We finally learn more about Maiya in today’s entry – information that probably would have been better to know from the start, if only you had known Maiya for as long as Marshall Vosler!

Word Count: 48,440

We turned a few corners; she knew I had no idea where I was going, which is why she stayed perpetually in front. And even if she sped up, she knew I would catch up to her – no matter how fast she walked – because I didn’t want to be lost again. No matter how much I would have liked to make this expedition on my own, I was trapped with Maiya, solely in the interest of time. And I knew that if I abandoned her or tried to betray her, she would strike me down.

I thought of her and I, and how so much of our relationship was based on fear. Not so much her fear of me, but mine of her. Fear that she would double-cross me at any moment; like the scientist had said, I didn’t really know who she was or what her true intentions were. For all I knew, this was her true self – then again, she could be a triple agent for The Collective.

It would figure, if that were true.

Infinite copies of us adorned the walls; infinite numbers of Maiya and I, together, alone. It was, in a way, a sick and twisted romance. And it lasted for minutes, hours, God knows how long. Maiya simply led the way, and I followed, almost in a trance. It could have been minutes, hours, days. I didn’t know. I didn’t really care. All I wanted was to stop this madness, for life to return to normal. Not just for me, but for everybody; I felt selfless. I felt proud. I might have been one of those few people concerned for other peoples’ safety.

With that mindset, I began to walk proudly behind my controller.

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Stepping out into the hallways, Curie had forgotten how disorienting all of the mirrors could be. In his stupor, he stumbled around, bumping into walls that he thought were hallways, and traveling down hallways he was sure would be walls when he approached them. Despite it all, he managed to awkwardly make his way away from the lab, until he came to a larger, more open hallway that continued down the facility quite a ways.

In the middle of the hallway, he could make out patches of fresh blood. No, he thought, not blood – it looked like it had an oil base. Fetch blood. To his right was an open room, dark, with some terminals already turned on and floating, waiting to be examined. He entered the room, looking at the terminals. On each one was a clear photograph of Vince Torsten with details of the man. “So, Boss came here.”

He reached out and touched one of the panels, but as soon as his fingers made contact with the glass he heard a high-pitched whine. While Curie moved his hands to cover his ears, the panels around him shattered into a million shards, which found their way to Curie’s artificial skin.

He cried out in pain. A million stabs across his body activated his artificial nerves.
Was this supposed to happen? So much pain? He could hardly stand it; between the screeching and the shattering glass, he ran out of the room. His stupor brought him further down the hall, to the bloody patch. Not just a patch, he discovered, but a whole body. There, in front of him, lay the dysfunctional fetch of a well-coifed gentleman in a suit. Looking around, careful not to step in the blood, he found a gun on the floor.

Gently, he picked up the gun, trying with great difficulty to keep his hands steady. With the gun shaking before his eyes, he could hardly make out its finer details. However, he did notice an odd similarity in its construction to the grenades. Could this gun also be from Earth? And, if so, where was the Corpus Lock bringing all of the materials here? What was somebody looking to do with weapons from a distant, alien planet – especially when there were more powerful weapons available on Cydia?

Baffled, he stored the gun in one of his pockets, careful not to pull to trigger on himself. “Vince, what the hell did you do here…” he said to himself, looking at the body and the footprints. Sure that it was Torsten, he began to walk briskly down the hall, in sync with the bloody steps.

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Infinite copies of us. Maiya’s infinitely many faces, all blocked from my view as she strode ahead of me. I couldn’t make sight of her emotions, of what she looked like at all as we trekked our way to the very center of the planet. I realized, then, that I had never been able to see what she was truly like – growing more paranoid by the moment, I began to doubt the Maiya that I knew in favor of the distorted vision purported by the scientist.

Was she who she said she was? Who did she even say she was? I recapped it all in my mind; her story and where she’d been before she’d been with me. I pieced together her history. I’d done it before, but now it was clearer. And it wasn’t unexpected; a part of me knew that by the time Maiya and I reached the collective that I’d be on her side once again. That my mind would twist its way into trusting her. That it would create a history for her that reflected who I wanted her to be, and not so much who she actually was.

However, until Maiya could find the courage to divulge her history to me, all I could do was wonder and fabricate. It wasn’t until much later that Maiya sat me down and told me her true story, unabridged, and I knew that she was on my side once and for all.

Maiya had worked for years on The Collective with this man, Marshall Vosler. Back then, Vosler was just a project manager at Inland – it wasn’t until much later that he became CEO of the company, and even later still that he came to participate in the upper echelons of the Cydian government. All the while, she and him had been working closer and closer – for all I knew, probably too close, but these were details Maiya shied away from when I asked. Maiya purported herself to be the creator of fetches; well, so did Marshall Vosler. This immediately began to cause tension in the pair, which only got worse over time.

Naturally, when she wasn’t looking, he took her idea and ran with it. Vosler kept fetches secret except from the most wealthy investors, but the government soon caught wind of the idea and bought its way in, taking Vosler with it. Betrayed, but not down for the count, Maiya continued to work underneath him, following him up the corporate ladder and even, eventually, into the government.

She already resented him for stealing her credit for fetches – as well as her rightful grant money. Working underneath him made her, naturally, only more miserable with her state of affairs.

Vosler’s fetch project was quickly scaled to one of the largest government-funded efforts and, with his newfound position of Secretary of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy, gained access to Cydia’s natural resources in a way he’d never thought possible. He used this access to begin extensive extra drilling throughout Inland’s mines with a small but dedicated group of miners, eventually tearing his way down to the core of the planet.

In secret, while Vosler was testing fetches in the rudimentary constructions of a past Renaissance facility, Maiya was developing a prototype of The Collective – one that she never shared with Vosler. As the story went, Vosler eventually found out about her working prototype, then tested it out for himself. Via the knowledge stored in her prototype, he learned about her plans to pitch the prototype to the Cydian government as an even bigger project than the fetch initiative. Vosler took this news hard and, after escaping from the prototype Collective, immediately marked her as a corporate traitor and effectively banished her from the plants and facilities at Inland.

But Maiya wasn’t so easily stopped. Until she joined with me, she’d been investigating Vosler’s plans and practices, still working under the arm of the government on The Collective and on fetch technology just outside of Vosler’s jurisdiction. This was how she worked her way into the Slate mines; it was her initiative to ruin Vosler’s attempts at misusing the technology she’d created. I’d just gotten mixed up at the right time, then – whereas I was down there to save Derek, Maiya was in the Renaissance facilities not to answer an urgent call, but to overturn Vosler’s entire operation.

All this trouble for credit where credit was due.

As she walked down those halls, I could tell that all those reflections of Maiya had been waiting to shoot Marshall Vosler in the face for a long time. Her strides, confident as a queen, reflected her satisfaction that she had done damage to, at the very least, his ego. He footsteps made sounds far louder than mine; she wasn’t afraid to let anyone know where the most dangerous and intimidating woman in the entirely facility was located.

Bring it on. She hoped.

No sooner had my mind begun to wander than had we arrived at a very large and securely sealed arch doorway. Standing, befuddled, I asked, “Is this it?”

“You bet your ass it is,” Maiya said. “Nothing else but that would be locked up this tightly. Follow me, we’ve got to get it unlocked.”She ran around the door, looking for anything that would help us get the door opened. Looking at the door, it wasn’t nearly as reflective as the other walls in the building. Instead, it resembled the walls and floor of the terminal room I’d learned about the rasase in. Dark and full of visible gears, it was easy to see how tightly sealed The Collective was.

Maiya began reaching around the air nearby the doorway, hoping to pull down a glass panel that would aid her in unlocking the room. Over and over she stressed her arms, grabbing nothing but air each time. But just before her arms were too tired to grasp the air just one more time, she finally managed to grab a hidden panel. In fact, it wasn’t just a hidden panel – it was an entire hidden, invisible room, and it situated itself right in the middle of the hallway.

Who could have ever imagined that someone could make an artificial room using glasses technology? Maiya, seeming unsurprised, began fussing with the terminals in this room.

I walked over to Maiya, hoping there was something I could do to help. Before I could utter any words, she held something out to me – a crystal. A large crystal, big enough to fit in her balled fist. Gripping it tightly, she motioned for me to take it.

“Use this to unlock the door. It’s got some good code in it that’ll jumpstart the door’s mechanisms. I have a power supply control at this dashboard that will keep those mechanisms running.” I stood, clueless. “Well? Don’t just stand there looking stupid. Go! There isn’t much time. We have to get those doors open…”

Running out of the room, I approached the massive doorway. It must have risen forty or fifty feet above my head. To think that this was just the entrance to the room was mind-boggling. From a distance, I heard Maiya shout, “Place the crystal in the slot just to the left of the crack in the double doors!”

I found the slot and jammed the crystal in. Noticing an arrow that appeared above the crystal, I rotated it in the specified direction. The crystal was a key. As long as the arrow persisted, blinking, I turned the key. “Good! Keep turning!” said Maiya from beyond.

So I turned. And as I turned, the gears in the door began to move. And as Maiya worked the power controls, the gigantic double doors blocking our way into The Collective began to click, click, click their way open – each movement of the gear represented with a click that opened the double doors just that much more.

Click, click, click. Thousands of clicks. Tens of thousands of them in rapid succession. And as we went on, the door only began to open faster, until we had our first enlightening glimpse of the modern-day materialization of Maiya’s old prototype.