The ball-shaped diamond mainframe shifted with a series of clean, air-powered clicks, its many-sided black glass surface refracting the blue surrounding lighting into complex sharp-angled arrays.
Above the central dais, the light-projected display cleared the static of the Antarctic drilled shaft collapse. It replaced the wild archival footage with a towering, high-resolution living blueprint of the Earth.
Arthur Vance stepped closer, his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe humming as it timed together with the quantum data stream.
“Partition Two is decompressing,” Arthur stated. His voice calm and was cold and exact in the chilled cold air. “Classified pre-cataclysm medical and deep-rock autopsy. File designation: The Autoimmune Genome and the Star-Devouring Void Parasite.”
Valerie and Corporal Miller gathered beside Arthur’s shoulder, their weapons resting against their plate carriers as they stared up at the rotating world-size projection.
Across the light-projected globe, the familiar blue oceans and brown continents of Earth were rendered in semi-clear relief. But beneath the lithosphere, thirty miles below the outer crust, a massive, coiled dark shape was traced in pulsing crimson light. It was an entity of impossible to understand scale, wrapped in a choking spiral around the planet’s liquid iron core like a huge, hard-shelled serpent. Arthur studied the body data scrolling beneath the diagram, his test mind instantly assembling the pieces of the puzzle that had eluded human science for one hundred and sixty years.
