With a flick of his wrist, Artek moved a screen showing the structure just in front of him. You are right about that. “These vines, they’re not just growing over the structure, they’re…becoming a part of it. Normally I would have to try to get past the plant life to learn something about a ruin, but the same rules might not apply here. The building is part of the simulation, of course, a part of the world around it. The difference between the ground, the vines, and the stonework is simply in how the code makes it appear, and there is no rule here that prevents one from becoming the other.”

Artek brought up several more images comparing areas from the previous expedition’s recording to what their away team was seeing now. He seemed no less than enthralled by observing every detail of every carving or crack in the stonework. “Ruins, historic buildings, their form and structure usually tells many stories about what it took to bring them into existence. Especially for large, intricate buildings like this, it [i]normally[/i] takes not just a person, or a team, but a [i]society[/i] to create them. It takes people with both the means to construct, and a reason to want to build. It takes many different people with different capabilities, personalities, and goals. A lot of moving parts to consider. The story of a building is the story of the client or organization that ordered its construction, the architect who has to balance their artistic vision with the limitations of technology, time, and budget. It is the story of the workers and craftsmen who build it, and of the artists whose self-expression is carved into the stone through the lens of the desires of the client who commissioned the work. That is the story I usually try to uncover, but this…this may be different.”

Pausing a moment, Artek pushed away most of the images, save for one. He brought Freyr’s attention to the most complete image they had of the structure, as it was during the first team’s encounter. “What do you notice about the structure in this picture? I’ll tell you, it’s in great condition. [i]Pristine[/i], actually. Like it had just been built. For a building of this size, construction through normal means would take many years for the type of civilization we have witnessed in this simulation, and it would be quite an unlikely coincidence for it to just happened to have been finished shortly before we arrived. The logical assumption, then, is that it was the entity itself that created it. Not through mining and carving stone, but through manipulating its own power over the simulation. If that is true, and I will say ‘if’, since I cannot give guarantees, but if it is, then that means the story of this structure is the story of the entity itself. It did not have to worry about budget, paying workers, or…physics, for that matter. The entity is the architect, is the builder, is the artist, and so on. Even if it barely put any thought into what it was making, it is still a creation of its mind and a reflection of its own self-expression. What we can learn just from this building tells a story about the mind of this entity we are trying to understand.” 

Marae, through it all, simply grinned and allowed Artek to talk. She had her own task in front of her. She continued tweaking her program in an attempt to make it as subtle as possible to avoid tripping failsafes, though she always made sure to keep a stable build on-hand and ready, in case the away team needed it.