Chapter 210: Code White

Chapter 210: Code White

As the weeks went by, the castle settled into a regular routine and began to assume some semblance of normalcy. Normal, of course, until the incident.

My sensors indicated some abnormality with the ground outside. I had picked it up last night, but hadn’t had time to investigate. Helping the soldiers clean up all the sawdust from their lumber mill took priority. But when I finally did emerge from the soldiers’ temporary structure, I was greeted by an awful sight.

I had barely gotten used to the idea of the outside world being covered with dirt, but this? This was somehow worse. A brown slurry of unknown origin had covered the camp, concentrated most densely along walking paths. It wasn’t mud exactly, but it must have shared some relation. The stuff clung to boots and trouser legs, seeming to and I could detect muddy footprints heading into almost every tent.

This was a disaster of epic proportions. Every area of dry, densely-packed dirt had been replaced with this new foe. Even with my newfound powers, cleaning this up would take me all day. To make matters worse, I still had no idea how far this terror had spread. Was it a local calamity, or were we caught up in some wider phenomenon? How had the castle fared? The only saving grace was that the covered areas were unaffected. Aside from what was tracked in by the humans and their boots, of course.

I ran through last night's logs, looking for anything out of place. We received some precipitation last night, which normally helped wash things away. Even if it did spread water everywhere, it was something I usually looked forward to. That could have explained mud, but surely not this.

Looking more closely, the precipitation had been a bit unusual. The water had displayed a far more ordered molecular structure than normal. But the ambient temperature had continued dropping every week, so I had put it down to simple entropy.

As much as I wanted to start cleaning up this mess right away, I had to go check on the castle. If this was widespread, my responsibilities lay there first. Hovering carefully off the ground to keep the disgusting slush from my underside, I zipped off toward the castle.

As I zoomed over the camp, I noticed more oddities. No one seemed to care that much about this development. Sure, they knocked their boots together before they entered the tents or any area that was relatively clean, but they otherwise just trudged through the slurry. No one really made any moves to clean it up. Arthur’s men weren’t so well-trained on cleanliness, but this seemed a bit much.

I found her in her office looking at reports while rubbing her forehead in frustration. She had been extremely busy this week getting everything set up. At the same time, the Council, Arthur, and his military’s structure had proven exceedingly helpful with putting plans into motion. Still, they generated awe-inspiring amounts of paper to record everything.

While I was certainly impressed by the organization of the army, I was sometimes shocked at how many resources they took to operate. I had expected them to require less now that they were no longer in the field and doing complex maneuvers. But apparently, when they were stationary, things got even more complicated. The work I remembered from watching over Arthur’s shoulder was nothing compared to this. I hovered over Beatrice's desk, and it was a measure of her exhaustion that she didn't even recognize I had come in.

Normally, she was never slow to greet me with a cheerful hello or a bow. This time, she was just scribbling numbers on a spare piece of paper off to the side, evidently trying to figure something out. I studied the sheets of paper laid out in front of her. It took me a few minutes, but I understood what she was getting at. It seemed that she hadn't fully grasped the problem, but her instincts were good and commendable for her to realize there even was an issue.

I carefully gave her a soft beep so as not to startle her too much. Her head whipped up in surprise, then she jumped to her feet and respectfully greeted me with a cheerful "Hello, master."

I tapped a few pieces of paper indicating certain numbers on them, and she looked at them and frowned. "Yes, something doesn't line up here, but I'm not sure why exactly."

As I expected. She had good instincts, but humans seemed to be pretty bad at basic math. I supposed that’s why Beatrice had insisted on setting up classes for everyone. So, I started to walk her through the problems, projecting equations as we went. As I did with the children, I had little symbols that represented different mathematical operations, to make them easier to understand.

Little herds of sheep gathered in the illusion over my head, demonstrating all steps for the correct accounting calculations. Bee followed along as I described exactly what the numbers were saying and why the results were wrong. It wasn't anything malicious, here, as was most often the case with Arthur. This was simply a bad accounting error where some of the numbers had been improperly calculated.

Still, as I walked her through it, she smiled at a certain point as she got the idea and could put together the rest herself. I was really proud of her. She was clearly learning how to organize and do math much better.

After we had settled the problem of math and she had made some careful corrections to the ledgers, I finally got around to asking my own questions. I replayed my logs of the precipitation last night, showing the white flakes of madness slowly sifting down through the air to land on the ground. I showed her the unbroken patches of white, the brown slurries of semiliquid mush, and the people tracking the mud everywhere through the camp. And last of all, Leanne, laughing in the snow like a crazy person.

I expected some somber explanation of what was going on, some commiseration over this new great threat. At the very least, I hoped for some insight into why no one else seemed worried. But instead, I watched in horror Beatrice broke out in a smile and giggled. "Yes, it's snowing so early in the year! Isn't that great?"

She was also infected.