Exosite 34b is an alien quarantine building discovered by Vera Corbin, buried under the sands of Sibylen and long since abandoned. The entrance is a steel door, about eight feet tall, embedded in a dune, marked with a band of sweeping tendril-like alien writing, surrounded by a one-acre dig site of colored flags, steel ladders, and crates.
The upper floor holds a chamber of large goo vats and a “pool room” containing a submersible “digital ocean” (a local alien network, like a LAN), as well as an annihilation bot, a multi-armed defensive machine the crew destroyed. A sublevel below holds a round “nautilus” room with a spiral ridge and a ceiling-mounted track system connecting to the vats above, the Fork Chamber containing the Paracausal Bifurcation Array (known as the Fork, a three-tined black metal pylon), and a surgical room where two “chainsaw” surgical spider-bots once operated on patients. A goo-powered transparent tube leads out through the wall on the sublevel, filling with goo over about two hours to serve as an escape route.
The crew arrived with Vera Corbin and explored the upper level (Ep 14-16); Felix was submerged in the nanofluid (Ep 15) and the crew fought the annihilation bot (Ep 16). They navigated the goo shaft and solved the nautilus room puzzle to reach the surgical chamber, encountering the chainsaw med-bots (Ep 17), which they then defeated: Robert riding one, Felix manipulating the ceiling via the goo interface, and Haleyy destroying one with a laser rifle. Dr. Elara Voss then activated the Fork using accumulated nanofluid, opening a portal that showed a distant structure, five interlocking rings arranged like a celestial gyroscope, with strange blue diamond entities visible nearby. Felix and Voss sensed an alien presence through the goo interface, and Haleyy screamed and collapsed unconscious; Robert hinted at prior contact with similar alien tech on Ventos (Ep 18).
Later, a Nexus Trading crew led by Rynn Kade took control of the sublevel and wired three captives to the Fork in a second attempt to replicate the earlier merge (Ep 21-23). When the crew descended to retrieve them, a Nexus psionicist scanned the group before Robert killed him mid-monologue, and Rynn Kade shot Thorne through the chest in a sucker punch that left him moments from death. While the crew argued over whether disconnecting the captives would kill them or save them, the Fork completed its process, and the three captives were fully merged. Haleyy activated a biosionic healing touch for the first time, saving Thorne’s life (Ep 24).
The facility had originally housed infected aliens submerged in their own nanofluid, connected to a virtual network as they slowly died to a plague. The lower floor’s surgical system was used to move patients from the vats for care, experimentation, and autopsy in increasingly desperate attempts to find a cure.
Appears in: Ep 14, Ep 15, Ep 16, Ep 17, Ep 18, Ep 21, Ep 22, Ep 23, Ep 24