“You said that my connection to Chris was a major part of my status,” I commented, changing the subject. “What was the other?"
Susie smiled, knowing what I was trying to do, but allowing it. “It's probably better that we show you. Now I'm going to play a little game. It's called stirring up your female curiosity. Computer!” Her voice raised. “Access, Susan Lendler. Level five."
Suddenly, the whole place became brighter. The black wall to my left melted away, exposing another one far off in the distance. I turned around, and at least a dozen doors that had been red were now pulsing green, and many other doors appeared. Several platforms raised up from the ground, showing large displays.
“We're now at level five,” Susie began explaining. “I can go..."
“How many levels are there?” I asked excitedly, running to several of the nearby doors and looking in. This puterverse was stunning.
“There are sixty-four, but..."
“How high can we go?” I couldn't contain my eagerness, and didn't try. I ran up the steps of the nearest platform and looked out over the landscape. Though not as populated as level three, there were still many other people sharing this area. “Does the access increase steadily, or geometrically?"
“Geometrically. But you can't just..."
“Then why don't we go higher? Say level fifteen? Or twenty?” My fingers flew over the access panel on the platform display, teasing colors and images from it. I was giddy with a sense of adventure and...
“Private Wyeth!” Lieutenant Sanchez barked.
I jerked to a stop and snapped to attention, my body and training overriding and bringing to earth my emotions and mind. If he'd grabbed a two by four and popped me one in the face the effect would have been the same. He walked over to me and inspected me as though I was something unpleasant he'd just run over.
“Are you always so disrespectful of your friends and commanding officer?"
I flushed with shame, only now realizing my rude behavior, and at a loss to understand it. “No, sir! I'm ... I'm sorry. I was just so overwhelmed..."
“I didn't ask for an explanation, Private. I asked for an answer."
“Yes, sir! That's to say, no, sir. I'm sorry, sir."
He stooped slightly and stared me in the eye. “Then perhaps you would be so kind as to show more restraint.” He paused and summed up the entire episode with, “Young lady."
Of course. That was it. I'd become so engrossed with my surroundings that I'd let down my self-discipline. In just the few days I'd been my new self I found it more and more difficult to keep myself in check emotionally, and my maturity was wearing thin in more than a few places. It wasn't a losing battle; it was a lost war. At least one nice thing about this loss of maturity was that I wasn't too worried about it.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, somewhat subdued but not much.
He contemplated me for a few seconds longer, then nodded.
“Very well.” He turned to Susie and smiled slightly. “You may continue, Susan."
Susie grinned at me, and I relaxed. I was very glad they seemed to understand. They certainly understood more about me than I did. I smiled back at her.
“Sorry, Susie."
“That's okay. I remember my first time accessing. I was three, and I acted just about the same way you did. No offense.” I blushed—or it felt like I did. I didn't know if an energy signature could turn red from embarrassment.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the answer to your question is, yes, we can access higher, and the view is even better. But there's a downside, too. Although access to the puterverse is a mental operation, there is a physical strain on the entire body. The higher you access, the more pronounced the strain. You can train yourself to an extent to tolerate the stress, but the benefit is realized normally with the length of stay and only marginally on level of access."
“How bad is the strain?” I asked, trying to sound calm.
“Very. Only one in a hundred go higher than level nine. Fewer than one in ten thousand can access level twelve. And at level thirteen, the stress on your body becomes actual damage. Few have ever been higher than eighteen and survived.
“Don't worry, though, Abigail. We're not going anywhere near there today. You'll be pretty sore tonight, but it shouldn't be too bad. No point in overdoing it. This is your first time here, so you're not ready for it. And also, we don't need to go that high to show you what we want you to see."
“And what is that?” I asked, sounding calmer than I was. I had a feeling something unpleasant was about to happen.
“You'll see. Literally.” Susie looked at Sanchez, who nodded. She took my hand and spoke to no one in particular: “Locate Oregon fire storm, 2414."
A tunnel just large enough for the three of us opened in the air about thirty meters in front of us. We remained still as it approached and engulfed us. Streaks and slivers of light, similar to the river, flashed by us on all sides. In almost no time, I noticed we were hurtling toward a pinpoint of light. The pinpoint grew to the size of an exit, and the light reddened. Then, as quickly as it had sprung on us, the tunnel abruptly terminated and we were in hell.
All around us were the massive flames of an uncontrollable firestorm. Vague shapes of buildings could be seen through the curtain of flames. Intertwined in the roar of the flames so as to almost come from them, were the screams of the dying, perhaps the already dead. I spun around, to look for escape, but there was none. Desperate to escape, I called for a platform, and we lifted up into the air, twenty, fifty, one hundred, meters. From horizon to horizon was nothing but flames and the sickening smell of death.
I had never seen anything so completely and utterly destructive. It had been, to me, almost ten years since I had left the horror of the Ethiopian Campaigns behind me. But I still should have been able to cope at some level with this conflagration. I couldn't. My senses were reeling from the horror. I felt no heat, but the terror would burn my soul for a long time. I covered my ears and started to sink down, but Raul lifted me up. He shouted something at Susie over the flames. She nodded and the flames died out as the platform we were standing on darkened and turned into another tunnel. Instead of falling in, our orientation seemed to change and we were standing in it, traveling quickly through it, the flickering red skies at our backs diminishing into the past.
The tunnel ended in moments, and we were standing on the moon's surface. I should have been overcome with the wonder, but the memory of the firestorm demanded all my attention. It took Raul gently shaking me to make me look up and put the horrible sight behind me to see this beautiful one.
The Earth sat in the sky, only just risen. All around was the rocky, pitted surface of the moon. I recognized the site as our first permanent moon base, established only twenty years prior, memory time. I realized we were also in a kind of lunar park, for the surface area of the base had ropes around it, and roughhewn benches, cut from native rock, were scattered around. Several flags, stiff with wire and shaped to flutter in a nonexistent wind, decorated the base. In all directions, I saw dozens of plastic bubbles protruding from the surface. Air locks, most likely.
“Look over there, Abigail,” Susie said quietly. She pointed to a large rectangular rock about ten meters to our right. Walking closer, I could see an inscription. I leaned down and read it out loud.
“Forever enshrined to honor those who so valiantly fought in the Terran/Martian Wars, there lies here a fallen comrade, known but to God.” It was dated 2389.
Terran/Martian Wars. Then they had established a colony. I stood and looked into the black sky to see if Mars was up. It was, its redness even more evident in the vacuum of space. It looked so peaceful. Susie, was also looking up, but in another direction, towards Polaris. Her face was quiet and thoughtful. I turned to Sanchez.
“How many?” I asked in a small voice. Since there were no ambient noises, it still sounded abrasively loud.
“Three million from Mars, 481 million from Earth. There were four wars las
ting sixteen years,” Raul said with an impassive tone.
“How can you be so cold?” I said with stunned surprise. A half-billion people. I couldn't begin to grasp a carnage that great.
“It was a long time ago, Abigail. Three hundred years. But though we may sound indifferent about it, we are not, and the war still leaves its mark. As one-sided as the numbers may appear, Mars lost the war because their entire population was three million. Fewer than one thousand survived. Mars was never again resettled. The terra forming operations were abandoned, and it is again a dead planet."
“What do this war and the firestorm have in common?"
He didn't answer me. Instead, he nodded again to Susie, and the tunnel appeared to rush us away.
And so it went for more than an hour. We saw New York City turned into a massive crater, surrounded by a flat, glassy plain, no life to be seen. They showed me dark hospital wards and filthy asylums, buried deep underground, housing horribly mutated things that may or may not have once been human. We saw a series of ripes, some of which were definitely not human, their brain cases merely welded, sealed boxes bolted into a control panel. In later images, not even that vestige of humanity was left them, as their intangible minds were moved into circuitry and hard memory. There were many, many more images, sounds, and experiences. How I managed to make it through without fainting, I don't know. Finally, we were taken back to the riverside. I looked into the ethereal data stream, shooting ribbons of silver and gold, and wondered how two such worlds could exist within each other. I looked up at Sanchez, feeling very weak from either our long access time or the mentally draining sights. Probably both.
“Why did you show me these things?"
He didn't respond, but instead leaned against the railing that ran along the riverbank, contemplating me. I looked at Susie, who stood quietly beside him, staring down at the hard floor of the puterverse. It was for me to find out.
“Computer. Access Abigail Wyeth."
“Access granted.” The obsidian walls shot up into the air, and the area became darker, less friendly.
“Locate common focus of past twenty queries."
Again a tunnel came up, and we were inserted into it. We shot along, my hand groping for and finding Susie's. Lt. Sanchez stood close behind us. I had a sudden flash of fear and shivered.
A pinpoint of an exit appeared and raced toward us. The light increased quickly; it was clearly daylight at the end. I heard the distant rumble of voices and could even make out a few faces before we were suddenly in the midst of them. No one seemed to notice us, and several passed through us, causing no harm nor having any come on them. I looked around, trying to orient myself. I first noticed the almost even proportions of race among the multitude. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, everyone was represented in almost the same number. It could have been anywhere in the world, but nowhere in mine. Many were civilians. Many more were in a military style of uniform.
After a few more moments of studying the crowds, I looked up. Being shorter than everyone but the younger children, it was the only other way for me to look.
Filling the entire sky in front of me was a massive complex of buildings. We were in a manmade canyon, surrounded on all sides by these huge structures, most hundreds of meters high and a few as wide as they were tall.
The complex was so massive that it was more a carved mountain, made to look like buildings. An unearthly steel and glass mountain, reflecting the sunlight in such a way as to be blinding, even from my low vantage point. It made it difficult to get a proper look at the structures, other than size. I did make out a logo on several of the buildings, but the shimmering reflection made it impossible to make out anything other than shape. And people were constantly getting in my way. I tried jumping up to see over, but it didn't help much.
“Computer, delete people.” They faded away and we were in a deserted valley of glassy concrete. “Accelerate time to two hours past sunset.” Time slipped quickly by, and the large buildings flashed with the setting sun's rays, then took on a luminescence of their own in the gathering twilight. Night descended, and the stars came out. The logos flickered, then flared to life, and suddenly they were very easy to see.
At last I understood. I could see why these people had been so happy to have me, and so upset. I knew now why my I ... I ... IHAD had gone on for so long, why they had questioned me, and questioned me, and questioned me, though I had no memory of it. As I stared up at the accusing symbols, the ground beneath us began glowing, and suddenly we were standing on another massive logo, flooding the air with brilliant blue light. I looked down at it and realized how lucky I was to still be alive, and not burned to a cinder by Susie's gun as I lay helpless. I stared at the logo, hoping it would go away, or change into something else. But it didn't.
NATech Supreme.
“End access.” My voice was very small, very quiet.
The sounds faded, the images quavered a moment, then collapsed back into the flimsy sheet attached to Lt. Sanchez's wall.
* * * *
“We don't know exactly when NATech was formed. The records have long since been lost, altered, deleted or secured. We had guessed sometime in the mid twenty-first century. Until you came along, Abigail."
I stretched out on my bed and looked up at the rock ceiling. It was a constant source of amazement that the rock could be cut to be so smooth, so flawless. I would have thought that natural imperfections in the native rock would leave the surface pockmarked and scarred. They must have some sort of blending method.
I rolled on my side to face Susie, groaning slightly as my aching muscles protested. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, largely unaffected by our puterverse accessing. Our room was so small that she was less than a meter from me, so our conversation was still pretty intimate. Not that anyone would hear us; we had shut the door for the night.
“You missed by a century,” I replied. “NATech was a result of the Second World War and the forming of the United Nations. Almost no one knew of it because it would compromise our mission. We wanted to be able to prepare society for the changes that it was going to go through. We also did a large amount of research in what were considered to be fantastic, unrealistic ideas. By keeping our existence quiet, we were able to focus on our work and not the ever-changing politics."
She shook her head in disbelief. “It sounds unbelievable. And it's so completely impossible that the very entity we fight against, and by whose hand so many of us die, could at any time have been benevolent. But I heard it from you, now and in the past days. The shock of the story you told us is still there."
“No more than the shock to me of seeing what NATech became. We had anticipated something like this could happen, and had installed numerous safeguards to prevent it. In fact, shortly before I ‘died', I...” I broke off and hedged. “...was also working on a long range safeguard. It's painfully clear those safeguards were useless. How far reaching is their power?"
She shrugged. “No one really knows, which by itself is a frightening indication. We do know it's nearly complete here on Earth. After the Terran/Martian Wars, the world government was destroyed. The planet had united under a common government as far back as 2209, but the more powerful countries, the United States, Japan, Brazil and Australia, remained autonomous. But then singularity drives were invented in 2243, and the first hyperspace corridor was established to a class M planet in 2267. And that changed Earth's future forever."
“I had wondered if space travel to other solar systems had been perfected. There seemed to be indicators in some of the things I looked at in the puterverse, but there were also very few facts."
“That's for two reasons. First is your current access level. There's not a whole lot you can find out at three limited four. As you feel more comfortable with the system, and we feel more comfortable with you, that access will be increased.
“The second reason is that space travel is not that important to us. Everyone who wanted to leave the planet did. The singul
arity drive ships—we call them ball chasers—allowed for exploration of Earth class planets that could be colonized, providing that they were not already inhabited by another civilization. If they were, relations would be established. If they weren't, emigration corridors would be set up after an experimental colony had proven the viability of self support.
“And I'll bet you've never found intelligent life, have you?"
She shook her head. “Of course, not. The very way the universe was created points to the improbability of intelligent life anywhere but on Earth. Of course, a lot of people still believe we'll find intelligent alien life one day."
“And maybe we will. I wouldn't hold my breath, though,” I commented dryly.
“I suppose.” Susie didn't sound too convinced, either. “Anyway, after the hyperidors were established to the first two or three planets, emigration could begin on a large scale."
“That follows. I'm not sure what a hyperidor is, but I'd guess it debunks the law of the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Probably a marked route through a type of subspace that twists those two points so they're closer to each other."
“I'll never get over that, Abigail! How do you do that?” Susie said wonderingly.
“You probably know as well as I do, Susie. As the Lieutenant pointed out, NATech didn't pick me for my good looks, nor for my more obvious military career."
“That military career would fetch you a high rank today with them. But you're right, I do know why NATech picked you; because of your success and ingenuity in the numerous recon missions you and your squad conducted. After we had you pegged, we were able to access many of your mission files. They were sketchy, and coded, but we could make out some of the details. Your skills with logic and personnel are brilliant. They'd make an excellent study in military tactics."
I blushed a bit. “Somehow, I doubt I'd find too many listeners if I gave the lectures. As for their ‘brilliance', I did what I could to obtain the mission objective and keep my men alive. You were talking about the emigration."
Shards: Book One Page 17