by Rob Reid
So the jailer went first. And this was a very lucky thing.
FOURTEEN
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
The jailer had just started descending the staircase when his gooey underside suddenly released its grip on the steps. As he started to slip, his head whipped backward, its gruesome eye suddenly lifeless and unfocused. Moments later, he started to roll. Anyone standing below him would have been carried along and crushed when he hit the wall at the base of the first landing—a violent collision that flung him backward and down the next set of steps. It took maybe three bounces for him to reach the second landing down. He bashed its wall even harder, then cleared the next set of steps with a single bounce. After that, he just ricocheted from wall to wall on his way down, slamming harder and harder, and flying faster and faster—like some kind of repulsive, sludgy pinball. We watched him careen down dozens of flights of steps until we could no longer pick him out.
“Lucky fellow,” Frampton murmured as he vanished from sight.
“Lucky? Didn’t I just … kill him?” This thought sickened me. Our jailer hadn’t been human, but he’d been intelligent and conscious. Did that make me a murderer?
“Actually, it’s more like you sent him to paradise.”
“Almost literally,” Carly agreed. “His body went limp when his brain hemorrhaged on a massive overproduction of endorphins. This not only creates a sense of supreme bliss, but it causes subjective time to halt. So you basically drove him into a state of eternal ecstasy.” Misinterpreting the horrified look that hadn’t yet left my face, she added, “Don’t worry—it’s a nonsexual sort of feeling. For the most part.” With that, she started us down the steps again.
“Humanity’s music did this to entire societies early on,” Frampton reminded me as we followed her.
“That’s right,” I said. “But I thought that everyone who was vulnerable to it kind of … died out.”
“Apparently, live music is more lethal than recorded music to some beings,” Carly said. “We always suspected this, and now we know.” She stopped abruptly in front of the wall at the end of the third staircase down and gazed at it closely. “I think we’re here.”
“Where?”
“Guardian territory. We’re below orbital altitude.” With that, the wall before us snapped up like an old-school roller blind. Behind it lay an empty, octagonal room with transparent walls and a matte black floor. It was nighttime outside, and a dazzling galactic core sparkled in the sky overhead. I looked down, and saw that we were in the tallest building of a unending city that glittered below and around us. The planet’s curve was plainly visible at the horizon.
“Come in, come in, whoever you are,” a grumpy voice urged from the octagon’s far corner. “And make it snappy. You’re not on my calendar, so when my next appointment arrives, you’re out. But since you’re here, you may as well state your name, species, and planet of origin—and tell me why you’re barging in on me.”
Carly and Frampton both looked at me. Apparently I was now our spokesman. And I realized with a start that I was okay with this. More than okay, in fact. I’d been following everyone’s lead but my own since Carly and Frampton first showed up. And until I took over with the jailer, things had gone steadily from extremely bad to unspeakably awful. Of course, the situation was still within the tiniest rounding error of unspeakably awful. But at least it was finally improving.
I strode confidently into the spacious room, which seemed to be empty. “My name is Nick Carter,” I said in my courtroom voice, wondering if this was, in fact, the “Intake Guardian” who would one day determine if humanity was ready to become Refined. “Individuals in my species are referred to as humans. And my planet of origin is Earth.”
The voice considered this. “You know, I actually fell for that once. It was in the year 9PK. Joking about the Planet of Song was still beneath even the lowest beings back then, so I was caught off guard. The perpetrator—I had him defenestrated, by the way—did a reasonably convincing human voice. But I must say, yours is much better. The attack in your consonants has every nuance that’s associated with the human palate. The resonant frequency structure is impeccable, and the inharmonicity levels are precisely as they should be. I am therefore impressed. But you will be defenestrated anyway. Lying to a Guardian is a serious crime. So is barging in on one without an appointment, come to think of it. As is stepping on a Guardian’s testicles. So will you kindly move your left foot?”
I yanked my foot off the floor, but had no sense that I had been stepping on anything. Then I saw a ghostly hint of motion down there. It was like a tiny splash of light, or a flicker of shadow.
“Thank you,” the Guardian said.
“I—I’m sorry about that.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. It actually felt kind of good. Not that I swing that way.”
Gazing closely at the floor, I could faintly make out an exotic geometric form drifting right in front of us. It was perfectly flat, and had an irregular, kidneylike shape. Its interior was filled with a complex set of interlocking segments and patterns. Bending closer, I could see that countless tiny points of light were swarming along a network of intricate pathways that connected its internal regions.
“He thinks you’re beautiful, Your Illustriousness,” Carly predicted in a bored tone. “And please forgive our intrusion and my colleague’s confusion. He is in fact human, and he’s never seen a two-dimensional being before. And we just escaped from detention in low orbital altitude, having been abducted by a Guild-affiliated jailer who intended to execute us.”
“You mean they’re back to doing that?” the Guardian huffed, as if she’d said that someone had just left the lights on in the garage again. “We’d ask them to stop, but they’d only go on strike. Clerks and peasants unite, blah, blah, blah. The government allegedly works for us. But you try telling a public sector union what to do. Anyway, what brings you here?”
“We were hoping that Your Illustriousness might be the Intake Guardian responsible for Earth,” Carly said.
“Yes, I’m with Intake, and humanity is among the many, many candidate races that I’m responsible for tracking and eventually promoting or rejecting.”
My pulse quickened and I felt almost giddy. Carly had said that not even the Guild would dare to harm a Refined species. So maybe this guy was our salvation! “Your Illustriousness,” I said. “Please pardon my ignorance, but what are the criteria for graduating to Refined status?”
“They involve attaining minimal thresholds of competence in thirteen technical disciplines. A civilization that reaches them without self-destructing is deemed to have survived its adolescence. It can then be entrusted with the Refined League’s truly sophisticated technologies without any fear that it will destroy the universe, reverse the flow of time, or otherwise cause a nuisance. Our criteria are very strict. But they are also entirely objective, and extremely fair.”
“And how is humanity doing against them, Your Illustriousness?” I asked.
“Oddly. When we first discovered you in 1977, you seemed to be on the threshold of what we call the Great Acceleration—a period when compounding improvements in a diversity of scientific areas push a society forward with stunning momentum. A Great Acceleration would normally take you from your hopelessly backward state to a full mastery of the Thirteen Disciplines in less than a quarter century. And once a civilization gets to that point, it’s just a standardized test and a few simple essay questions away from joining the club.”
“So what happened?” By that schedule, we should have made the cut ten years ago.
“Your development almost stopped in its tracks. Which probably isn’t evident to you, since you are in fact modestly more advanced than you were in 1977. But you should have started experiencing drastic advances in computing technology about thirty years back. And that simply didn’t happen. It’s quite baffling to the entire Intake team.”
“Seriously?” It seemed to me that digital technology had been movin
g along at blinding speeds my whole life.
“Absolutely,” the Guardian said. “You suddenly started having terrible problems with software. And your crap software has hobbled everything else. Biotech, caliology, nanotechnology, materials sciences, oikology—you’d be flying along in all of these areas if you had just one or two decent programmers between you. Not to mention that your dismal ECAD tools have crippled your integrated circuit design—so your software problem has also become a hardware problem.”
“And have we always been this bad at software?”
“That’s the odd thing. You were actually pretty good early on. I mean, the PDP-11 was an elegantly balanced package of hardware and software, for its day. But then it was like someone lobotomized your entire population of digital engineers. It’s strange. But I’m an Intake Guardian—not an anthropologist. So I can’t begin to guess at what went wrong. What I can tell you is that humanity falls drastically short of our promotion standards. And we can’t relax them for any species—not even yours.”
With that, the Guardian fell silent, and the lights circulating in his innards briefly sped up. “Oh crap,” he said.
“What is it?” Carly asked, suddenly anxious.
“The hospitality union just filed a grievance against you. They say you killed one of their best greeters right after you Wrinkled in. Line of duty, distraught widow and orphans, blah, blah, blah …”
“One of their greeters?” I said. “But he wasn’t trying to greet us—he was trying to kill us!”
“Well, duh. Don’t you have euphemisms where you come from?”
“Trespassers are commonly executed at Guardian facilities,” Carly confirmed. “I knew that before we came. My miscalculation was in not realizing they’d have a celebrity greeter that Frampton and I couldn’t incapacitate.”
With that, there was a thunderous knock at the door. It sounded more like a battering ram than a friendly request for access.
“That would be security,” the Guardian said. “Our facilities are run by strict and precise rules. I’m not required to open the door for them. But if I don’t, they can let themselves in after a short interval. So … I’m afraid you have just under three minutes to live.”
“But you have to stop them, Your Illustriousness,” I blurted. “This is all part of a Guild plot to destroy humanity!”
“Oh please—don’t tell me you’re one of those conspiracy nuts,” His Illustriousness snorted. “I’ll admit, I’m no fan of the Guild. But I can’t imagine they’re hatching some diabolical plot against your species.”
“But—” Carly said.
“And no, the Guild wasn’t behind nine/eleven, or the weird murals at the Denver airport.”
“But—” she tried again.
“And whatever the tinfoil-hat crowd says about alien involvement, I can assure you that NASA faked the lunar landings entirely on its own,” the Guardian added smugly. “We’ve looked into that one carefully.”
“But Nick is right, Your Illustriousness,” Carly finally managed. “The Guild has definitely positioned two operatives in Manhattan. And they clearly intend to destroy Earth.”
There was another surly thud at the door.
“That’s an interesting claim,” the Guardian said in a more thoughtful tone. He was silent for a moment. “I don’t actually believe it, because harming a primitive species is strictly forbidden—and I also don’t think the Guild is quite that awful. But I’ve just filed an urgent request to Wrinkle your tetrahedral asses out of here. Wrinkle connections are wide open to everywhere, so I can send you right to your respective home planets. But it takes a few minutes to formerly process a Wrinkle request.”
Now the pounding was coming in persistent, frenetic waves.
“So you will have to fight them off, at least briefly,” the Guardian continued, after apparently consulting some data source. “They’ll be entering in just over ninety seconds. And it looks like I can’t Wrinkle you away for three and a half minutes.”
“So we’ll have to survive for two minutes after they get in here,” I said grimly.
Frampton turned to me. “Did you seriously just figure that out in your head?”
The pounding got louder and more insistent. It sounded like a vengeful tribe smelling enemy blood.
“Are they from the same race as the greeter that we already fought off?” Carly asked.
“I’m afraid not. They’re photophobes.” As the Guardian said this, the exterior windows that made up seven sides of the room started turning opaque, one by one. It was suddenly getting very dark in there.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Photophobes are highly allergic to light,” Carly said. “They navigate by sonar, like bats. And they only enter pitch-dark places.” The third window went dark.
“It was clever of the Guild to send them,” the Guardian said. “My office is designed to darken whenever a photophobe arrives, since I can’t see into your dimension anyway. So when they enter, you’ll be blinded, and they won’t be.” The fourth window blackened.
“But what about the fame field?” I asked. “Are they all celebrities out there or something?”
“That’s why they’re sending photophobes,” Carly explained as the fifth window darkened. “I’m sure they don’t know who they’re arresting. And since they’ll have no way of recognizing us, our fame fields won’t act on them.”
“Then I’ll sing to them!” I said, starting to panic as the sixth window blotted out.
“I’m afraid these beings can only hear ultrasonic sounds,” the Guardian said. “Give us ‘I Am Woman’ at six octaves over High C, and you’ll have them. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your breath.” With that, the last window went dark. This left only a faint ambient glow coming from the floor, which itself started to dim. Moments before it faded into darkness, a brilliant light ignited to my left, and the whole room was suddenly brighter than daylight. I looked over and saw that Frampton was using his stereopticon to beam white light in all directions.
“Great thinking,” I said. I had just enough time to get this out before the light cut out and we were plunged into utter blackness.
“Exahertz disruption field,” the Guardian explained. “The guards are using one to shut off all Refined technology in here. No device running on molecular valves will work within these walls as long as it’s on.”
“But that’s everything,” Frampton said.
“Not quite,” said the Guardian. “Human technology is premolecular valve. Got a cellphone, Nick?”
“Yes!” I yanked my iPhone from my pocket and clicked at it desperately, but nothing happened. “It’s—not working.”
“Hmm,” the Guardian said. “I guess they have terahertz, gigahertz, and megahertz disruption fields as well. That knocks out modern human technology. Very thorough of them. You don’t have a couple of sticks to rub together, do you?”
I just let off a panicked whimper.
“All right, then go fetal,” the Guardian said. “Tuck your face into your chest, roll yourself into a ball, and be still.”
“Why?” I asked, as we all collapsed to the floor and followed his instructions.
“They don’t know that you’re about to Wrinkle out. That’s your only advantage. If you’re boring and unthreatening, they might be in less of a rush to kill you. You only need to last for two minutes.”
I squeezed myself into the tightest and most boring ball I could manage. Figuring my hands would be my most captivating feature in the dark, I tucked them deep into my suit jacket’s inner pockets.
“They’ll be entering in five seconds,” the Guardian said. “Four, three, two, one.”
After all the pounding, I expected our pursuers to enter the room with an explosion of noise. But the door slid open soundlessly, and I heard only the faintest drumming of tiny feet as they fanned out into the octagon. Whatever they were, there were dozens, even hundreds of them.
“I can hear their vocal range clearly,” the Gu
ardian said. “But they can’t hear mine, so I can give you a running commentary. Thus far, they find you terribly boring. Keep up the good work.”
Several of them were running over my body by then. One trotted across the exposed part of my neck. It was furry and weighed about a half pound. I pictured a putrid ratlike creature with venomous fangs and a black licorice tail, and almost vomited from revulsion.1
“They don’t know who or what you are, but they’re very upset about having to kill you. They’re following orders reluctantly, because their pensions are on the line. A minute thirty to go. This might just work.”
I heard more pitter-patters. Then the tip of something that felt like a hypodermic needle was positioned against my neck. I recoiled, plunging my hands ever deeper into my innermost jacket pocket and—what the hell was that? My fingers had just brushed a mysterious plastic lump.
“They’re going to have a Parcheesi tournament to console themselves when this is over. They’ll eat food that’s not unlike popcorn and gingerbread cookies. Somebody just converted the new Melinda Doolittle album into an octave they can hear, and they’re eager to listen to it. And—wait a second.” The Guardian fell silent for a moment. “They … they’re gossiping about one of the Guild operatives who was sent to New York. He hates to be called … Dyson?”
I ran my hand over the base of the unidentified foreign object in my pocket as the needle’s tip pressed harder into my neck, almost breaking my skin.
“They—they think this New York team has been dispatched to do something awful to humanity. I’m very sorry that I doubted you. It seems that your story is true.”