The Maze The Lost Labyrinth - By Jason Brannon Page 0,54

suddenly stopped as quickly as it had begun. I wondered if I was to blame. Still, I knew there wasn’t time for quiet introspection. There was only time to keep pushing forward and to react in whatever way the maze demanded. My family was depending on me although they didn’t realize it.

I walked ahead bravely, hoping Asterion hadn’t figured out where I was. I wasn’t even sure where I was until I saw a sign.

“The Hall of Silicon Eden.” I read the notation carved into the base of a statue made in the likeness of a snake devouring its own tail.

Chapter 27

Even before I reached the beginning of the hallway, I heard the static. It sounded like white noise from a million televisions. The cacophony was loud enough to make me cover my ears, and I shivered involuntarily at the thought of electronic snow.

My imagination went wild at what might lie ahead. I prepared myself for cybernetic storms, frequent white-hot crackles of lightning, and a lifeless, bleak landscape overwhelmed by nuclear winter. That picture in my mind changed once the static was replaced by a barrage of voices that spoke in serious, authoritarian, and clearly enunciated sentences. It was like listening to those same million televisions when they were all tuned in to news stations from around the globe. Although it was impossible to discern what was being said, I heard a similar tone being used every night at six and ten o’clock by the local talking heads.

The media spoke and I tried to listen, but it was hard to dial in to a specific voice. As is so often the case, the media said a lot while really saying nothing at all. Despite the sheer volume of words, their message was lost on me. I wondered how many other messages were missing their mark in this place.

I ignored the voices for the moment and progressed deeper into the maze, keeping an eye out for anything scaly. That snake statue made me wary of serpents. Something crackled underneath my feet, and I froze, not sure of what I had stepped on. Looking down I saw that it was a skin that had been shed, but not like any I had seen before.

It felt a little like aluminum and crinkled easily in my fist. Ordinarily I would have thought it was just trash that had found its way out of the garbage can. But this was different. This was one continuous piece of ultra-thin sheet metal that was patterned and stamped to resemble reptile skin.

A name was stamped on the backside of the skin in blue ink.

“Daedalus.”

I chuckled. This place didn’t fail to miss a detail. Daedalus was the original architect of the labyrinth at Crete. Apparently, he had expanded his repertoire since those days and now worked on things like synthetic snake skin. I wondered what other parts of this place he might be responsible for.

I thought about the image of the snake devouring itself and wondered what that had to do with the news media---or with me. Everything in the maze was tied together, and I had no reason to suspect that this was any different. But I just couldn’t make any kind of connection between the two. The snake in this case was symbolic of the circular pattern of life. Life existed because of death. Death was a direct byproduct of life. You couldn’t have one without the other. I knew all that, and yet I knew nothing.

I pondered the mystery as I walked deeper into the Hall of Silicon Eden. I could hear the droning hum of something that sounded like an electrical transformer. The hair on my head and on my forearms stood at attention, and I felt the static in the air. Snake sigils had been emblazoned into the cobblestones beneath my feet.

“Please don‘t let there be a real snake.”

I prayed that this was one of those symbolic tests the maze was so fond of. Anything literal would send me running and shrieking in the opposite direction like a schoolgirl. I hated snakes.

I kept my eyes open for anything slithering and listened for the sound of hissing. Even the most mundane of things seemed terrifying here, and I could only imagine what sort of perverse twist the maze could put on something as menacing as a serpent.

I turned abruptly at the end of the hallway and found myself in a bizarre sort of orchard. Row upon row of crystalline trees filled the passageway, glimmering as