by Sean Platt
In one of those hands, he’d felt Kai’s. Behind, he’d felt the gentle pressure of someone leading him ahead, so he walked with something in the neighborhood of faith. He’d turned a few corners, been folded into a seat, and accelerated at an unknown rate to an unknown place. There had been more walking, more jostling. Nicolai found he didn’t mind. Compared to the stark nothingness of sitting, being shoved and shaped had felt interesting.
Panic had tried to intrude. So, as Ryu had suggested, Nicolai had imagined himself in his apartment. He’d pictured long, slow laps of the place. Touching his piano. Staring out the window, across the city.
When he felt the new tap, his senses returned as if someone had flipped a switch. Nicolai found himself in a chair, unbound, with Kai beside him. She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking around the disorderly room like someone acquiring sight.
Ryu was standing above them, no longer in his dark overcoat. He was in a sleeveless tank top, his arms and chest massive.
Ryu pocketed something. It seemed to be the same object he’d used to shut them off.
“I’m sorry for the precautions,” he said. “They are necessary. I’m sure you understand, given the situation and your request.”
Nicolai kept his voice calm. He wasn’t afraid, but was angry. This was the second time in a month that he’d been abducted, and even though he wasn’t restrained this time as Kai had told him he’d been last time, he hadn’t precisely given consent.
“I didn’t make any request,” Nicolai told the hacker.
“I did,” said Kai. “Come on, Nicolai.”
Ryu was already leaving the room, heading through a wooden door that had been almost entirely covered with old circuit boards and what seemed almost to be pneumatics. Kai had risen to follow, holding a hand out for Nicolai. Her look was slightly apologetic. Mostly, Nicolai saw urgency on her face.
He stood and followed.
Ryu led them into the room beyond the door. It wasn’t large. In the center were two chairs like they’d had in Nicolai’s childhood kitchen, with something metal or Plasteel wired to their tops. The contraptions, on hinged armatures attached to the chairs’ backs, looked to Nicolai like the colanders used by manual cooks to drain pasta from boiling water. Thick braided wires draped from the colanders to the floor, where they joined other wires and ran to the wall in a python-thick tube.
Ryu pointed to their forearms, still wrapped in foil.
“Once I close the door, you can safely remove the shielding. Your IDs won’t leave this room except through the wired connection, which is encrypted with the best technology we have. We don’t use Fi, so if you detect any, immediately re-shield. Same when you’re finished. The door won’t allow you to exit if you are radiating a detectable ID. With me so far?”
Nicolai kept his mouth shut, but Kai nodded.
The big man touched the colander-like thing atop the first chair. “Hinge these down. They should settle over your heads, and I’ve ballparked the armature for your heights. Miss Dreyfus, you’re in this one.” Ryu pointed. Then he touched the chair’s arm, where Nicolai saw a second arm, much thinner than the first, extending from the chair’s side. On the arm’s end was another of the devices Ryu had used to turn off their eyes and ears for their ride over.
“The command to immerse is simply a verbal, ‘Immerse.’ You will emerge from inside the simulation by using your normal dashboard. The immersion command will also trigger these.” He tapped the devices. “They’re rustic but effective nanobots. You won’t get the smooth transition you had before, but it will mimic neural downtuning by simply flipping those nerves entirely off. Now, just so you understand, these are different than what I used to bring you in. Using the immerse command will shut off all five of your senses. The effect is disorienting to say the least. If you haven’t experienced disembodiment before, you’ll have to fight panic. I’ve heard the effect described as being like dreaming. It is not.”
Nicolai looked to Kai, wondering a thousand questions. But she was still watching Ryu as if all of this made perfect sense.
“I have been unable to visit the sectors you’ve requested. If you are successful, the disorientation should fade once you are given new senses, if our estimations of the simulations’ depths are even close to accurate. Until then, I recommend pacing a known place, as you hopefully did when you were blind and deaf before. You need to understand that I will not be watching. If you get lost, or if you become stuck in a hole, I will be unable to help you and won’t even know you’re trapped. We suspect time acceleration may be in use in the restricted Beau Monde Beam sectors, so it’s also possible you could become stuck for what feels like years, but what those of us outside this room will experience as minutes. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the dangers if that happens.”
Kai nodded. “We’ll be careful. Thanks, Ryu.”
The tall man nodded back then turned and left the room. When the door was closed, Nicolai looked at Kai.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“He’s giving us anonymous access to his hacked connection. It’s the only way to access the Viazo without an authorized rig.”
“What’s the Viazo?”
“Ultra-high-end immersion. Like the one we used to stage Doc’s death for Jason Whitlock, only restricted. Playground of the rich.”
Nicolai’s heart thumped harder. Kai and Doc had both described the experience. It had sounded real enough to be terrifying.
“What makes you think you can get in if it’s restricted?” And why, he wanted to add.
“Rachel gave me access.”
“You moved into Beau Monde?”
Kai was sitting, already lowering the colander onto her head. She looked up at Nicolai, her eyes urging him to join her in the second chair, and shook her head when she saw he wouldn’t budge without an answer. “It’s a kind of back door. Consider it a day pass.”
“And Ryu? How do you know this isn’t all something he orchestrated?”
“Because I saw Rachel. Because she gave me the key herself, tagged with some sort of short-term addition to my ID.” She was already unwrapping the foil, freeing that altered ID for the room to read. “I’ll owe Ryu. But we can trust him.”
Nicolai was thinking of Doc. And of Kate, whose recent call had been one more bit of overwhelm he hadn’t yet divulged to Kai.
“Doc doesn’t trust him.”
“Doc didn’t trust anyone.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“There’s honor among thieves, Nicolai.”
Nicolai reluctantly sat. His fingers tugged at the foil but didn’t peel it away. “You’re sure about that?”
She nodded, her brown eyes serious. He didn’t trust Rachel or these people who’d stolen his senses and dragged him into their lair. But he trusted Kai. She was the best judge of character he’d ever met, intuitive to the bone.
“Okay,” he said.
Nicolai peeled away the foil and tossed it onto the floor. He lowered the colander-thing onto his head from behind as Kai had done then waited while she tapped out a pattern in the air with her fingers. He was about to ask if she needed anything from him when he felt a tap on his head and the world disappeared.
Nicolai, are you there?
The voice was Kai’s, but also not. He couldn’t truly hear her any more than he could see her or feel the chair beneath him, but if he’d understood Kai’s discussion with Ryu, The Beam and the Viazo were about to supply them with new senses. For now, her ID must be talking to his, her signal becoming his internal concept of her voice.
I’m here.
Are you okay?
I’m okay.
He was, too, but he was okay in what felt like a bundle of his missing body, like the non-corporeal version of the fetal position. He didn’t want to speak or breathe or move — to whatever limited or nonexistent sense he could do any of the three. The sensation was filled with an existential breed of panic that Nicolai thought only existed in philosop
hy texts.
I need to find the door, Kai’s feed told him.
Nicolai nodded, not trusting himself to do anything else. He had no idea what “the door” meant; he had no idea why Rachel Ryan or anyone else would give her the key to it; he couldn’t figure out why she didn’t sound as nervous as he felt. Maybe it was purpose that drove her — a sense that somewhere in this dark room, there was indeed a light switch. Nicolai felt no such certainty. The terms Ryu had used in his warning rang in Nicolai’s head, feeling worse than the simple ending of death: Time acceleration. Hole. Stuck. Dangers.
Reality returned all at once. Nicolai hadn’t had a body a moment ago, but he’d still carried that sense of curling up. Now he was standing, snapped erect like a rope pulled suddenly taut.
The room Nicolai found himself in with Kai was, as far as he could tell, exactly the same as the one they’d entered with Ryu. The walls seemed the same. The wired door seemed the same. The twin chairs with their colanders, behind them, were the same. Even the discarded bit of candy he’d noticed in the corner was still there, covered in fuzz.
“Did the connection break?” Nicolai asked, looking around, confused.
“I don’t think so,” Kai said, holding her hands up at waist level as if walking on brittle ground, unsure how to distribute her weight. “Let me try something.”
Nicolai felt annoyed. He’d been dragged here, promised yet more information to overwhelm his already-stuffed mind — practically abducted. It didn’t matter that Kai had been behind it. He didn’t have time for this kind of cloak-and-dagger bullshit considering the way —
Kai’s hands began to glow. The chairs, one by one, evaporated as if she’d magicked them away. They became swirls of dust, curled toward the ceiling, and were gone.
“We’re in a simulator?”
“Does it smell like a simulator?”
At first, the question didn’t make sense, but then Nicolai found his mind drifting back to simulators he’d visited before. As time had passed, he’d even seemed to gain access to bits of memory from his missing time with Kai and Doc in the simulator they’d described, just before two of their three had been tortured nearly to death. That had sounded high end, and Nicolai’s foggy memories seemed to agree. But no matter how fine the simulator, one glitch always rebelled. Of all things, simulators didn’t smell like reality. They could fool every sense but that one. Vents in simulators could create artificial scents, but they were always mixed just wrong enough, coming from slightly wrong directions. Even if the top level of the mind was fooled, the deeper mind wasn’t.
This was reality…except that in reality, chairs didn’t evaporate.
Nicolai walked to a low table along one of the walls. He touched the wall, finding it substantial — indistinguishable from the real wall in the real room. The echoes of his footfalls were real. The subtle interplay of light was real.
Nicolai picked up what looked like a beverage coaster from the table. Then he went to the door Ryu had exited from and opened it, finding it unlocked with no one in the room beyond.
“Can you make it outside?”
Kai concentrated. He could almost imagine her pulling up a dashboard, keying whatever Rachel Ryan had given her.
And then, in a blink, they were in a mown meadow, the air filled with the scent of freshly cut grass. Nicolai looked down at his coaster then threw it as hard as he could. It soared into the distance, not striking a simulator’s wall, and puffed soundlessly into a clump of weeds.
“Is this what it was like? With Whitlock?”
Kai nodded.
“We’re still in chairs?”
“I think so. The nanobots have shut off our real senses. This is all coming from his link to The Beam.”
“So Ryu built this place.”
Kai shook her head. “No. This is what Rachel’s key opened. The sequence she added to my ID. My day pass to the Viazo.”
Nicolai took a minute to look around. Kai and Doc had told him how real the simulation from Isaac’s rigs was, and apparently Ryu had managed to cobble together rigs that could mostly do the same. But if Kai was right, only the place could make it this real. The restricted Viazo, above even Ryu’s pirated access, open to Kai’s new key.
“Why are we here?”
But somehow, Nicolai already knew. It couldn’t be what Kai intended or Rachel had wanted, but his sense of disorientation had vanished. The old version of Ryu’s room felt like home. So did the meadow. Nicolai couldn’t remember if he’d been here before, but the place — any version of the place — was too familiar for denial.
“She said there was someone we were supposed to meet. Someone we couldn’t meet in the real world.”
“And you took it at face value?”
Kai turned to Nicolai with irritation. What Kai trusted tended to be worth the faith. She was in control. Rachel wasn’t leading her; the old woman had merely granted her entry. They were in Ryu’s rigs, in Ryu’s place. Doc hadn’t trusted Ryu, but he’d believed in the man’s wares. If the best in the business said this was safe, it probably was.
Except that Ryu never said any such thing. Not to Nicolai, anyway.
“She said he’s a ghost. Something that’s stuck here. Something that got trapped. She told me a lot, Nicolai. I’m not an idiot, going in blind. This was something she couldn’t say where there might be ears, but something that I had to see before I…well, before I kill her. Because she said this will be my responsibility, after she’s gone.”
“West, Kai,” Nicolai said. It was dumb, unnecessary beyond belief. “In what world did this make sense to you?”
“She knows that Micah sent me after her. And she said this was a way for us to have something to use against him. A detached mind of some sort who — ”
“It’s Doc,” Nicolai said. “She’s talking about Doc.”
Kai looked over. The room’s reality flickered as Kai’s attention faltered. Now they were in an all-white room, walls lined with benches and cabinets.
“I talked to him,” Nicolai told her, sighing. “Or rather, I talked to Kate.”
He wanted to sit, but there was nowhere to do so. Then a lush bed appeared in the room, and he sat on its top.
“You talked to Kate?”
“She’s playing you, Kai. Rachel. I already know what Kate’s trying to do. In fact, she wants my help with it. She even told me all about Doc’s ghost — a kind of shell she plans to use to get at Braemon. But Kai, if Rachel knows about that, it just means she’s planning to — ”
Before Nicolai could finish his sentence, a third person blipped into existence at the far end of the room. It was a man of medium height with brown hair and calm, quiet eyes. A verification sequence streamed past Nicolai’s display, several unknown tags appending his ID. This wasn’t AI. This was a person, like he’d imagined Doc’s ghost would be in the digital flesh. Except that this was different. It wasn’t just a ghost. It was a mind. An autonomous mind, locked in this place by endless streams of permissions now streaming through his immersed eyes — and, judging from appearances, through Kai’s as well.
“Hello,” the man said.
“Hello,” Nicolai echoed, blinking.
“My name is Stephen York,” he said. “And if you’ve come to this place with the backdoor sequence, there are only two possibilities.”
Kai stepped forward, not speaking, waiting for the man to continue.
“Either you’ve found my body and have come to erase me, or you’ve come for the boson I carry.”
“Boson?” said Kai.
York’s mind nodded. “The lost piece of Project Mindbender.”
Chapter Eight
With even a little bit of moondust in his blood, Sam found he could navigate the connection better than expected.
Better, yes, but still dirty and littered as shit. The line must have been split five hundred times — and not just split; merged, too. In buildings this old, the electrical wiring was copper, only the most recently replaced appliances
powered by Tesla Inductive. The fiber lines, more often than not, weren’t actually fiber. And when you skewered metal lines that many times, taking them into pieces to feed that many apartments and bundling them closely with so many non-Beam wires, the current between the walls stopped being discreet signals and instead became an absurd electromagnetic stew. Sam had heard someone’s waffle iron on the way in. How did that make sense?
Still, he found his personal firewall intact. He was able to tunnel through the native lines and out into the secondary hub near the park, trusting his brother’s hardware to keep him safe instead of having to jump through his usual hoops.
There was a beeping. Sam’s head pricked up, turning toward the kitchen. His coffee was ready. Time was short — almost up, really — and this was no time to be getting the cup he’d planned when starting the pot. Still, the wires in the old thing were as questionable as the copper lines he’d been using to (apparently) hear waffle irons. He’d forgotten the pot before and nearly set the apartment on fire.
Sam got up, clicked the pot off, and rushed back to his seat.
He didn’t want to admit that Nicolai Costa may have been right, but Lunis really was a wonder.
Still, Sam was inclined to be careful. The small, surely covert supply Nicolai had sent to his door (he hadn’t used a bot; Nicolai really did understand paranoia) wouldn’t last long, but Sam didn’t want to become an addict anyway. Because what he’d read about other wonder drugs, when researching them from the history of distractible minds, was a mixed bag. Ritalin. Adderall. Focusin. ’Nuff said.
With the coffee pot off, Sam returned to the desk and immediately found his place. His mind effortlessly returned to what he’d been doing then went back further, to the verified ping Shadow had received in his Null inbox and the conversation on Diggle that followed. Integer7 had begun the exchange with one of his trademark too-knowing statements then had done something to the connection to allow Sam to save what should have been a self-destructing sequence, probably as a reminder: