Huixiong let out a rueful chuckle. “A great location.” As he finished his sentence, the aircraft guarding both sides suddenly split off to the left and right. The photon cannons turned in different directions, taking aim.
The blue light at the top of the tower exploded outward. With a loud hum, all sound grew distant.
With Father as its center, an electromagnetic ring spread out rapidly across the entirety of the Eastern Mainland. The sky, the land, and all of the robotic guards and clone battleships, without a single exception, were struck by this paralytic electromagnetic blast that swept past, hitting both friend and foe.
The world went still for two seconds, then all of the fighter robots burst into flames and plummeted to the ground.
The land quaked, and the indicator dials on the aircraft spun wildly. Heishi had lost control of it. There was another blast, and its top tore off. Before the aircraft slammed into the tower, countless black-gold feathers made of photons scattered outward, gathering again under A-Ka and Heishi’s feet. A-Ka hugged Heishi around the waist, squeezing his eyes shut as the two of them stood on the hoverboard formed by the feathers.
As a photon bomb exploded behind them, they ran into the tower that made up Father’s main body. A-Ka heard a pained cry from the communicator. He couldn’t tell if it was Shahuang, Huixiong, or if it came from the clones’ battleships. To him, these things were no longer important. As soon as he and Heishi made it into the tower, it was as if they had entered a completely different world.
They found themselves in a long hallway filled with light, where the ceiling, floor, and walls were all screens flashing with countless lines of code. Standing in the midst of it all was like standing in an endless universe of information. The flow of symbols was like the twinkling of the stars or the ebb and flow of the tides—never ceasing.
A-Ka knelt by Heishi’s side, only to find that he had fallen unconscious. “Heishi?!”
With great difficulty, Heishi coughed up a mouthful of blood.
“Heishi!” A-Ka shouted again.
“Zoroaster has already lost all of his might,” Father’s rich voice intoned. “Foolish human. Even now, you still hold such an unrealistic desire…”
Awake again, Heishi struggled to speak. “These are…attenuation beams. Don’t be afraid, A-Ka. We can go. Let’s move forward.”
Pulling Heishi up, A-Ka let him lean on his shoulder as they jogged through the hallway, all while Father’s intimidating voice echoed in their ears.
“Give up on your mission. All of this cannot be stopped by your actions alone.”
“Your hours are numbered,” A-Ka murmured, lifting his head. “You disabled all of the robotic life-forms in the City of Steel, so now you have no firepower to speak of…”
The two of them reached the end of the hallway. What appeared in front of them was a huge dark-blue quartz pillar, around which countless tentacles were wrapped.
“Quick!” A-Ka said. “That’s the mechanism that controls its core!”
“Wake from your fantasy now, Labere!” Heishi growled.
His wings spread open as he gripped A-Ka and flew to the center of the blue pillar of light. In A-Ka’s eyes, everything around him shifted, and a gap appeared in the quartz pillar.
At the same time, thousands of dancing tentacles curled toward them and wrapped around Heishi, who let out a shout. A-Ka, however, jumped from Heishi’s arms. Shooting forth like an arrow leaving a bow, he flew across that last short distance, raising the chip decoder high with his left hand as he aimed it at the dead center of the quartz pillar.
The flow of time seemed to come to a complete halt.
A-Ka reached the quartz pillar, his palm slamming into the chip decoder. There was a quiet click as the chip was inserted into the slot.
Instantly, the quartz pillar went from blue to red, and the lines of code around them scrambled.
“Warning. Emergency shutdown,” Father said in an electronic voice that it had no control over. “In thirty seconds, the Nucleus Protocol will be restarted. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”
The tentacles disappeared. Heishi let out an exclamation as he barreled toward the quartz pillar, and he spun around to catch the falling A-Ka.
The two of them slammed heavily into the pillar, then dropped headfirst into a bottomless abyss. Thousands of lines of code, like twinkling stars, gathered together and formed a huge face. That human face created from flashing squares opened its mouth and let out a furious howl.
Blood was running down Heishi’s face as he held A-Ka. The two of them tumbled through the air, their velocity growing faster and faster as they dropped down the energy pillar that Father controlled. From the inside of the tower, they fell and fell, down toward the Nucleus of the Astrolabe deeper under the surface.
A-Ka opened his eyes. In the encompassing darkness, he saw a single point of light.
Father’s blue light circled relentlessly around their bodies while its glowing tentacles whipped toward them. However, every time they neared Heishi and A-Ka, black-gold feathers would spring out and slam into the tentacles.
With a loud noise, A-Ka and Heishi careened through the other end of the blue tunnel. Father’s consciousness faded away, and what appeared in front of them was a calm, still domain that glowed with white light. Millions of water droplets suspended in midair appeared around them. A-Ka turned his head curiously, only to find that reflected in every droplet was an immense, magnificent world.
“Right here?” A-Ka asked, puzzled. He tried to move but realized that he was still hovering in the air. The two of them looked up and saw that far above their heads, countless blue tentacles of light were trying to break into this space. Father still hadn’t given up trying to snatch away control of the Nucleus of the Astrolabe.
“In millions of years, you are the first, and also the last, human to set foot in this place,” Heishi said.
“What are these?” A-Ka, surprised, used his finger to prod at one of the suspended water droplets that floated by. It tinkled gently, splitting into countless smaller drops that flew in every direction. The world reflected in that droplet disappeared, giving birth to new ones.
“This is my Heavenly Father’s knowledge repository,” Heishi answered. “In these water droplets, he preserved the data from all of his experiments. Within the Nucleus of the Astrolabe, he used the consistency of these fluids to carry out conversions and calculations.”
A-Ka could not help exclaiming over how magical this was. This brilliant world filled with white light far surpassed any system a human could conceive of.
“Shall we begin, A-Ka?” Heishi asked.
“Do you know how to operate the system?”
Heishi pushed A-Ka behind him. “No matter what happens, don’t step forward.”
“No way,” A-Ka shot back. “What can I do to help? Don’t be like this now.”