adjusted his mindset. He had not expected to actually "awaken" Alice’s consciousness here and still found it quite unbelievable, "You... look around, do you know what state you’re in now?"
Only then did Alice belatedly raise her head, realizing that this place was not the familiar Holoss she knew.
She beca dazed for a mont and when she turned to look at Duncan, her gaze was obviously confused: "Where is this?"
Duncan thought for a while, mainly pondering how to explain what "the core server room that has reappeared after the Navigator’s cognitive reshaping by the Observer on the New Hope" ant to this naive one. After a mont, he nodded and held Alice’s shoulders.
"This is the world inside your mind."
Alice looked bewildered, "But I don’t have a mind, do I?"
Duncan: "..."
After a mont of being dumbfounded and speechless, he glared: "Pretend you do!"
"...Oh."
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