Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  “What we want is behind that door,” he said as it flashed in her vision. Kim broke into a jog toward it. “Oh shit,” Spencer said. “You’ve got—”

  She lost the rest of it as armored bodies fell from the sky on top of her. Grit was thrown into her helmet; Kim’s eyes burned as they drilled her face-first into the dirt. She tasted virtual blood from her avatar’s split lip. Dropping an entire squad on her head was an innovative move. They were getting control of the situation. That was not allowed.

  Kim activated her armor’s razor extensions and turned into a shredder. Three of the bodies on top of her exceeded their damage limits and vanished. She grabbed another one by the ankles and spun him like a baseball bat. That collected two more, and she sent all three of them sprawling down range.

  She drew her sword and forced the remaining men to step away. The move backed her up against the door. Kim heard the tendrils grow out from her helmet, and the door opened behind her. She walked backward into the room and slammed the door shut, ramming the simple bolt-locks home while Spencer’s tendrils construct-welded them solid. There were maybe half a dozen ways to get into this room now, but they all took minutes. Kim only needed seconds.

  She turned, and there it was: a construct console that would’ve been perfectly at home in any network closet. Kim took her helmet and gloves off so she could see properly and touch the screen with her hands. The crown jumped off the helmet, and now Spencer was with her, his jeans and T-shirt changed by the contracts into a peasant outfit.

  “At least this one doesn’t smell. The shit Edmund makes me wear stinks worse than a full chicken coop.” He sat down and made a you go first circle with his hand. She reached out.

  There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. Unlock relock make block passage this line no line collapse and now…

  FIBER NETWORK CONNECTION ACTIVATED came up on the screen.

  Over the shared channel Tonya said, “What did you guys do?” It wasn’t said in a that was funny, do it again way.

  “We opened up the fiber connection. What happened?”

  “Mike passed out. He’s breathing okay but won’t wake up. He had all these crazy little cube things running everywhere, and now they’ve stopped.”

  A clank from Tonya’s side blanked out what she said next.

  “What was that?” Kim asked.

  “They’ve locked the door,” Tonya replied. “I think they know we’re—”

  Her connection cut off.

  Mike and Tonya were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by armed men who now knew where they were. They wouldn’t take prisoners or ask questions. In realspace, her arm throbbed, but there was only one solution for this.

  “Spencer, do what you need to, but do it fast.”

  Kim relaxed and opened herself to her power.

  There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe…

  She had a trump card in her hand.

  Seams of power dimensions of nothingness…

  It didn’t hurt as much this time around. She spared a thought for ribbons.

  Dark patterns potentials horizon to zenith…

  Maybe that would at least keep her from stepping out naked.

  Waves higher and lower everywhere nothingness…

  Silk caressed her skin as the transformation took her. She had her ninja outfit on now. Good. Spencer would be stunned enough as it was.

  Remember to breathe…

  Like this, she could reenter the world from any point she chose.

  Breathe…

  Like the room Mike and Tonya were in.

  Breathe…

  Her armor vanished, and the sudden loss of mass had her hopping on bare feet. Okay, no shoes then. She wouldn’t need them. Spencer had frozen solid, mouth open like a big, dumb, teenaged fish. Kim tapped it shut with a hand of glossy obsidian traced with coral lightning. “You have seconds, Spencer, not minutes. Do it fast.” She gathered power in her fist and smashed a hole in the realm’s wall that opened into nothingness.

  Since Kim had gone over the same maps Mike and Tonya had used, she knew exactly where they were. Navigating this dimension came to her as naturally as her realm skills. Kim wanted to be next to where Tonya and Mike were, and then she was. They needed a distraction, and Trilogy needed another right hook. She stepped through, setting off a resonance in the quantum stack in the far corner of the room. The whine was inside her ears, not as sound but as a twinging electric presence. They had cut the lights, so Kim wasn’t sure where Tonya and Mike were inside the building. A random pick would have to do. She gathered another fist of power and smashed her way through. Kim spun the power higher and aimed it at the stack.

  Chapter 15

  Tonya

  It wasn’t exactly pitch dark. The racks of servers and network equipment had flashing lights all over them, but they were faint. They were going to get shot by rednecks in a Christmas light show.

  She pulled Mike, who had passed out at the same time Kim did her unlock the locked things schtick, away from the door so he wouldn’t get hurt if guards rushed in. Then the quantum stack started to whine, some sort of overload maybe. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

  She caught a motion out of the corner of her eye. Someone running flat-out into the room.

  She threw a quick punch trying to knock whoever it was off balance before she even got a clear look at them. An electric pulse jumped from the figure to the back wall with a loud bang.

  “Ow!” Tonya said, shaking her hand. The thing she’d hit said the same thing at the same time, but the sound was rapidly covered up by a loud hiss. It was like hitting a granite block with her fist. Pain bloomed as she got a good look at the person she struck.

  Person was not what she had hit. It looked like a jazzed up robo-mannequin from a mall window display, shiny black with pink lightning going off inside it, clearly female, wearing some sort of tight outfit made up of ribbons. Had they missed a door somewhere?

  Oh no. The tanks.

  Tonya turned. A hole had been blown open between their room and the emergency power system next door. Mist shot from a split seam on one of the tanks. Then the reek of propane hit her.

  The mannequin asked, “Where’s Mike?”

  “Kim?” That’s exactly who it was. They’d talked about this, but the descriptions had never come close to what it looked like in person.

  Kim called it the transformation. If they were in realmspace, it would be an award-winning avatar design.

  “Yes,” Kim said. “It’s complicated. Now where’s Mike?”

  “Right here.”

  They weren’t in a realm, though. Part of Tonya knew this was Kim, her best friend, but another part, deeper and more powerful, thought this was alien. Every move Kim made set off an inner shriek, screaming at Tonya to get away from her.

  Kim threw her arms wide, and a bubble of energy formed around them. Before Tonya had time to register anything else, the gas ignited. Flames wrapped around the bubble but did not break it, insulating them from almost all the heat. The concussion was a powerful slap that sent them both reeling. Being inside a bomb as it exploded wasn’t anything Tonya ever wanted to experience, but that was exactly what had happened. It was loud.

  She stumbled backward, and her heels hit something that hadn’t been there a moment before. The ground wasn’t where it was supposed to be. In an instant, Tonya lost her balance and everything went black.

  Chapter 16

  Spencer

  Kim had gone back into the dimension she’d fought Ozzie in. From there, she could go anywhere. It didn’t take a genius to figure out her destination.

  It sucked. The biggest problem with Kim’s tools was that they were slow. Like, is-the-fucking-thing-even-working slow. He had compressed his own toolkit down so small it’d take a lot more than seconds to unpack it. He started the process anyway but needed to do something now.

  The construct door shook with a mighty BANG. The
ir contracts had forced them to play by the rules, but they still owned the realm. Someone had brought a battering ram to the party.

  “Spencer, do what you need to but do it fast.”

  Kim obviously thought her idea would ruin the run, and now the maniacs outside had pulled their heads out of their asses and found a strategy that would work.

  BANG! This time masonry construct flew off the frame. It smelled like chalk. Nasty.

  Whatever was going to happen would be epic, and he sat in front of an open connection to the power plant. They were about to join the party too. It would come from this end, that much would be clear to them. The propellerheads who ran the plant would naturally want to know why this end vomited a shit ton of garbage into their network.

  And there it was.

  He turned a super-sized and totally unsubtle vacuum hose construct loose to grab everything in reach on the Yellowstone side. Whatever Kim did had to be fucking epic. He needed that to cover its tracks. Spencer tossed a targeted, disguised packet with his contact information on it through a gap next to the hose. They’d never know the difference between him and Trilogy now.

  An actual, for real, this-is-not-your-daddy’s-digitally-fake fireball blew into the room from the hole Kim made. It spat her out and she bounced off the opposite wall.

  Realm and reality didn’t cross. That was the point.

  Whatever it was also pushed his hoped-for datastorm through the connection and into the power plant’s network. It used up so much bandwidth it caused the construct contracts to degrade. Spencer had only read about that happening in journals, and only as a theory. It was cool as fuck.

  Another thwack with the battering ram took a lot less force than the people swinging it were counting on. The door and the wall that held it exploded like someone had stuck a firecracker in a bag of flour, and the whole thing—frame, ram, and the men controlling it—tumbled into the room, crashing into a heap on the floor. It wasn’t a medieval construct; he had forgotten they upgraded that contract. It was some sort of sideways jackhammer that’d basically blown itself apart when it was set up to push against a heavy door but ended up pushing against construct Styrofoam.

  Kim was out cold and looked normal now; the hole she’d flown through had vanished. Contract rejection was still engaged. The vacuum hose yanked back into the realm with a ridiculous little ping. They couldn’t drop the connection to escape now; he had to get them to an actual exit point, otherwise they’d lose all the data he snatched. He had pulled a map down when he unlocked the first door, so he knew where the nearest one was. It would be guarded, but Spencer had a plan for that.

  He never thought he’d use the avatar Helen had given him as a going away present when they left China. Certainly nowhere anyone could see him. Meant specifically as a gag, it was one of the worst knockoffs he’d ever seen. It didn’t have rock skin; it was made of flagstones. The color wasn’t orange; it was gray. Its speedo was blue and had crenellations across the waistband to remind the user of the Great Wall. Spencer thought it looked like someone had gotten bored with scissors.

  The commonality with The Thing was size, strength, and near indestructability, which nobody had a copyright on. It was specifically prevented from saying the better-known battle cry, It’s clobberin’ time!, even in Chinese. He bellowed the default out as the avatar manifested.

  “Attack if you can attack, defend if you can’t attack, flee if you can’t defend, surrender if you can’t flee, die if you can’t surrender!”

  The only reason it worked at all was someone lost their nerve and altered the contracts trying to take Kim out with cartoon weapons. They’d have to lift the locks to bounce his avatar, which would allow them both to escape. That would blow, though. It would be too easy.

  They must’ve used a standard feature pack to change contracts that quickly. He crushed a loose stone to powder to confirm that. Full acceptance of his superpower suite. This was gonna be awesome.

  He set the catch phrases to automatic. They were all in Chinese, but it still sounded badass to shout things as he smashed shit. First up were the goons around the ram. He bashed a hole in the roof and tossed them out in two fistfuls, and they flew well out of sight. Heaving people like they were basketballs fucking rocked.

  Kim was conscious now, but she hadn’t stood up. Whatever happened must have hurt like a son of a bitch. He could barely hear her hoarse voice. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  He overrode the auto setting. “No, but it sounds pretty bitchin’. We’re still locked in. Can you walk?”

  “I can barely talk. You’ll have to carry me.”

  Her armor was back, so she was as protected as he was. “No problem.”

  He could hear tanklike noises coming from what was left of the door, so he rammed his way out the other side. Construct stones flew across an inner courtyard and right into a different tank. They bent its cannon barrel like a wet noodle and deranged the turret mount. Too bad, so sad, I broke your tank.

  A navigation carat, well he hoped that’s what it was anyway—all the goddamned labels were in Chinese—pointed left, so he headed that way. When he passed the tank, he tore the turret off and used it like a broom to sweep soldiers and small mechanicals out of the way. Weapon hits either bounced off or made him stronger. Spencer had been on a hyperrealism bender ever since he met Mike, but now he remembered how much fun simple mayhem was. Sure, the avatar was a knockoff, but someone had gotten creative with it. Helen would be proud.

  Finally, he made it to the exit. A figure in black with a laser sword stood in front of it. Before it could raise a hand for a power choke, Spencer smashed it flat with his fist. The sword tickled his pinky finger before the blade vanished. Cradled in one arm, Kim laughed at what his avatar shouted out.

  “What did I say?”

  “‘On the Road Again.’ You’ve been shouting song titles the whole way.”

  Of course. Most song titles were public domain. He set Kim on her feet; she wobbled a bit but held steady. He asked, “You ready, ma’am?”

  “Born that way.” She laughed, but he could see it hurt her. At least they were almost there. A squadron of Apaches lifted into view, and he threw the turret at them. Then he exited the realm, the helicopter explosions ringing in his ears.

  Over their audio channel he asked, “Did it work?”

  Her voice was still badly strained. Whatever had hurt her must’ve messed her up in realspace too. Not good.

  “My distraction?” she asked. “A little too well.”

  “Are they safe?”

  “I think I took out a transmission tower. All I have is text, but Mike says they’ll be out in less than an hour.”

  Tonya had left an urgent request for Spencer’s toolkit in his message queue. It hadn’t decompressed, so he aborted that and sent her a copy. Then he went looking for one of Mom’s whiskey bottles. It was party time.

  Chapter 17

  Tonya

  Tonya spun all over the place when Kim vanished, then landed on her butt with a thump. She closed her eyes to wait for the ground to stop twirling.

  She could breathe. She was singed a little but otherwise not injured. The urge to puke her guts out passed quickly. Tonya thanked the Lord for that small favor.

  Someone nearby said, “Oh my word.”

  Another voice she recognized.

  Cyril.

  She opened her eyes and found herself in a room that had haunted her dreams ever since they got back from China. When she was little, her grandmother had a ragged-looking handbag made of yarn that was full of dark rainbow colors. Tonya would play with it, emptying it and filling it up again, tracing the colors of the threads as they changed from dark blue to purple, purple to red, red to brown, then to gold, then to black, then back to blue, over and over again all across the surface, inside and out. That was what the walls, floor, and ceiling looked like: threads of dark, endless colors. But these weren’t static. They flowed and changed, all in the same direction, from her l
eft to her right, along the long axis of this football-shaped place.

  The threaded room.

  “How on earth did you get in here, child?” Cyril asked from behind her.

  Tonya checked her balance for a moment. It would be just her luck to spring to her feet and then promptly fall on her face. When that came back good, she stood and turned to face him.

  Cyril was every bit as alien as Kim had been, but in a different way. He was a glossy, bright blue, mostly human-sized insect. Jiminy Cricket dunked in children’s paint, minus the top hat. Unlike Kim, he didn’t set off an inner alarm to run away. Maybe it came from the same place that made old CGI animation work fine as long as the characters weren’t too human. Cyril was outside the boundaries of whatever freaked out her inner cave woman. Humans made of black glass: bad. Blue bugs as tall as she was: good.

  Maybe.

  “The short answer is,” she said, “I don’t know.” The last time she’d been here it’d been Cyril’s doing. Her timeline had gotten out of whack, and he helped her untangle it.

  She said a Hail Mary as fast as she could to concentrate on the here and now, wherever this here was and whenever this now may be. God had put her here. Questioning that would only complicate things.

  His smile was more in the voice than the face. “You’re getting much better at accepting things. Bravo.” The smile went away. “I don’t know isn’t a good enough answer. Try again.”

  She described the last moments of Kim’s rescue.

  “I see,” he said in that infuriating way that didn’t help her see anything at all. “Still, that does not explain how you’ve ended up in this node rather than one of your own.”

  “Node? This is a node? Is that what you call a realm?”

  He waved away her question. “Semantics. You should be some place you recognize, not here.”

  “Well, for some reason Kim made me think of you. Would that do it?”

  He chuckled. Even though it was clacky, Tonya smiled at the sound. “How interesting,” he said. “Do you really think we resemble each other?”