Anna has called in all the students. It is chaotic here, a perfect opportunity for you, but move fast. The path forward will remain clear for twenty-four hours. When you find the box, take it, but do not open it until after you arrive. As always, discretion is your ally. -C
It was a measure of how crazy the situation had become that a personal message from a transdimensional alien was a comfort. There was no box waiting for her at the hotel, of course. Being straightforward wasn’t Cyril’s gig.
“How does she get in?” Emily asked.
Tonya checked the About Us section of the power plant’s website—realms hadn’t quite replaced them for quick, basic things—and found the answer. “We need to schedule a drone delivery.”
The hospital scrubs, which were naturally an unattractive shade of green, arrived a few hours later. “It hurts to have to pay for them,” she said. “I’ve got a closet full back home.”
Every large educational institution that primarily served young adults had a medical facility of some sort attached. If they weren’t running into trees or jumping off balconies, they were forgetting prescriptions and catching mono. The power plant’s school was no exception.
“Spencer got back to me.” Tonya did a quick cut and paste, then shared the first part of Cyril’s message so that it looked like it came from Spencer. “This just arrived.”
Kim nodded. “I can fix an ID up that’ll pass a quick inspection, and if they’re that busy I don’t think they’ll do anything more.”
“And if they do?” Emily asked.
Tonya shrugged. It wasn’t like they had much of a choice. “I’ll have to talk fast or run fast. I grew up on the streets of Philly. I can do both.” She knew deep down that neither would be required. She wanted to tell them, but Tonya had been through too many realm adventures to ever consider ignoring the advice of odd, powerful people.
“We can’t have much time left,” Kim said. “They must already have Will inside. I’ll keep working on Mike. If he gets better or we haven’t heard from you by morning…”
Tonya nodded. “You’ll come in behind me. I’ll do my best not to get caught, chief.”
“Keep your connection open the entire time. I’ll help where I can, and we’ll at least have a map if anything goes wrong.”
Tonya had no intention of walking in the front door, or even the employee entrance. She should make an excuse to keep Kim out of it. But the truth was she wanted Kim in her ear. Tonya was trusting a freaking vision to guide her. Having a backstop in case anything went wrong was simple common sense.
The drive to the plant was surreal. Déjà vu didn’t come close to covering it. She had done this before, and hadn’t. The memories were slippery half-formed things that didn’t feel normal. An alien had put them in her head and hadn’t bothered sugar coating it. It pissed her off. Nobody but Tonya had a right to the contents of her mind.
It also wasn’t exactly the same. In her vision, the drive had no other cars around her, but it didn’t take long after pulling off the interstate to run into a solid stream of traffic. “How many people does this school hold?”
“More than five thousand,” Kim said. “And they’re all trying to use this single country road to get there at once. Anna is waiting an extra day for a reason.”
It played right into her hands. Tonya crept along with the stream until her inner memory told her she had arrived at the turnoff. “I’m never getting anywhere like this,” she said and turned onto what looked like a logging road. The not-memory had her make another quick right and park. Tonya was less than ten yards from the main road but couldn’t see it at all, especially in the fading light.
“What are you doing?” Kim asked.
“See that?” She used her finger to highlight the trail her not-memory said went all the way to an entrance. “I bet that will get me to the power plant faster than being stuck in traffic for the next ten hours.”
Kim’s doubt was obvious, but she wasn’t the one taking point. “It does go in the right direction. And you aren’t that far from the back edge of the site. That’s where the portal room is.”
“There you go. And I’ll have you two to keep me from getting lost.” She opened a navigation app in her virtual vision with a topo map and her current position clearly marked. She made a show of checking it even though she already knew the way. Once she had the map aligned with the not-memories, she fired up some hiking apps and set off.
She had spent more time hiking in forests in the past six months than she had in the previous, well, pretty much her whole life. It wasn’t that she hated camping or the outdoors. The simple fact was that she had grown up a city girl. Adventure and combat realms gave her the experience of roughing it with the convenience of getting up to get a sandwich from her fridge when she was done. But after spending at least a week trekking around in Chinese forests—real and virtual—going after the survivalists, and now this, she had to admit there was an appeal to it. Even with her not-memories ringing in her head like a bell, she felt the power of a real forest.
She stopped for a moment to say a quick sincere prayer to the Lord. He would guide her way through this. She knew it the way she knew the sky was blue and this forest was deep. A blooming love flashed through her. It wasn’t a voice, an answer, or even a touch, but an almost indescribable certainty that whatever the struggle, she was not alone.
“Is everything okay?” Emily asked.
Tonya breathed through the sensation. “It is now.” The forestScan app outlined an old, dry branch that made for a perfect walking stick. It felt good in her hand. She would have to remember to send the programmers a PatreoFundMe contribution when this was over.
She walked past an unmanned watchtower and then a garage or factory set into the side of a hill. Unlike the tower, this was crawling with people, but none of them looked her way. It was dark now, and she was well inside the tree line. “What’s going on there?”
“It’s part of the water control system,” Kim said. “I don’t know why they’ve got the door open though.”
“The ladder’s been torn off,” Emily said, and it flashed in Tonya’s shared vision. “See? It’s all mangled.”
“Not my problem,” Tonya said, although it worried her. The not-memories never brought up sentries or patrols. It was all empty forest.
Until it wasn’t. Tonya felt a memory urge to hide, so she did, not-remembering a perfect spot underneath a fallen tree.
“What’s going on?” Kim asked.
Tonya sent a text message. Shh.
A few minutes later, the unmistakable sound of booted feet accompanied by the whir of a drone went past her. When her not-memory assured her they were gone, Tonya got back to her feet. It was one thing to have inside-out memories of trails. Those didn’t move. Cyril knew how to predict where people would be days before they got there. Theoretically it worked, sort of. The threaded room could let someone do that. It didn’t make feeling it any better.
“Are you okay?” Kim asked.
“Fine. Almost there.”
“The portal room was the target all along?”
“Not until you told me it was close. They have to bring Will there. He might be there right now.”
“With lots of guards, yes.” Kim was never one to pull a punch.
“One problem at a time.”
At last she closed in on her target: as it was in her not-memory, another entrance set into the side of a hill. Like the water control site, this one was populated. Unlike it, though, they were leaving. She could hear their voices as they walked past her spot in the woods.
“…hate staff meetings.”
“…tomorrow is definitely a go.”
“…at least I’m not watching an empty room all night.”
Tonya waited until they were all long gone and then five minutes more. When she got up to the door, though, she was confronted with a red light. “Kim?”
“Hold your phone against it.”
After a few seconds, the
light went green, and there was a distinct clack. The facility on the other side was an odd combination of industrial garages and executive offices. It was also empty.
“This matches the plans perfectly,” Kim said. “And that’s a problem.”
There was always a problem. It was amazing Tonya had gotten this far before she found it. “Why is it a problem?”
“You can’t log into their network, and the portal room is out of wireless range.”
“So this is where I lose you guys?” Tonya liked having Kim running mission control.
“When you get on the elevator, yeah.” She said, clearly unhappy about it.
Time to pull on the big girl panties. “It’s not like we have a choice. Can you do anything about locks I might come across down there?”
“Hang on.” A new app landed in her message queue. “Assuming they use the same class of locks everywhere, that should get you past them.”
The elevator lobby was about as unremarkable as it got. The elevator door opened, but she couldn’t enter it right away. “Kim, if anything happens to me, I want you to know that I have had the greatest time with you.”
“Please be careful.”
“Hey,” she said as the door closed. “It’s me.”
She lost signal about a third of the way down. It made the longest elevator ride in her life that much longer. There was a definite urge to reverse course, to ride the damn thing right back up to the top, but that wasn’t going to happen. She prayed again, and got the same comfort, but doing this alone didn’t make leaving it all in God’s hands easy.
***
The room was large, an open oval space as big as a football field on its long axis and maybe half that high. Consoles formed neat rows in front of her. It was like one of Gramma’s favorite old movies, Apollo 13.
The portal was at the far end of the room, much more impressive in person than it was in drawings or simulations. A large white box sat at the top of the ramp to the portal. When she laid eyes on it, something inside connected with her phone.
Pick me up and then hang on.
Combined with the urges of the not-memories, she found the command impossible to resist. Literally impossible. She walked up to the box and picked it up. She couldn’t turn around.
Don’t panic.
That was rich coming from a dumb cardboard box. A dumb, heavy cardboard box. Things inside thumped and shifted.
Then the portal flared to life a few feet in front of her face. If she could’ve moved her feet, she would’ve booked it out of there. She’d been trapped by Cyril and didn’t know why. She was going to tear his blue hide up if she ever saw him ag—
The stuff inside the portal flared white, reached out, and enveloped her.
Chapter 44
Mike
Mike gradually lost the ability to communicate with his realspace body; it slowly went numb as time passed. His autonomic agents continued to display nominal readings, though. He could see from the blood sugar history that they must’ve fed him, so nutrition and dehydration were taken care of. There was a professional nurse out there, after all. There was no pain, otherwise he’d see it in the outputs. He just couldn’t exit this realm. He hated being cut off from Kim. He wanted to share this fascinating place with her.
At first he couldn’t believe he had an actual avatar that interacted with the realm, but now he was getting used to it. A little. The only thing he could think of to explain it was that the engineers had figured out how to model molecular force fields. In other words, his current hypothesis was that he wasn’t touching things. There had to be a barrier of some sort that was so sophisticated he couldn’t feel it. There wasn’t a lot of evidence, but he couldn’t think of a better explanation.
As it grew dark and cold, he and Tal came upon a construct that didn’t crumble to the touch: a basic shelter that on the outside wasn’t much more than a box with a door on one side. Tal opened it and went in, and Mike followed. The inside was stark, modeled with what looked like bare concrete that was smooth in the way newer nano-built emergency shelters were in realspace. The detailing was as always exquisite, with textures that were the equal of anything he’d ever managed. Maybe even better. The only furnishings were wide bunks mounted to the walls. The bottom ones were low to the ground, only a few inches.
“Ah,” Tal said. “It’s been efnek since I’ve needed to host a type C-7. One moment.” The bunks on one side of the shelter wavered, then transformed into a single, human-sized bed. “That should suffice, yes?”
He was exhausted. Kim had talked about this when she had been stuck inside a realm for a week using the Chinese superconnections. Even though they never moved in realspace, they still had to rest. Maybe that was what was going on. He’d stumbled into some sort of ultra-low-power-connection experiment. It would explain the monochromatic outdoors, insubstantial constructs, and single inhabitant. But the realism was too high.
Tal stared at one of the bunks with what Mike could swear was longing. “Efnek, nach val tecrhana. Efnek.” Then he vanished.
“Tal?” he asked. The silence stretched, and Mike was aware of how alone he was. He might be the only other entity in the entire realm, and this was a big realm. “Tal?”
Still no answer. He tried again to access the basic functions of the realmspace, but nothing worked. They’d changed the language and the alphabet on the error messages. He’d never encountered a team so dedicated that they drove their paradigm down into the diagnostic plumbing. When things broke, it was a bad time to get cute.
Down deep, it was all the same, of course. The protocols were derived from quantum resonances that emerged from the Improved Model of particle physics. Unlike that ridiculous old alien invasion movie, Mike actually could access any network based on realmspace technology, no matter where it was or who built it.
He lay down on the bed and thought about alien networks. Kim would be so interested in them. All those new locks to pick.
Buzzing. Something buzzed in his ear. He rolled over, and it buzzed in the other one. Mosquito. Blasted mosquito was trying to crawl into his ear and bite him. He should never have let Spencer talk him into visiting southeast Arkansas.
But he wasn’t in Arkansas. Mike opened the eyes of his avatar realizing he didn’t know where he was.
The mosquito sang in his ear, “You nesta has. No trust. Tal bad.”
He sat up, only then noticing there were narrow windows at the tops of the walls. They’d turned dark gray from the dawn’s light. No meditating during sunrise here.
“You nesta has. Tal bad.”
The mosquito was still here, except it wasn’t a fluttery gray disease vector. It was a small purple speck, the first flaw he’d seen in the realm. Now he had proof whoever designed it wasn’t perfect.
“Chexkna nek!” It seemed to get frustrated. “Morning attention! Important!”
The buzzing stirred the hair of his avatar, so he elbowed himself off the mattress construct. “I’m up. Fine. What do you want?”
“You attention pay do not. You sleep much too. Me ignoring stop.”
Reflexively he pushed a coffee command at the realm fabric and got incomprehensible error codes in response. That pissed him off. It was one thing to make debugging your damned realm code a pain. It was beyond wrong to make coffee an invalid command.
“Preeta! Preeta! He soon comes! You must listen!”
“Stop shouting.” Mike rolled off the edge of the bunk and rubbed the eyes of his avatar. He now understood on a much deeper level why Kim hated that long-term realm she’d gotten stuck inside in China. There was no coffee.
The buzz flew past his ears again. “Naz re ma re! Understand you?”
“Slow down. I don’t learn languages like you do.”
The buzz at least stopped whirling around him. “I menana. Eznatada.”
Okay. If he let his inner caffeine addict loose on the mosquito, it would be bad. He was a Buddhist. Getting rid of desire was the whole point. “I don’t understa
nd.”
“You menana do not. You think real this, but is not it is.” The mosquito got pissed. Mike was pretty sure what it said next was a lot of swearing. “My alnurta I miss.”
“Is there a point to this?”
The mosquito flew closer, and then it wasn’t a mosquito. It was a version of Tal, but smaller, more graceful. Mike couldn’t quite see it. It was less than a hologram, but more than a hallucination.
“You me must trust.”
The truth was he needed coffee to be coherent after he woke up. Mike wasn’t even ashamed of it at this point, which again pissed him off. Realm developers without coffee were a contradiction.
“I don’t understand.”
The graceful cat-centaur turned back into a purple spark. “Trust…me.”
“Okay, that I understand. Why?”
“Trena you are. Werna you are.”
“Lost me.”
More mosquito swearing. Kim would know what it was saying.
The mosquito vanished as Tal manifested his holo. “Are you rested? Good. We’ll arrive today.”
“Arrive where?”
“Is the other half of your pair available?”
“We seem to have lost our connection.”
Tal looked closely at him. “How is that possible?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Tal pulled back and sniffed, his horselike face making the noise even more haughty than it would if he were human. “Your education is sorely lacking. Please tell me you’ve reported the issue to your guild house.”
If Mike claimed not to know what that was, it would set Tal off. “First thing when I get back. Now, where exactly are we going?”
“My Salta, of course.”
It would be too much to expect him to make sense by now. “Of course.”
Tal suddenly switched to a different language. Mike waited for him to switch back, but he didn’t. “Tal, I can’t understand you.”
Tal stopped, confused. Then he vanished.
Great. His guide was glitching.
The mosquito returned. “You Tal not must test. You him must go with. You understand do?”
This was worse than Yoda. “I must not test Tal, and must go with him?”
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