***Scanning all memory cells…no match found, no correlation with visual, acoustic, EM inputs…probability that this bot has been in this environment before nearly zero…it looks new to me, Johnny. Are we in Kansas?***
“Very funny. No, I don’t think so, Doc. Let’s do a little recon around the area—“
He tried to take a step forward. His feet wouldn’t move. Then, almost before he realized it, he was on the ground again, on his side.
For the first few moments, he was dizzy and disoriented, like he had spent the entire day riding the Dragon’s Tail roller coaster at Macau…that kind of dizziness.
Then came the imagery…it never made any sense…or more likely, according to what Doc II would tell him later, his brain couldn’t make sense of the flood of entanglement waves that washed through the coupler. By turns, he felt like he had fallen into the ocean and storm waves were battering him from all directions.
That subsided, to be replaced by a strong, fetid smell, a swamp smell of decay and rot. Mist and fog cleared and he was floating chest deep in a steaming swamp. Something screeched overhead and wings fluttered.
Then the imagery dissolved once again, to be replaced by an open plain, like Dakota prairie country, only the plain was covered with undulating plants. The plants were not plants at all, he soon realized. The ground writhed with life, swarms upon swarms of bots seething and swelling and contracting, pulsing and throbbing to some unseen rhythm. The imagery jerked and shifted and this time, the horizon was curved and he was in space orbiting a planet. A planet of bots, teeming with nanoscale life.
The planet of the Old Ones.
He had been here before.
“Doc…what is this place? Where the hell are we?”