Ad Infinitum

The teams blast out of the air ducts into apartment 712 and drift down into a hazy living room where two level 99 Human Shells stir a pot and sleep on a couch, their eyes stitched shut with heavy black wire under an X of the same wire, matched by every face on the walls including a blinded portrait of Jesus. Only a photograph of the crawler Tran keeps its eyes, ringed with crosses and an unlit incense burner. Reports come in from the other apartments: Louis's mother rendered as a shell called Lady Bird, the Popov twins' mother, Lucia's father's house with a laughing copy of Lucia on the floor, and Tipid warning that killing a shell is a mistake because something else is inside it. Donut's sunglasses read the rings as flowing magic while Prepotente warns that some gates are counterfeits wired with disintegration traps, and the truck clears two of seven. Then the AI freezes the floor with a mandatory quest, Ad Infinitum, to explain that every apartment is a probability model of one crawler's life, that Linus was replaced by his soldier brother Minus, and that the choice of Imani C and Louis Santiago 2 as targets is the thing it cannot understand; it signs off by admitting the last-minute rebuild made it overlook something about the seventh heat.

First appearances (2)

• Human Shell (Creature) — Level 99 · tenant of the L'Engle Building
• Quest: Ad Infinitum (Notification) — Mandatory quest · the AI explains itself

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