I looked down at my left arm, my stub, and then I looked down to the Maiden. Though she continued to be annoyingly enigmic when I asked questions, she had never given me any reason to doubt her. Yet. I took my chances, and I stuck what was left of my left arm into the machine.
“This is an apparatus which will replace your missing arm. We were quite proficient in the design of biomechanical limbs. This is the culmination of our work. You will feel pain in a little bit as the nerves are connected with the appendage, but it will not last.”
There was pain. Lightning and ice seemed to course beneath my skin, and as I involuntarily wrenched my arm away, and as the machine released me, I saw what I had become. I flexed my fingers, but they were no longer mine. What had once been sinuous flesh, cartilage, and bone was now tempered metal, motors, and circuitry. I brought the back of the hand around, and I noticed the odd grooves traced throughout the hand. Tiny lanes traced down the top of each finger, leading into a hub on the back of my hand, which then fed into a large trench that ran the length of my arm into a final hub where my elbow used to be.
“We found that humans cannot directly manipulate the energies of the Tesseract. This is the device that circumvents that rule. We called it the Dominion Gauntlet, as it will give you the power to achieve and master anything you dream of.”
I looked down at it with fresh eyes, and I realized what I was now. “You’ve made me into a weapon. That’s all this can ever lead to.”
“Adam,” the Doctor spoke firmly to me, “You are not a weapon, and this arm is not you. It’s not a weapon either; it’s a tool, and it can help just as easily as it can harm. You’ve been entrusted with a lot of power.”
“I don’t want it.”
“No, but because of that, it’s probably best that you were the one it was given to. Now, we still have a job to do. Lead the way Maiden. We will follow.”
The Maiden steered Lyra’s body out of the room and into the hallway. We proceeded down hallway after hallway, seemingly even more lost in the maze of this labyrinth.
“It is best if I showed you as well as spoke to you of our plight.” She gestured to the rooms to our left and right; they were barracks. “We were at war for many years, and finally one day it just..ended. Not because one side won, but because we all lost. We had created weapons that destroyed entire ecosystems in a matter of hours, and radiation was beginning to poison everything and blot out the Sun. Then, not being satisfied with just destroying the Earth, we destroyed the Sun as well. Someone created a weapon that harnessed the power of the Sun, and once it was completed, it scorched the planet. The weapon backfired, though, and it simply sucked up all the Sun’s fuel. Eventually, the Sun was all used up, and it died. It’s still out there, you know; drifting along, the corpse of a giant, and a celestial monument to our folly.”
“How long ago was this?” asked the Doctor.
“If the surface world were still operating on human measurement of time, it would be 3756 A.D.”
“What?” The Doctor exclaimed, “When did the war begin and end?”
“2206 A.D. until 2273 A.D.”
“You burned through your Sun in sixty-seven years when it’s supposed to naturally take over 16 billion years?” The Doctor brought his hands up to clasp his head as he exhaled, “Wooh! I’d congratulate you if it weren’t so horribly awful. That’s quite an achievement!”
“One we were not proud of,” the Maiden commented. We passed a glass paneled wall that was meant observe the chambers below and beyond. “We were some of the only ones left. We hid away in our bunkers and prayed for our survival in the apocalypse we helped to create. Radiation teemed on the surface of the planet, plant life had been flash carbonized into diamonds, minerals were degenerated into radioactive slag, water was instantly frozen or vaporized. By all rights, the human race should have died with the planet that day. But we survived; wiser but undaunted. We created a near perfect civilization below ground, and we discovered the Spatial Tesseract. Our overarching goal once we came to realize the infinite potential it had was to recreate the planet, and we began by mutating what animals we had into more resilient, heartier breeds that could withstand the hostile surface. Some animals evolved, some devolved, and some went sideways in the chain of evolution.”
She then led us into the largest chamber of all of them, and the door sealed behind us. “Then our pride and curiosity struck us, and we brought about our penultimate destruction.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“We created a life; a being of infinite power. In this very chamber, we created the Serpent, and we destroyed the Eden we had made.”