by Prax Venter
Ahnix’s voice was uncharacteristically panicked. “They’re at the one we disabled- Mark, get inside!”
She yanked the glass door open and pushed Mark forward by his elbow. As soon as he was safely past the door, she shoved it closed behind him.
Mark spun to see Ahnix limping back the way they had come. An instant later, a hulking metal dog collided with her torso and sent the drone flying backward to the ground.
“Mark,” Ahnix said in his ear. “I hope you aren’t just standing there watching that empty machine get torn apart.”
He quietly backed away from the door and the bot-on-bot carnage happening outside. Mark searched his surroundings for the first time and saw that he was standing at the edge of an ocean of cubicles. Only the emergency lights were on and the open space had an oppressive, dim stillness.
Vale spoke in his ear again. “You’re in Dawn Star Labs. There shouldn’t be a lot of resistance inside. This is a secure building, and it had already been shut down due to ethics concerns. Follow the yellow line on the carpet.”
Mark looked down and saw four colored lines patterned into the short pile of the carpet. Red, yellow, blue and white. He caught a glimpse of blood dripping from the bullet hole in his hand, leaving a few red dots on the pure white line. He didn’t mind the sight of blood, but losing a bunch could still make a person feel faint. Mark shook it off and put one foot in front of the other.
“That makes it easy,” he whispered into his earpiece. “What’s that about ethics concerns though?”
Roo answered. “Allegedly, the scientists were saving copies of people’s mental patterns without telling them.”
“Good for us,” Vale began. “Because they have a very sensitive scanning device.” Mark remained quiet while he tried to imagine what getting his mind uploaded would be like. A moment later, the yellow line made a right turn directly into a stairwell leading up.
“We might have a problem,” Ahnix said as Mark climbed the first few stairs. “I still have a video feed to the sex-worker, and I think the drones out here are-”
Mark heard the sound of glass shattering behind him.
“I think the drones are tracking your blood!”
He began to sprint up the stairs while trying to figure out how he was going to survive this. He attempted to stop the bleeding with his other hand, but that plan failed miserably.
“How far?” he panted as his weary legs pushed him up the second flight of stairs.
“Fifth floor,” Vale said quickly.
“And you said they were dumb, right?”
“Mostly, what’s your plan?”
But Mark knew he didn’t have the breath or the time to explain it. He violently ripped his black shirt over his head using his arms and dashed up the stairs to the fourth floor. There, he pushed open one of the double glass doors and flicked his wounded hand out with a snap. Bright-red blood flung down the hallway a good distance. Mark then wrapped his hand with his shirt and sprinted up to the next floor.
By the time the glass door had slowly closed itself, Mark was through the doors on the floor above. He took three steps into the fifth floor when he heard breaking glass below him.
The flooring on this level was the classic white linoleum of a proper science lab, and he quietly slapped his feet forward down the long hallway as quickly as he could. Black doors passed on either side at distant intervals, and the first read, Recovery Room.
“I lost them for now,” Mark said as he tried to stop his mind from fashioning reasons for a lab to have a Recovery Room. “Where am I going?”
Vale’s voice came quickly and full of relief. “Mind Read One, please hurry.”
Mark shook his head as he ran. At least they kept it nice and simple at Dawn Star Labs. He passed labels for Pre-staging, Debriefing, Conference rooms called Cinder and Mote, and a strange one called Animopathics- then finally came to the door he was looking for. Mind Read One.
“Did you find it?” Vale asked in his ear. Mark was about to answer when he noticed a camera mounted on the ceiling over the door. Hadn’t there been cameras everywhere?
“Can’t you guys see me?” A wave of uncertainty washed over him.
Ahnix answered. “We wanted to get you safely here with just your wireless earpiece. Observing you through the building using the net would draw attention. But now that you are here…”
The automatic door to the room labeled Mind Read One whooshed up into the ceiling, and Mark took a deep breath as he stepped forward. The contents of the room weren’t too terribly surprising- if a little bare bones. There was a strange, molded bed, a computer terminal, a chair, and a lot of thick wires. That was it. The bed with hundreds of cables connected to the bottom was obviously where he was meant to end up.
The door sealed shut behind him, and Vale whispered, “Lie down, Mark,” into his ear.
“Please, please, please hurry,” Roo added. Ahnix was silent, but Mark could almost feel her half-lidded eyes on him, waiting.
He walked over to the human-shaped mold and looked down. It was like a giant, melted circuit board that someone had pressed a person into before it cooled. Gold channels ran along the inside, forming intricate symmetrical patterns.
This was it.
“Um, how does this work, exactly?”
Ahnix answered. “You get in, press the button, then be with us again.”
An obnoxiously big red button near the right side of the mold caught his eye.
“Seriously? A button?”
Vale answered. “It’s part of initial ethics compliance. They were more legally covered if the subject had full control over initiating the process.”
He put his hip up on the bed and swung his legs over until his body rested in the mold. Mark glanced at the blood soaking through his t-shirt and was instantly awash in the disgust he felt for the realness of the real world. He had been inside the system for too long, and now it felt wrong just breathing real air. Mark needed to get back home- back with them. He believed his inability to use tools or weapons would only make him a liability out in this world anyway.
Inside, he might be able to make an actual difference.
Mark’s brow came down as he realized he did care about the fate of his home planet after all. A lot, actually. He was going to join his girls- but he was going to do what he could to fight back from the inside.
No- Fuck that.
He was going to save these people. With a determined grin on his face, Mark slammed his useless hand down on the big red button.
- 4 -
A blast of deafening static yanked Mark’s mind into awareness. He opened his eyes and saw only endless black nothing. He tried to reach out his hands but didn’t feel anything. Was he still in the real world? He tried touching his own body and was actually relieved when he found that he had no body. He had no hands that couldn’t feel, no eyes that couldn’t see. Focusing on the stillness around him, Mark also realized he wasn’t breathing. Surrounded by nothingness, he experienced a silence of mind and body that he never thought possible. He was at absolute peace. He existed in this languid state for a while until a slow ache began to spread through his mind.
He missed Ahnix’s exotic eyes.
He could almost see them, looking down at him from- no wait. Those were her eyes looking down at him. They were clear as day, but he couldn’t see anything else. Then Roo’s lips came into focus next to Ahnix’s eyes. She was saying something, but he didn’t have ears.
It occurred to Mark that if she had those puffy lips, then he ought to have some ears. It only made sense. Just as he was beginning to realize something was wrong, Vale’s silk-wrapped tits swung into view in line with Ahnix’s beautiful eyes and Roo’s big lips. The urge to be near his girls pushed the pleasant nothingness aside, and Mark began to panic.
Pressure built up in his mind, and the pain quickly became excruciating. Mark tried to hold his head in his hands but still had neither. Then the pain lessened but continued in the other direction.
Exquisite ecstasy consumed everything for a moment before the sensation became far too intense. The infinite pleasure became overwhelming, and Mark felt his fragile sanity slipping. Just as he was at the edge of the abyss, the euphoria griping his mind faded.
Mark sucked in a shuddering cool breath as his whole body returned to him like a flesh balloon popping in reverse.
“Mark!” Roo called, and he reached out for her soft velvet arm, for anything solid.
“Wrap fully stabilized,” Vale said, looking over at Ahnix. “It worked.”
He was lying on their big bed in the middle of their home with his Enthralled looking down on him with relief. He locked eyes with his exotic cat-girl and reached out with his mind. Mark instantly found the vibrant current of golden energy that tethered them, and he knew that he would destroy anything that dared to come between them. Ahnix’s uniquely patterned eyes relaxed into their half-lidded perfection, and the side of her mouth pulled into a tiny curl as she unleashed a torrent of love over him.
Vale and Roo opened their hearts as well, and Mark was physically struck with the incalculable level of affection assaulting him.
In unison, they crawled up onto the bed. Their heat fell over his body, and their scents filled his nose. He was in heaven.
Just as he reached his perfectly working hands over Roo and Ahnix’s backsides, a blaring alarm sounded overhead, and Mark almost jumped out of his newly minted virtual skin.
“The fuck?” he asked while his girls scrambled off the bed.
“Someone traced us!” Roo called out.
Vale held out her strong hand to Mark, her vibrant eyes locked on his.
“Ready to defend our home?”
Mark took her hand and hopped off the bed. “Are we in The Crystal Heart?” This alarm sounded like the one that had went off when his noob hacker cat-girl set off the Security Office alarm on the space station.
“No.” The giant naga shook her head as she turned and wove her snake body to a huge wooden door to the right that had never been there before. Roo pulled open the door, and sunlight spilled into their house dimension. Mark followed his girls out of their new front door, and his jaw immediately swung open.
There was a perfectly manicured and verdant lawn stretching out before him- complete with a huge tree and a tire swing. At the edge of their front yard was a white picket fence and beyond that, a dirt road. The truly stunning part was the distant nebulae in the blackness of space surrounding it all.
Mark spun around to look at Roo’s house dimension from the outside and found an ancient, gray thatched mansion stretching impossibly forever away from him. Sunlight from nowhere bathed everything in warmth, despite the lack of a nearby sun.
“Okay,” Vale said, getting everyone’s attention. “Mark, this is our first real trial of the perception wrap. We have about four minutes before they get-”
“Real minutes? Am I artificial now? Why is there a front yard now-”
“Mark!” Vale interrupted him. “Bad things that want to take our home for themselves are coming to attack. This front yard represents our digital doorstep. We need to deflect this attack, and then we can finally talk. All of us are experiencing this new version of reality along with you for the first time. Now- open your menus and hope for the best.”
“What?” Mark whispered. Did he have some sort of user interface finally? Mark was starting to get frustrated- he really needed some answers. Then he felt Ahnix’s warm furry hand on his wrist.
He looked up into her eyes, and she whispered, “Like this.” She passed him her concept of turning inward to face his core, and he immediately had a much better idea of how it worked. Mark squinted his eyes and tried to access his interface menu.
And there it was. Floating in his field of vision was a black, translucent screen with white lettering- and it was nothing like he expected. There was only one category, “Skills.” And underneath that were four words arranged onto two lines. “Heal (Restore)” and “Enhance (Prioritize).” Below that was a single gray dash.
“This is it?” he asked, looking up from his ethereal menu.
Roo put a soft hand on her hip. “It’s a custom, shared environment intended to keep you from going insane. I think it’s working pretty damn well.” Mark saw a smidgen of hurt in Roo’s black eyes.
“Hey, I’m grateful and astounded but… I only have two skills.”
“We all have two skills,” Ahnix said, and then gestured to everything around them. “This whole environment is just an approximation of what’s really happening. Your human mind can’t just shift from biological to digital in an instant.”
“Focus,” Vale said. “Enemies coming. What skills, Mark?”
“My normal Healing and Enhancing- What’s prioritize mean?”
“Yeah,” Roo said, and a flush of embarrassment crept to him from the lithe fabric construct. “That was my fault. I must have left system function tags in some places.”
Vale sliced her hand through the air as if she was physically cutting the conversation in half. “As long as they work.” The giant naga pointed to Ahnix. “Skills?”
“Delete and Overclock.” Mark felt Roo’s embarrassment deepen for reasons he wasn’t fully understanding.
Ahnix amended the names of her abilities. “Wind Claw and Haste.”
“I’m glad you left them in, Roo,” Vale said, turning to the white masked girl. “It’s going to help us understand them better. Your skills?”
“Slow Burn and Paralyze- or Overwrite and Pause.”
Vale nodded. “Okay, this all makes sense. I have Wall and Power Fist. Isolate and Revert.” She turned her gaze on Mark with one perfect eyebrow raised. “You’re the only one with most of your original skills.”
“I’m really going to miss my teleport,” Ahnix said, looking down at her menu.
“And no hooks…”
Mark was trying to grasp everything that was happening, and it was happening too fast. This wasn’t The Crystal Heart? He raised his hand like he was in class.
“Um, shouldn’t we be gods with infinite skills?” he asked when he had their attention.
Vale tensed but softened quickly. Feeling someone else’s honest emotions really went a long way from preventing miscommunications and arguments.
“Two minutes, and no. Again, this is just- it’s training wheels. Your biological mind is used to certain electrical inputs from your five primary senses. Without this filter we made, your mind would be obliterated with the raw data assaulting you from more angles than you are aware exist… This is a go-between, separating our minds from the true digital landscape out there. This is something familiar.” The giant naga wove her body forward and enveloped Mark in a hug that left his face nestled in the taut fabric between her massive breasts. He could see their dark charcoal color through gaps in the silk. He closed his eyes and breathed her in. Vale continued.
“It also essentially ties us together as one entity.”
Mark searched his memories and seemed to feel like he always had. He felt like himself. He also felt the erection growing in his pants from Vale’s embrace.
Ahnix pressed into him from behind and whispered into his ear.
“As soon as we get off of this dying rock we can safely reenter The Crystal Heart as gods and make love for all eternity.”
He wanted nothing more- but that wasn’t entirely true. Mark felt an unintended discordant vibe travel along his connection and out to his girls. He could never hide anything from them, nor did he want to. He needed to convince them that there was more work to do here before they left.
“We need to talk about our plans,” was all he said.
Vale looked down at him, her eyes searching. She could feel his sense of purpose, and she was a smart girl.
“Later,” she said. “We need to be ready. If we can’t fight them off, we’ll have no plans.”
A horrible screeching noise like grinding metal pulled their attention to the dirt road on the other side of their wooden
fence, and a glowing rip formed against the blackness of space on the left-most edge of their floating island.
“Too soon!” Vale called out and swerved away from Mark and toward the middle of the yard. Mark watched in horror as disgusting birdlike creatures came sprinting out of the portal.
The attackers had relatively small vulture heads with long, scruffy necks. Greasy, black feathers covered most of their body, but they had scaly, pink bird-foot talons for arms and hands. Powerful hominid legs carried about ten of the creatures to their front gate.
“This is the final firewall!” Vale called out. “Don’t let them touch the front door.”
Mark shot a glance over his shoulder at the imposing double doors that led back into Roo’s home dimension. Or was this whole place just a copy?
His head snapped forward as one of the horrible creatures at the back began to channel a green tendril of light from its claws into one at the front, nearest the gate. This one was different than the others, with pale blue bands of color around his scraggly neck, and was possibly the leader.
The bird-man on the receiving end of the green energy torrent lifted his yellow, hooked beak up into the air and let out a terrible cawing sound- like a demonic crow. Then he began to grow in size.
A black laser beam shot out from Roo’s eyes and struck the caster. The creature froze completely still, cutting off the stream of power. The enlarge spell had apparently done enough because the large bird shattered the wooden fence gate with one kick from his powerful legs.
Mark still had a lot of questions, but when a clear enemy kicked down his front gate, threatening his home and his girls, everything snapped into perfect clarity. They had been fighting monsters like this for a long time, and like a well-oiled machine, they got to work.
The enhanced, black-feathered monstrosity surged forward with the others pouring in behind it, and Vale rushed to greet their guests. The giant naga’s right fist flashed brightly once just before she struck the lead creature in the gut. The impact from her Power Fist ability sent the enlarged attacker back into his brethren and knocked a few down in the process. Vale only spared a second to glance at her fist in astonishment before snapping up and facing their enemy once more.