A few hours of walking later, he came past the small river he had already passed on his first time coming here and greedily bowed down to quench his thirst.

“Eh, I guess explosive diarrhea from drinking contaminated water is still better than dying of thirst,” Ede commented from within him, but Marcus didn’t even listen and sipped in the delicious moisture with both hands, only stopping to look at his own reflection after a good two minutes.
“...what am I even doing here?” he asked the distorted guy looking back at him, “What am I trying to achieve? A better tomorrow for everyone? Fame? Acknowledgment? I...I don’t even know any more. What was I hoping to find when I set out back then?”

Of course the reflection did not answer any of his questions and even Ede kept silent as Marcus tried to come to grips with this new and life-threatening situation. He didn’t know how to handle himself. One day in and he was without food and any means to make this water here actually drinkable. For all he knew, he had just poisoned himself and would now die a painful death in a few hours or maybe day’s time. And then what? Would they come to find his remains? No, not this time. He himself had made sure of that. Had gotten himself exiled. To save the position of his father, who had done what any father would have done. He thought he could handle it, because he had gotten unbelievable lucky a few times. Finding Ede had filled him with the confidence, that the world out here wasn’t close as bad as everyone had told him time and again. But this confidence was a mistake. This whole journey had been a mistake. He was no hero. He was just a fool. The world would be better off if he just rolled over here and waited for death to come fetch him.

In the end he shook his head, got his sorry butt back up and said to the silenced surrounding him, “Might as well join Ede in his metal casket. Hopefully he won’t mind another corpse lazing around.”
He wiped off his tears and started walking again, down the road, towards the ancient monument on the horizon. As he approached it, he felt like he was being watched, but when he turned around, nobody was there. In the end he attributed it to his wracked nerves, just having ‘escaped’ a group of raiders and all. But the feeling did not go away. As he waded through the hip-high blades of wild grain towards the rocks, he turned around a few more times, but there was still nothing there. He recalled the first time he had come to this place and how he had almost got eaten by wolves, if not for Ede’s intervention. ‘Maybe,’ he thought, ‘it’s just fate for me to die at his gates.’ But nothing jumped out to eat him and he reached the gateway stones without incident. As he stepped onto the unnaturally green and plentiful meadow, he once again felt like entering an entirely different world. A better world. But that was, of course, nonsense. Why, after all, should everything around him lie in ruin and this place do fine? In the end, he attributed it to his imagination. His wishful thinking.

He found the entrance point and climbed down the long and decrepit ladder, more feeling his way down than actually seeing where he was going. Once or twice, his searching feet only found thin air and he almost fell, but his grip on the ladder saved him from this particular end. Eventually his feet found the solid surface of the elevator cabin beneath them and he proceeded to climb down, ever further into the darkness. He had once read about Elephant graveyards, where Elephants would go when they felt their end coming. When they were still around that is. And now he was here. No water. No food. No tools. No anything but a book and the clothes on his back. And an annoying voice in his head, that miraculously managed to stay shut up for a little while.

As he walked through the halls, he realized that, strangely enough, this place felt a lot like his home. Not the surface levels where everything was well-lit and bustling, but the bowels of the place, the deep underground stuff, where even maintenance does not tread if they don’t have to. Eventually he arrived at the grand chamber, where Ede shone a soft and weak light unto the hallway.

Marcus stopped. Did he really want to go back in there? He still had not found any of the answers he had been looking for. How would going in there solve anything? Certainly, he was sheltered from the elements down here, but that did not mean that he was ‘safe’. Sure, he was curious to find out what Ede was all about. What else he could tell him. ‘And maybe,’ he thought, ‘he can even make my final hours more bearable. Put me to sleep to never wake up again.’

He walked into Ede’s chamber, but nothing happened. The surroundings did not change, he was just ‘there’ in a mostly empty room, facing the humongous wall scattered with pulsing lights. Marcus walked forward, sat down where the dust had been disturbed the most and said aloud, “Ede, I’m back. Can...we talk?”
It was like a big sigh went through the entire facility as the lights on the wall all went off simultaneously, plunging the room into absolute darkness.
“H-hello? Ede? Are you there?”
The lights came back on, but not all scattered like before, but much more focused. It took Marcus a moment to realize, that they had taken the shape of a human face.
“E-Ede?” Marcus asked, flustered by the sudden change.
The face kept changing, apparently trying to communicate, but eventually the lights went out again and returned to its scattered positions again. Moments later, Marcus found himself back inside the library room again, Ede sitting in his chair.
“My apologies if that scared you. I was trying to interact with the world out there. But it seems I can’t even talk to you without pulling you in here with me.”
Marcus walked over and took his seat, “But...why go to that trouble?”
“Yes well, it seemed to me that you were rather troubled having your consciousness getting hijacked by a telepathic signal, so I tried to engage in a more...shall we say conventional type of conversation. Unfortunately it did not work all that well. So…,” Ede said, clapping his hands in front of him, “...welcome back, Marcus. How have you been?”
“...shouldn’t you already know that? Having access to my mind and everything?”
“I consider it common courtesy to not ‘read people’s thoughts and memories’ without their consent. People need their secrets, after all.”
“Well, I guess...that’s nice.”
“...you seem troubled. Did something bad happen?”
“...yeah well, only if you count getting picked up by your dad like a lost kid, put on display before the entire settlement and getting myself exiled and robbed in the course of two days as ‘something bad’.”
Ede’s face grimaced briefly and he said, “Yes well, I would consider that as ‘something bad’. Wait, ‘robbed’? Are you unharmed at least?”
“Yeah, funny story that. Apparently the raiders were really into the story I am carrying with me.”
“Oh, you carry a story with you? I like stories. Which is it?”
“Eh, it’s an old book from the beforetimes. ‘Journey to the center of the Earth’.”
“Ah, a classic from Jules Verne.”
“You know it?!”
“Sure do. Way back then, everyone at least had heard about the old stories.”
“That sounds nice...say, did anyone ever follow Mr. Lidenbrock to the center of the world?”
“...um...I beg your pardon?”
“Yes well, it’s...oh wait, this is not the real world, I can’t pull out the b—“, Marcus started, baffled to suddenly have his book in hands.
“This is a dreamscape, Marcus. Anything you want to happen is possible in here, if you can imagine it,” Ede explained, smiling gently.
Marcus shook his head and proceeded to explain, how Dr. Lidenbrock climbed down a volcano and found a world full of wonders, however Ede stopped him before he really got started, “Marcus, Marcus, stop please. Uh...you are aware that this is just a story, yes? If you really climbed down a volcano, the only thing you’d find is a fiery death!”
“Just...but...but I thought…”
“You thought it was real? Well, I do admit that Mr. Verne had a knack for writing realistic stories, but no. To my knowledge none of his works were real. Inspired by real world things, sure, but spiced up a lot by the author’s fantasy.”
“B-but all the wonders! All the miracles! All...all the stories in the library…” Marcus argued, suddenly feeling betrayed.
“My apologies, but I will need to verify something in your memories now,” Ede suddenly said and in a nauseating stream of images all the stories Marcus had read after having learned to read flashed past him, together with the will to travel and see all those wondrous things for himself. When the stream stopped, however, Ede looked at him with a blank expression.
“What...what’s with that look?”
“...I’ve gotta say, whoever filled that library had good taste. But they apparently failed to mention, that 90 % of all those stories were completely made up. I don’t know all the titles in there, but I know for a fact that quite a number of the things you remember are simply not possible in this world. Or at the least they were not possible at the time of writing, basically making them all lies. They are meant to entertain people. To give them a respite from the real world.”
“But...they could be possible now?”
“Yeah well, people kinda stopped writing new stories when stuff really started to go south. They were too busy with trying to stay alive and all that. But yeah, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from history, is is that, what had been mere fantasy just a few decades ago is perfectly normal now. At least that’s the way it used to be.”
“But...but the garden of Eden…”
“Ah yes...the promised land man got exiled from for breaking the rules. Yeah well, sorry to break it to you, but I don’t think ‘God’s garden’ ever existed. At least not as an actually physical place. I think the ‘Garden of Eden’ was more of a metaphor for the bountiful world we were entrusted with and how we, as mankind, just cannot handle that. And that we, as a species, are just terrible at following rules, because there’s always someone who thinks ‘they know better’.”
“But...my journey...it was all..for naught?”
“I wouldn’t say that. And, to be honest, I think the bible is probably ‘the’ book closest to reality you’ve got memorized. Sure, most of the stories were a...tad exaggerated to make them seem more interesting, but when you look at the core of it, there’s often actual events behind them. Scientists spent centuries to figure out which of the stuff in the bible was actually real and which is fabrication. For example there used to be a lake, which was so damn salty, you could literally walk on it without sinking in all the way. Or that story about Lazarus? Medicine didn’t even properly exist back when that story was told, there’s countless accounts of ‘people getting buried alive’, because people couldn’t tell a coma from death! Why, during Victorian times, people were so afraid of being buried alive, they had bloody bells fixed to their fingers, so they could chime for help if they should wake up in a coffin!”
Marcus chuckled slightly and then sighed, “Doesn’t help me much though. If the garden of Eden does not exist, my entire journey is a failure. How I ever face my people if I’ve got nothing to show for it?”
Ede smiled and responded, “Y’know, I think you’ve got it all wrong. They don’t love you because they expect greatness or salvation from you or anything. They love you, because you are you. That’s what family is all about, you know? Love is only real if it’s unconditional. If you need a reason to love someone, you’re doing it wrong...um, speaking of ‘other people’...did you bring friends?”
“What? No! If I had told my people around you, you’d have a demolition squad coming instead of me! Wait, is...is someone out there?”
“Not just someone. It’s a whole bunch. At least 10-12 people.”
“Can you show them to me?”
“No, the cameras have gone offline a long time ago. I can only sense their presence. But they are definitely humanoid...and they are coming down.”
“C-could it be my people? Could they have followed me?!”
“Well, we’ll see in a little bit. But for the time being, I suggest you go and hide somewhere in the dark. Just like you, they will flock to the light. And if they are hostile, they’ll have another thing coming.”
“But...please do not kill them. They might be my friends.”
Ede smiled as the world around Marcus faded, “Oh, didn’t you know? There are far worse fates than ‘death’.”