Chapter 154 - 152 — The Reports They Came Back With I

"Which reports, sir?"

"The ones my father used to prepare for Floor Three."

The man behind the operations desk stopped reaching for his keyboard and looked at me properly. He had three documents open on his screen, a pen tucked behind his right ear, and the expression of someone who had already spent a long day answering questions he would rather have answered by email.

"Do you mean the expedition summaries?"

"I mean everything available on the previous attempts. The original reports, survivor accounts, and whatever Myrmidon put together for my father’s team."

"That’s a considerable amount of material."

"I’ve got time."

He glanced at the clock above the operations-room entrance. It was getting late, and I suspected he had rather less time than I did.

"I’ll need to check what’s available in the preparation archive," he said. "Are you planning an attempt?"

"I’m planning to find out whether I should make one."

He looked at me for another moment, then pulled his keyboard closer.

That was one of the advantages of being Christopher Nolan’s son. People generally assumed I had a reason for asking questions about the Tower, even when I had not yet worked out what that reason was.

It was also one of the disadvantages. I could ask for something perfectly ordinary and watch an entire room begin wondering what my father had told me.

In this case, my father had told me considerably less than I wanted to know.

The staff member found the preparation archive and turned his screen slightly so I could see the list of documents.

"The current packet contains the two principal expedition reports, the clan’s comparative assessment, and the preparation notes assembled for the Nolan expedition. There are references to additional survivor statements, but those aren’t all included in the packet."

"I’ll start with what you have."

He transferred the files to a reading terminal at the end of the desk.

"Would you prefer somewhere quieter?"

I looked toward the corridor behind me. Two people were talking beside the operations-room entrance, and someone had just come through carrying an equipment case that kept knocking against his knee.

"Yes."

He directed me to an adjoining room with a table, several chairs, and a wall display large enough to spread the reports across without losing my place every time I opened another document.

I thanked him, took the terminal, and went inside.

The first page was a summary of humanity’s current Tower progression.

\(HUMANITY TOWER PROGRESSION\)

\(Highest Verified Clear: Floor Two.\)

\(Current Frontier: Floor Three.\)

\(Floor Three: Unconquered.\)

I dismissed it.

I had seen those three lines before, and they had not become any more informative since the last time.

What I needed was underneath them.

The Halloran expedition had entered Floor Three four months before my father’s departure.

Twenty-two Players had gone in.

Eleven had come back.

I knew those numbers already. Christopher had told me about the expedition while he was preparing his own, and I remembered wondering how an organization capable of assembling twenty-two Players for an uncleared Tower floor could lose half of them without discovering what it needed to win.

I had been thinking about the question from the safety of our home.

After Floor Two, I found it considerably less difficult to understand how eleven people could die before the survivors knew what had happened.

I opened the next report.

Ashford’s expedition had entered six weeks ago with nineteen Players. Fourteen returned, and two of those fourteen had to be brought out by their teammates.

They had not cleared the floor.

They had withdrawn.

The report made that distinction plainly, although I noticed that Myrmidon’s comparative assessment was less interested in whether Ashford’s team had come close to clearing than in the number of people they had managed to bring home.

I understood why.

Christopher had taken twelve people into Floor Three, and his decision had not been based on the assumption that twelve was the perfect number for whatever challenge waited inside.

He had told me himself.

"Twelve is what I can extract if it goes wrong."

At the time, I had been more interested in the fact that he intended to enter an uncleared floor than in the number of people he was taking.

Now I opened the two expedition reports side by side and began reading them again.

There was something I wanted to establish before I decided how useful either account would be.

Ashford had returned with fourteen people. Halloran had returned with eleven.

That sounded like an improvement until I remembered that their starting numbers had been different.

Five deaths out of nineteen was better than eleven out of twenty-two, but it did not tell me why Ashford’s group had survived in greater numbers. Perhaps they had understood something Halloran had missed. Perhaps they had encountered different circumstances or decided to withdraw earlier.

Perhaps they had simply been luckier.

A report written after an expedition could tell me what the survivors believed had happened. It could not automatically tell me whether they were right.

I went back to Halloran’s account.

The version in front of me contained the expedition’s recorded outcome, its principal observations, and the conclusions that had been circulated afterward. There were references to statements taken from individual survivors, but the preparation packet did not reproduce all of those statements in full.

I made a note of that.

The same problem appeared in Ashford’s report.

The account explained that the surviving party had withdrawn without completing the floor’s objective. It also recorded that two of those who returned had been unable to leave without assistance.

What it did not provide, at least in the sections I had access to, was a complete account from every survivor explaining what each person had seen and understood at the time.

That bothered me more than the casualty figures.

If the surviving members of one expedition agreed about what they had encountered, I wanted to know whether they had reached that agreement while they were still inside the Tower or afterward, when they had finally been able to compare their experiences.

There was a difference.

I had spent most of Floor Two separated from Krüger, Mara, and Theo. Had someone asked me to describe the Stone Side before we cleared, I could have repeated what the other three had told us through the Resonance Pillars, but I would not have been describing something I had witnessed myself.

After the clear, I could have given a much more complete account because Krüger had explained what happened on their side.

Both accounts would have been truthful.

Only one would have represented what I knew when I was actually making decisions.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the two reports again.

"Right," I murmured.

I needed to know when the survivors had learned what they claimed to know.

More importantly, I needed to know what they had believed before somebody died.

I spent the next hour separating the information into three groups.

The first contained facts I could verify from the expedition records: how many Players entered, how many returned, whether the floor had been cleared, and which expeditions had managed to withdraw.

The second contained observations attributed to the survivors.

The third contained their conclusions.

That last group was where the trouble began.

The two expedition reports disagreed about what Floor Three was actually asking challengers to accomplish. Myrmidon’s comparison noted the disagreement, but the material I had been given did not establish which interpretation, if either, was correct.

I read the assessment twice before setting it aside.

An interpretation was useful when it explained the evidence.

Two competing interpretations of an uncleared floor were reasons to investigate, not reasons to choose the one I preferred and begin packing.

I had made that sort of mistake before.

In my original life, whenever a Gate report came across my desk, I had skimmed the summary and looked for the information that mattered to whatever work I was doing. I knew how to find a number in a long document without reading every word around it.

That habit had followed me back six years.

It had helped me before Floor One, when I found the gap between what the current guides knew and what I remembered from the future.

It could also get me killed.

I was not reading about a familiar Gate this time. I was reading about a place nobody had cleared, using accounts written by people who had survived only part of it.

If I chose an interpretation because it resembled something I remembered from my previous life, I might walk into Floor Three expecting the Tower to behave in a way it had never promised to behave.

And if five other people came with me, they would have no reason to know that my certainty had been built on a guess.

I rubbed my eyes and returned to the first report.

The figures were beginning to run together.

Twenty-two and eleven.

Nineteen and fourteen.

Twelve.

I looked at the last number for a while.

My father had not selected twelve because he expected every member of his team to remain standing until the end.

He had selected twelve because he had considered what would happen if they did not.

I opened the sections dealing with the two expeditions’ withdrawal.

Ashford’s group had reached a point where they could stop the attempt, and they had taken that opportunity.

Halloran’s group had not had the same option.

Christopher had told me as much before he left.

At the time, I had understood it as another reason why Floor Three was dangerous. Now, after spending an entire floor trying to keep five other people alive, I found myself reading it differently.

If I entered Floor Three and discovered that I could not complete the objective, how was I supposed to get everyone home?

I could die and regress.

That did not mean I could arrange for five other Players to die beside me and assume the Tower would return them safely.

I had never tested Ouroboros under those circumstances. I had no intention of making Krüger and the others the subjects of the experiment.

The first thing I needed was a way to recognize when an attempt had become unrecoverable.

The second was a way to leave.

I searched the preparation packet for everything it contained about withdrawal.

The available material established that Ashford’s expedition had withdrawn, but it did not provide enough information for me to conclude that every party would have the same opportunity.

I read the relevant passages again, looking for something I might have overlooked.

There was nothing that justified the answer I wanted.

I could imagine several explanations for the difference between the expeditions, but every one of them depended on details about Floor Three that I had not established.

The temptation to fill in those details myself was surprisingly strong.

It would have been convenient if I could assume that a party could withdraw after reaching a particular point, or that the Tower would offer a way out once enough members were injured. Those were the sorts of rules a person might invent after seeing two incomplete accounts and deciding that the floor probably worked in a familiar way.

I had already seen what happened when a group entered Floor Two thinking the guide told them everything.

We had found fresh tracks in a passage that was supposed to offer us a route through the canal, and I remembered the moment I realized something had used that passage before us.

The guide had not been wrong.

It had simply never promised that nothing else would be there.