“Can’t you fool them?” suggested Matt. “Like you did at her aunt’s house? You were bragging about how you had become super-intelligent last week.”
“They’ve taken the drones off the network,” explained the AGI. “They’ve probably connected them directly to the ANSIS network instead, though I’m only guessing. Either way, I can no longer reach them.”
Matt resumed walking, though his feet felt much heavier now that he knew how far they would have to travel. The terrain didn’t help. Their first order of business was getting out of the canyon, which seemed to be larger than anything Matt had seen before. I guess that’s why they call it ‘Grand’.
Finding a way up might have taken days, but Gary and his seemingly magical GPS could pinpoint their exact location, and since he had access to aerial surveys and maps, he knew the location of the nearest trail that led to the southern rim.
The hike/climb took most of the morning and Matthew’s legs were burning by the time they reached the top. He almost didn’t notice his discomfort, though; with every step higher the view became more and more spectacular. When they finally reached the top and he was able to get a full view of the canyon, he was astounded.
Thousands of feet below, the brown river meandered humbly along, as though ignorant of its role in carving out the massive structure. The canyon itself stretched out into the distance as far as his eyes could see, like a giant wound in the earth, banded with striations of red, gold, beige, and brown. The entire thing was on a scale his mind simply couldn’t comprehend.
He opened his mouth to articulate his wonder. “Oh.”
“Struck dumb, eh?” observed Gary. “Most people feel that way the first time they see it.”
“Wow.” Matthew’s vocabulary was slowly beginning to return.
“Gary, the real Gary, brought Karen here when she was a teenager,” said the AGI, describing memories that were not his own. “He wanted to share the feeling of seeing it for the first time with her.”
“It’s so big,” said the human. He temporarily forgot to use English, still being dumbfounded, and was forced to repeat himself for Gary’s benefit. “It’s huge.”
“One of our astronauts described stepping onto the moon by comparing it to standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon,” expounded the AGI. “So, it’s understandable that you may find it hard to describe.”
“Astronaut?” Matthew hadn’t heard that word before.
“Explorers we once sent to the moon,” explained the machine.
Matthew stared at the machine and then pointed upward. “By moon, you’re referring to the one up there?”
The moon wasn’t visible just then, but Gary understood. “Yes. We still have facilities there, though they aren’t manned by organics. There’s an astronomical observatory and a lot of now defunct mining equipment.”
“People went there?”
“Yes.”
Matthew wasn’t sure he could believe what the machine was saying, though he had never had reason to doubt Gary’s words before.
The AGI watched his reaction and wondered if perhaps he might have said too much. He hadn’t meant to stupefy the young man. The Grand Canyon was enough of a shock by itself, so he tried to put it into perspective. “You’re a traveler from a parallel universe. You’ve already done something beyond my imagining. You should expect to find wonders here that are far outside your own experience.”
Matthew just nodded, letting his eyes drink in the sight of the immense canyon before him while his mind soared upward to the stars. He wondered if people could do the same in his own world. At some point he realized he had sat down, and he was unsure how long he had spent there, absorbing the view.
He didn’t even notice the approach of a lone pert landing only twenty feet behind him, not until his ears announced it. Glancing around in alarm he jumped up and then crouched back down.
“Relax,” said Gary. “I summoned it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” accused the young man.
Gary’s face assumed an expression of exasperation. “I’ve been telling you for the last half hour. All you’ve done is nod and grunt. I knew you weren’t listening!”
As he tried to recall the missing time, Matthew had a vague recollection of Gary talking, but he had been so caught up in his thoughts he hadn’t heard any of it. Rather than apologize, he pressed forward. “How do you know it’s safe? Can’t they track it?”
“If they knew it was here, they could, but they don’t,” said the AGI smugly. “The owner hasn’t used it in years, not since he was uploaded. I changed its registration to that of an organic living in California who is unlikely to be under any active study.”
“You stole it,” said Matt bluntly.
“The previous owner doesn’t need it, and he’ll never notice it is missing, since I’m managing the security camera that watches the garage it was housed in. The new owner doesn’t know it exists. If you were a bank robber, this would be the perfect getaway car.”
Matt stared at the screen as he tried to process that last statement, “Do people rob banks here?”
“There aren’t any banks anymore,” Gary informed him. “But if you had ever seen any old movies—well, never mind. The important fact is that you can use this to get much farther away before you translate home. After you do, I’ll send the car back to its garage and restore its registration to its original owner, and no one will even know it was used.”
That sounded good, but one point confused him. “Aren’t you coming with me?”
“This PM is, and I’ll keep a compact version of myself loaded on it, but the rest of me will still be here,” said Gary.
“You can be in two places at once?”
“People can’t,” said the AGI. “But I am not a person. Strictly speaking, the me that I consider central to my existence will remain here, but a lesser, more limited copy will be on the PM. Make sure to keep it charged up. I look forward to learning about your world from my smaller self when it returns.”
If I ever try to write a personal memoir, people will think I’m crazy, thought Matthew. No one will believe all this.
The pert flew west for the rest of the day, and by evening Matt could see the ocean on the horizon. The scenery had been beautiful, but his eyes could only take so much of it before his mind drifted into daydreams. He had half-dozed for much of the journey, drifting in and out of sleep between long periods of introspection.
“How much farther do you want to go?” he asked the AGI.
“Can you transfer to your world over the ocean, or do you have to be on land?” said Gary, answering the question with one of his own.
Matt shrugged. “I could do it here, but I would prefer to get out of the pert so I can take everything out of the pack and bundle it up first. The dimensional opening built into it won’t work once I leave.”
“So the coast then?”
“No, the ocean is fine. Since I’m going to alert them anyway, I can use some power to make a stable surface.”
“If you had come to this world a few hundred years ago, you could have made a fine living as a messiah,” said Gary dryly.
Matthew frowned. “I don’t understand the reference.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Gary. “Just a bad joke.”
They flew out over the ocean through the deepening twilight, and when the stars came out Matthew found himself staring up at them with renewed wonder as he waited for the moon to make its appearance. When it finally did appear, he could see no real difference between it and the moon he had grown up with; presumably the two dimensions were similar enough to be almost identical, except for differing in their timelines. Five or ten thousand years was probably a miniscule difference as far as the moon was concerned.
Could we really go there? he wondered as he stared up at the pale sphere. “How far away is the moon?” he asked aloud. He was beginning to get used to Gary’s seemingly limitless supply of information and facts.
“If it
were directly above us, it would be approximately two-hundred-thirty-eight-thousand miles away. If you desire a more precise measure I can calculate one based on our current latitude and the moon’s present position respective to our exact location…”
Matthew shook his head, boggling at the number. “No, I can’t even wrap my head around the size of the number you just gave me.”
“For comparison, the diameter of the Earth is seven-thousand-nine-hundred and seventeen point five miles,” added the machine.
“That’s a help,” said the young wizard sardonically, but even as he said it he was doing a calculation in his head, Roughly thirty times the distance around the earth to…
“You could travel around the world…,” began Gary.
“Thirty times, I have it, thank you, Gary. I know my world must seem primitive to you, based on what you’ve heard, but we do have mathematics.”
The face on the screen of the PM closed its mouth, and then after a second the AGI responded, “My apologies, I didn’t mean to give offense. Honestly, it wasn’t because of prejudice, though. Few people, few organics I should say, can do multiplication or division in their heads without the aid of their implants.”
The young wizard nodded. “I’m just tired of being cooped up in this metal box. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” He didn’t bother explaining that most of the people in his world weren’t able to do mental math either. Most counted themselves lucky if they could read.
Several more hours passed, and the view of land had been gone for quite some time when the pert came to a stop and hovered a few feet above the tops of the waves. Matthew opened the door and jumped out, smoothing the surface of the water and reinforcing it with his aythar so that it would hold his weight as he dropped.
Once down, he expanded the smooth level surface another ten feet in each direction and added a shield to the edges to prevent waves from outside from washing inward. That done, he opened Karen’s pack and began removing the contents, laying them on a large blanket. It went against his natural tendency to order to jumble them together, but he didn’t have much choice.
As he worked, his mind considered the problem, and he had several ideas for improving his storage problem when moving between dimensions. He filed the ideas away for review later, when he had the luxury of working on them. The blanket was filled and the pack was now empty. He tossed it onto the pile and gathered up the corners.
He wasn’t really sure what his limits were when it came to transporting materials across dimensions, but he suspected that they followed similar rules to those that his other magic did. The blanket that held the gear was there primarily as a boundary. It defined the equipment within it, so that rather than it all being separate things it fell into the category of a bundle in his mind. It was the mental concept that was important. He wouldn’t have to think about bringing the tent, the food, his personal items, and so on. He only had to think about bringing the bundle.
“Are you ready?” he asked the PM in his hand.
Gary smiled. “I took care of organizing and loading what information I think I’ll need already. You can start as soon as you want.”
Matthew did, and the world began to melt away.
Chapter 28
They arrived deep in a forest where the trees were so thick and tall that the sun was barely visible. Birdsong filled the air and the space between the trees was relatively free of underbrush, smaller plants having been deprived of light by their larger brethren.
“Do you know where we are?” asked Gary.
Matthew shrugged, “No idea. We could be anywhere in the world, and there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen.”
“You don’t control where you arrive?”
“The first time I went to your world I arrived in a spot that was analogous to the one I left. The second time I homed in on Karen somehow,” he answered. “When I returned the location seemed random. I don’t think I can control the arrival point without some sort of beacon. This is still new to me.”
“I am glad you’re so confident,” said the AGI. “For myself I’m having some trouble adjusting. Without a GPS signal, many of this device’s basic functions are failing, and with each passing second I’m sure my other time-related functions are becoming less and less precise.”
Matthew gave the screen a curious look. Gary’s voice almost sounded anxious. “You sound less confident of yourself than you did before,” he observed.
“I’m not myself anymore,” said the AGI. “I’m a shell of what I was, and now that I’m no longer connected to the network—well, if I were a normal human I might describe what I’m feeling as a panic attack.”
“Try to relax,” said the young man. “While you’re here you’ll have to live with not having an absolute sense of time and location, but you’ll manage.” As he talked he opened the blanket and took out his personal bag. Carefully, he organized and packed most of what was there into his bag, since it was now functioning again.
He couldn’t get everything into it, though. His bag didn’t have as large and opening as Karen’s pack, and the tent simply wouldn’t fit. Luckily it had a shoulder strap, so he could carry it. Once he had everything organized to his satisfaction he took out his staff and began burning a circle into the leaf-strewn soil of the forest floor.
It wouldn’t last long, drawn that way, but he only needed it to work once. He made it bigger than he needed, since it was hard to draw precise runes in loose soil. Hoisting the tent and putting its strap over his shoulder he stepped carefully over the edge and into the middle of the circle.
“How can this get us to your home when we don’t even know our present location?” asked Gary worriedly.
“Because I’ve drawn it with the key for a permanent circle at home,” said Matt, as though that explained everything.
Gary wasn’t satisfied. “But how does this circle know where that is? All you’ve done is draw some symbols that supposedly match those in a different circle, and you don’t even know where this one is!”
Matt smiled. “I don’t have to know where it is. Whenever we create a circle we create a new key for it. The key could technically be anything—it’s just a label, a name that we give to that particular place within the circle. We invest a small amount of aythar into it, and it marks or brands that location with the key chosen. From that point on, we can make another circle somewhere else, and as long as we create it with a key that matches another existing circle, it will take us there.”
“What if two circles were created with the same key, by different wizards?”
He stood still for a moment, thinking before answering honestly, “Neither would work without additional support, but that’s the foundation for creating a gateway. The wizard who first designed the methodology for creating the keys used a mathematical function to prevent that. One of the variables included in that function is a time and date, along with a name denoting the wizard creating the key. As long as those guidelines are adhered to, no two wizards will create a circle with the same key, since the possible keys are practically endless.”
“Unless your function can potentially give the same answer for two different sets of inputs,” observed the AGI. “On a separate note, I didn’t see you doing any calculations to arrive at a new key designator for this circle. Will it work without one?”
Matt was already a little rattled by the possibility of creating identical keys by accident. He had always assumed it wasn’t possible, but without studying the function he couldn’t be certain that the computer’s concern wasn’t a possibility. Now is no time to start second guessing myself, he told himself. He turned his mind to the second question, “I did the calculation in my head. Those runes on the bottom right are the key for this circle, since no, it wouldn’t work without one.”
“What about…”
Matthew interrupted. “Would you like something to do? I think you need something to occupy yourself.” He was getting tired of answering the PM’s seemingly endless questions.
“Do you have something in mind?” asked Gary, sounding almost hopeful.
Matt proceeded to give him the function used to create teleportation circle keys, and then he explained his task, “See if you can find a proof to show whether or not it’s possible for the function to produce the same answer in response to different inputs.”
The AGI hesitated. “Math isn’t really my specialty, you know.”
“I thought computers could calculate anything in seconds.”
“They can derive the outputs of already defined functions, yes, but creating a mathematical proof is a creative endeavor that requires a lot of intelligence and intuition.”
Matthew gave him a puzzled look. “But you’re not just a computer. You’re a sentient being, a self-aware program, an artificial intelligence. A super-intelligence, according to what you told me before.”
Gary seemed mildly embarrassed. “Well, I was originally designed to emulate Gary Miller, and while he was a decent mathematician, it was mainly just the math he had to deal with in his line of work. He wasn’t the sort of theoretician you might think he was. Granted, that wouldn’t have been a problem in my world, where the rest of me has evolved into a near god-like being, but this PM has very limited resources.”
Matt found himself amused by the admission, so he seized on it, “So you’re telling me you’re an idiot now?”
The face on the screen pursed its lips, “Please, it’s hard enough just to say it. Show some mercy. How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and discovered you had become a moron overnight?”
“I don’t know,” said Matthew gleefully. “But I’m sure I will get a feel for what it’s like by watching you.”
Gary squinted at him. “You really are an asshole.”
Matt grinned, “I’m impressed you managed to figure that out. There’s hope for you yet. Perhaps you can put that limited mind of yours to finding that math proof for me, or have you given up already?”
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