Since I was already sitting down, I took this opportunity to pull out my portable holofield projector and see if anything had changed. Without a network connection, it was pretty much useless for doing anything other than watching TV—and unfortunately, the connection status symbol in the corner of the window was still completely grayed out. I wasn’t sure if I’d been completely cut off from the network as I was still receiving a TV signal, but couldn’t get any form of two-way communication to work. Holofields were pretty much worthless without a network connection, and it was irksome not having any way to get in touch with Narain and the others, whom I assumed were still stuck down in the intelligence base at the feet of the Titan. At first, I wondered if maybe the distance or altitude had something to do with it—but a thousand meters really wasn’t all that far for a wave to travel, and we put communication towers atop mountains all the time. Even if I couldn’t get a high-speed connection from here, I should have still been able to use the standard public frequency to contact my teammates on the ground. In other words, this isolation was artificial. There was some outside force jamming the signals or otherwise ensuring I couldn’t get a connection. What that might be, I had no clue.
But this was enough ruminating for now. I snapped back to my senses and looked down at the spot I’d circled on my diagram once more, then touched my finger to the same spot on my own forehead. Let’s see. If I’m at the top of the forehead now, then the fastest route would be… I traced my finger along my skull, drawing a corresponding line on the map with the pen in my other hand. The route was fairly simple, actually—just circle around the skull, then drop down. The only question was whether or not there’d be a traversable way for me to get there. Because if there weren’t, I’d have to get a bit daring.
4
I slowly inched my way further through the exoskeleton’s convoluted interior, hanging as close to the walls as I could as I surmounted steep inclines and passed treacherous crevasses. I met any number of roadblocks and dead ends. Occasionally, I had to climb up or down to a different level to proceed. In some spots, the only visible way forward was so narrow that it felt like I was tiptoeing across a balance beam from one piece of solid ground to the next. And there were no hand railings here, obviously, so I had to be as cautious as I possibly could. One false step would mean tumbling down several storeys if I was lucky—several dozen if I wasn’t. Not that the end result would have been all that different, I suppose.
I’d had a pretty good vantage point just looking out the window when the Titan first rose to its feet, and while I couldn’t give an exact measurement, I could estimate the Titan’s height relative to the nearby Mount Kamui on the crater surrounding Lake Mashu. I traced my memories back to three months ago, when I first arrived at the base. I’d come across some trivia about Mount Kamui back then. It was something like five hundred meters from the peak down to the surface of the lake. And the Titan now stood more or less level with the lakeshore. I looked down at my own body and tried to visualize it. I was fairly certain that the mountain had come up to about the Titan’s waist, which would mean my original estimate of it being one thousand meters tall may actually not have been too far off.
“Then what would this length be?” I murmured to myself, tracing my finger across my forehead. I reflexively waited a moment for Titan to chirp up with the answer for me, but sadly it seemed I’d have to do the mental arithmetic myself this time. It was only after losing access to all of the network’s convenient functions that I realized how much I’d taken them for granted—and was subsequently humbled by the notion that our ancestors had somehow invented calculus without it.
My rough estimate was that I’d need to make my way about seventy or eighty meters along the circumference, then drop down approximately the same amount. It certainly didn’t sound all that far when put like that—a distance of 160 meters total was basically nothing. Assuming there was actually a viable path, that is.
It had already been about forty minutes since I left the counseling room, but in terms of actual distance I didn’t feel like I’d made it more than twenty meters from the window. It felt a bit like a claustrophobic labyrinth, in a way, as I was only able to proceed through any large enough gaps I could find in the armor’s internal support structures. I crawled through tunnels, climbed over and under beams, and squeezed my way between pillars—and it felt like I was simply going in circles half the time. It was extremely easy to lose my sense of direction in this cramped three-dimensional maze, and at times I had to look up at the direction the light was pouring in from to regain my bearings. But at least I was able to eventually find a way forward most of the time.