The Atomic Heart Engine

Species/Type

Human-Built Machine

First Appearance

Not yet introduced

TL;DR

A secret machine built in 1956 around crystals from another world, the Atomic Heart Engine worked exactly once before it ran past its builder's controls, and it has been sitting in the dark under what is now Sunrise Sanctuary ever since.

The Engine — 1956

Brand new and brightly lit, the Engine sat deep in a natural cavern. Its violet crystal fragments were held in reinforced housings around a central core, wired to analog consoles, tube screens, tape reels and floodlights.

The Engine — Today

The Engine sits abandoned below the koi pond, past a riveted shaft and a rough tunnel. The consoles are dusty and corroded, and cobwebs hang off the old floodlights. Roots and mineral stains run down the rock. The crystals around the Engine still throw violet light across the cave.

Origin

In 1956, seismographs picked up a pattern under a remote Wyoming basin that looked like no ordinary earthquake. A winter shift in the mountain then opened the way into a chamber that had been sealed for ages. Inside, the first teams found clusters of violet crystal arranged around a huge animal frozen in the ice. The animal was Otto.

The operation was called Project Sunrise, a name chosen to sound harmless. Commander Jonathan Hale ran its security and containment. He treated the chamber as a danger before he treated it as an opportunity, and his first orders limited who could touch the crystals. Two days after Hale secured the site, the project's lead scientist arrived: Dr. Elias Mercer, a brilliant physicist who believed he was the smartest man alive. Hale wanted to understand the crystals before anyone used them. Mercer could already see what they might do: keep living tissue from decaying, and move energy without the losses every human machine suffered. He meant to make them work.

When Hale's restrictions slowed him down, Mercer found approval elsewhere and kept going. He repositioned the crystal fragments, mounted them in reinforced housings and wired them through a central core. The finished machine let human equipment feed energy into the crystals, force a rough order on them and measure what came back. He named it the Atomic Heart Engine, for what he hoped it would become: the central source of a new, controlled kind of power. Nothing about it runs on atomic power.

Mercer never knew where the crystals came from. They had been processed long ago by the Aurelians, a people on a distant world called Aurelia Prime, and launched away from a war. The Aurelians' own Keth Engines handled the same crystals with containment, safeguards and precise control over what reached a living body. Mercer's machine had power and a crude frame, and no way at all to steer.

The first activation was short. For a while the Engine seemed stable. Samples of synthetic tissue stopped breaking down. The people standing near it felt their pain fade and their focus sharpen in a way that was not natural. Then the reaction ran past Mercer's controls. Energy arced between the core, the crystal clusters, the cavern walls and the equipment. Heat spiked in bursts, the readings stopped matching, and the ice around Otto began to shift.

Hale cut the power before the reaction could spread any further. The Engine shut down, though the crystals still showed faint signs of activity after every human machine in the cavern had gone dark. Hale ended the testing and took Mercer's access away. Judging that moving an unstable system could be worse than leaving it where it had failed, he kept the Engine, the crystals and Otto together under the mountain. His team collapsed the main tunnels and buried the chamber behind barriers. One maintenance route stayed open in case it was ever needed, and it never made it onto the ordinary maps. Hale's choices contained the disaster and left its cause in place for the next generation.

The land above the chamber was protected from drilling and building. Water came back, trees grew over the scars and wildlife moved in. A pond was built over the hidden way down. In time the land became Sunrise Sanctuary, and the koi pond became the lid on Project Sunrise. The sanctuary and the project share a name, and nobody has yet said why.

What the Engine can do is push those old crystals into a wild, uncontrolled state first recorded on the Aurelians' own world. In that state, living creatures caught in the field can be changed, sometimes a great deal. Each result is built from what was already there: whatever survives in the crystal, the machine driving it, the body caught in the field, and the feelings and habits rooted deepest in that creature. The crystals add nothing of their own.

The Engine outlived the project that built it, and it sits at the center of what happens beneath Sunrise today. After an earthquake, the koi pond started losing water. Kagen, who keeps Sunrise running, and Renji, its tour guide, dammed off one end, pumped that section dry and found an iron hatch in the mud, with the pond draining down past its seal. They opened it to fix a leak. Far down the riveted shaft underneath, there was a small violet light.