Dragon's Ark

by D Scott Johnson

  He rubbed his chubby hands together. “Breakfast! The most important meal of the day.” Ozzie set into the impressive pile of food with a gusto that explained why he was one of the chubbiest Chinese in the room.

  Ozzie stopped with noodles hanging out of his mouth. “It is, you know.” He slurped them up. “Skipping breakfast is strongly linked to obesity. Studies have shown that obese people are less likely to eat breakfast than thinner people.”

  Mike shared a wry glance with Kim. A quick realmspace check showed Ozzie was correct about the studies, even though he seemed oblivious to the fact he was living proof they were sometimes wrong. He definitely had a way with chopsticks, though.

  It was all the more noticeable when he stopped eating and stared at the door, another load of noodles hanging over his chopsticks. Kim had set her tea down and seemed just as interested in what was happening back there. The other monks were going about their business, so it couldn’t be cops or soldiers. He turned and sure enough, it was neither of those things.

  It was Helen.

  She wobbled forward with a cane in one hand and her arm around one of the younger novices, a girl, maybe thirteen years old, about as tall as she was. Helen’s face was thin and pale, but she didn’t seem to be in any pain, just completely exhausted.

  Mike rushed over to her. “You’re awake!”

  She smiled, and he took over for the novice. “Yes, a few hours ago. Please, may I sit with you?”

  “Absolutely.” He wanted to carry her but knew better than to try. She’d gotten here at least partially under her own steam. He’d probably just get belted with the cane. She did, however, rely on him to get situated in a chair.

  “Ozzie,” Kim said, “get off your butt and get the lady some food.”

  He sputtered and almost knocked his teacup off the table heading to the kitchen.

  Mike couldn’t stop staring at her, afraid if he did she might vanish.

  Kim asked, “How are you feeling?”

  She smiled wanly. “Better now. Much better.” She reached down and picked up the chopsticks. “Fine motor skills are already nominal. It’s mostly just muscle soreness from the fight. They told me I came close to breaking my own bones.”

  Ozzie set a plate full of food on the corner, well away from everyone, and then sat down. He’d gotten another plate for himself and resumed slurping.

  Mike pulled the plate over to Helen and was relieved to see a flash of enthusiasm. She used her chopsticks with a grace he hadn’t seen from her before.

  “Has the integration finished?”

  She shook her head as she chewed, and after a drink of tea replied, “No, but it is further along, and it’s moving faster now that I’m in Chinese realmspace again.” She sighed. “You never told me hunger could hurt this much, or that muscles could be sore. How many different ways can humans feel pain?”

  He shared a smile with Kim. It wasn’t too long ago that he’d wondered about that himself.

  Kim asked, “What do you mean, from the fight?”

  Helen started to shake. She set her chopsticks down, then put her face against the back of her hand. Mike reached out to help steady her, but she stopped him.

  “No, it’s okay. I’m all right.” She wiped her eyes and turned to him. “You’ve never dreamed of your host, not after all this time?”

  Kim went as pale as Helen. In a previous life, his host had terrorized Kim, murdered children in front of her, and nearly killed her at the very end.

  He needed to reassure Kim as much as Helen. “Not once. And you have?”

  Even Ozzie stopped his slurping.

  “She was in here, with me. We fought.”

  His host had vanished. Mike hadn’t so much as had a dream that involved him. Helen’s was a simple drug dealer, but it must’ve been awful just the same. He gripped her hand tightly.

  “Mike, I couldn’t fight her off.”

  Even worse. He knew she’d nearly died, but fighting a ghost? “Helen, it’s okay. This is all so new. Nobody could’ve predicted that.”

  “No, Mike, you don’t understand. I had to win.” She gripped his hand hard enough to hurt. “If I’d lost, she would have…”

  Helen paused, and then switched to whispered Chinese. It was a long stream of syllables he couldn’t hope to make out. Kim and Ozzie both blanched, and then flinched, more and more as her story went on. He needed to know what she was saying, but each time he tried to get Kim’s attention, she wagged a finger at him. Ozzie jumped up and ran from the room, retching. They were the only ones still in the cafeteria.

  Kim’s eyes streamed as she coaxed more of the story out of her. It all built up to a climax, and then Helen threw her arms around him and sobbed into his chest. Helen crawled into his lap like one of the kids in his dojo back home, holding his neck so tightly he could barely stay synced with his real self.

  “Kim, what the hell?”

  “The host wasn’t just a drug dealer, Mike. She was a monster.”

  He held his sister, his safe, sane, healthy sister, as Kim told him the rest of the story. Mike wasn’t sure he could’ve survived that sort of ordeal. None of his models predicted an original host’s survival. If such a thing had happened to him at a critical juncture, he would’ve been responsible for resurrecting a psychopath. Kim might be dead right now because of that.

  But they were all fine. Still, it bothered him enough to suggest meditation after breakfast, as much for his own benefit as Helen’s. The practice would speed her integration along and hopefully bring some calm back to his own soul.

  There was no resistance from her, no making fun of superstitions now. She was humble, and Mike wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

  They all ended up in the media room Kim and Ozzie had been practicing touch avoidance in. Ozzie was already there, tinkering with the antique electronics.

  Taranathi brought Mike here long before he had gone outside. It hadn’t been upgraded since then, and so it was obsolete and abandoned. At first, the monks didn’t approve of mixed-sex couples practicing meditation anywhere, but his prestige as Taranathi’s final student had reassured them.

  Helen had stopped complaining about practicing new skills, but Ozzie was a different story. “I am not going to dance with him!”

  Kim sighed. “I’m not asking you to dance with him. I’m asking you to stay close and follow his movements.”

  Helen sat in a far corner practicing her multithreaded meditation, but Mike was certain he could see a faint smile.

  Kim stood behind Mike. “Ozzie, you don’t have any idea how to walk down a street.”

  “I won’t need to walk down a street.”

  “You can’t possibly live your life inside an apartment. Believe me, I know.”

  Ozzie peered up at Mike. “How you get so big stealing bodies of this kind?”

  Helen wobbled.

  Kim snapped, “Okay, Ozzie, we’re done.”

  “As you wish, your highness. Look if—”

  Kim interrupted him. “Enough, Ozzie. Take a walk around the compound.”

  As he turned, Ozzie saw Helen. “She doesn’t look good.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s dealing with a lot more stuff than you are. You still need to get used to no ceiling over your head. The paths should have just enough people on them to make for good practice. Now, move.”

  He laughed, and then tipped an invisible cap at her. The floorboards creaked under his stomps as he walked away.

  Helen sighed. “Thank you, Kim.”

  Mike settled in next to her. “He can be a bit much.”

  “No, it’s not that.” She looked at the door and her voice changed subtly. “He’s really not bad.” When she looked up, she blushed a bit.

  That set off alarm bells. No way would his sister be with Ozzie. With anyone.

  He could tell by the way she unfocused that she was hurling as many threads into realmspace as he was, trying to figure out what just happened.

  Kim cleared her thr
oat. “Are we done with our searches yet?”

  How the heck did she know?

  She laughed. “What? You both look just alike.”

  Mike’s host was a tall Bolivian. Helen’s was a small Chinese woman.

  Kim waved her hand back and forth between them as she laughed harder. “Never mind.” She got serious. “She’s going to start dreaming soon, maybe tonight. You two need to work on it.”

  He needed Kim’s mastery of both languages to help Helen understand the concept of multithreaded dreaming. When Kim finished translating, Helen sputtered indignantly in Chinese.

  Kim translated, “A full haptic field when your mind is at rest?”

  Helen switched to her accented English. “You’re kidding me.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But you can control it.” It turned out that Mike, and presumably Helen, was a natural lucid dreamer. Once he realized it was just another kind of realmspace, it wasn’t very hard. “It’s like living in a movie.”

  “I don’t want to live in a movie. I’m so scared she might come back.”

  He’d never worked out the math behind what might’ve happened when Helen’s integration went wrong. It never occurred to him that a consciousness might be able to hang around without an anchor. It had to be a short-term tunneling fault across higher dimensions.

  “She won’t come back, Helen, I promise.” He gripped her hand tightly.

  Kim didn’t react at all to them touching. From almost the moment he and Kim met, all a woman had to do was glance his way, and he’d be stuck in a penalty box for hours, if not days. A comment about how pretty someone was in a realm drama would turn into a shouting match over boundaries and manners, when she talked to him at all. And yet Kim seemed to think nothing of his holding Helen’s hand.

  He asked her about it at lunch, trying not to keep too obvious an eye on Helen and Ozzie, seated on the other side of the room and talking with smiles way warmer than he liked.

  “She’s your sister. I’ve never thought of her as anything else.”

  “But we’re not really related.”

  “How can you be sure? You were born the same way, in the same sort of place, have the same abilities; hell, you say some of the same things. Every time either of you discovers something new I can tell you’re splitting apart in realmspace trying to figure it out.”

  It’d been too long since he’d been able to tease her. “So, you’re finally admitting I’m not a complete know-it-all?”

  A spark he really liked flashed in her eyes. “Of course you’re a complete know-it-all. You’re built that way. I missed it.” She breathed heavily and turned away. “I missed it so much.” Kim pushed back from their table and marched over to Ozzie, snapping him with her napkin when she got in range. “You. Walk with me.”

  Mike moved over to Helen’s table. “So. Ozzie.”

  “He’s such a strange person.” She watched Ozzie leave without a trace of wistfulness, more like the way Mike did when an interesting event had just happened. “I think he might be attracted to me.”

  Mike would examine the sudden protective reaction later. “And you’re not?”

  “To Ozzie?” As she rolled it around in her head, he had to admit Kim was right. When they weren’t dealing with the liquid emotions of their outside hosts, he and Helen really were a lot alike.

  She came back to him slowly. “I’m not sure I understand attraction, not like this. How do you handle Kim?”

  The temperature in the room kicked up two notches. “Kim? Nobody handles Kim.”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  This was supposed to be about her. “I am not.”

  Helen waited until a group of monks walked past their table and through the exit. “I don’t understand attraction yet, but you do. Does she know?”

  It couldn’t be that obvious. “Know what?”

  Helen looked at the ceiling the same way Spencer did when this came up. “I thought you were spending time with your friends in that hospital room, but you weren’t. You were spending time with her. I caught you in bed with her.”

  “Please, don’t say anything about that.” All he needed now was for Kim to find out.

  “Why not? It’s so obvious.”

  “Helen, you have no idea what you’re talking about. What we have is…complicated.” Mike understood quantum field theory but, compared to Kim, that was just shuffling cards around.

  “You’re both crazy about each other. Everyone can see it.”

  Maybe he could talk to Helen about this. There wasn’t anyone else he trusted more. “This isn’t the Kim I know. I’ve tried so hard to live with her, but all she does is cut me. Every time I try to open up, I can almost hear her sharpening a razor. She’s nice right now, incredibly nice, but I can’t trust it. I don’t trust her, Helen.”

  Her face soured, and she let loose a stream of Chinese Mike was pretty sure wasn’t complimentary, and then switched to English. “I like Kim. I would be very sad if you weren’t able to start a family with her.”

  He was trying to explain how impossible it was to live in the same building with her and Helen talked about children. “We’re not having this conversation anymore.”

  Another stream of Chinese stymied him. Thankfully, the abbot had quietly stolen up behind him while she spoke. He leaned over and translated, “She said the important conversation won’t be with her.”

  The current leader of the monastery was as disarmingly modest as his predecessor. After a brief exchange of Chinese with Helen, she bid both him and the abbot goodbye.

  Ximen Nao grinned. “I was wondering if I could speak to you for a moment in my quarters?”

  The hallway hadn’t changed, but the boards’ creaking was caused by his feet now. He sat, feeling the grain of the wood he’d once floated a hologram over.

  “Years ago, a man came out of the woods, much as you and your companions did,” Nao said as he rummaged through a trunk, the only free-standing furniture in the modest room. “Except he was in much worse shape.”

  He pulled out a case slightly smaller than a classic briefcase, but probably twice as thick. “He must’ve been wandering in the forest for a long time. He was extremely ill.” Nao paused. “This was twelve years ago, before Taranathi set us on a path through the realms.” The metal hasps opened with a solid thunk. “He wouldn’t tell us his name, said it would put us all in grave danger. He died only a few days after he found us. This case was his only possession.”

  It contained a single object, nestled in the middle of thick protective foam. It was a miniature boat of some sort, not much bigger than the abbot’s outstretched hand.

  Ximen Nao set the boat on the floor between them. It was a model of a Chinese junk, exquisitely detailed from its wooden decking to its ribbed triangular sails. Nao pressed a button on the base.

  “Observe.”

  Hidden holographic projectors flashed, and the tiny ship sailed across an ocean, a miniature crew working efficiently on its deck. The illusion made Mike a little dizzy as it tricked his outside brain. After ninety seconds or so, it switched off.

  It was an incredible device. “You got this twelve years ago?” Back then holographic technologies still competed with realmspace. Realmspace won out, but to this day most shared realm interfaces owed their existence to their earlier holographic cousins. He’d never heard of projectors with that kind of resolution packed into such a small device.

  “Yes,” Ximen Nao replied. “He entrusted it to Taranathi and swore him to secrecy. Taranathi only told me about it after you joined us. He thought perhaps you would be able to puzzle out its mystery, but then Taranathi died, and you disappeared.”

  “What’s so mysterious about it?”

  Nao pressed the base in two places. A stack of mah-jong tiles appeared, and then rapidly clattered away in all directions, revealing two Chinese words. After a few moments, the mah-jong tiles flew back and buried the symbols. The process repeated.

  “It’s a lo
gin screen,” Nao said gently. “Taranathi thought that if anyone could figure it out, it would be you.”

  The tiles flew away. The device was really old, complicated, and wasn’t connected to realmspace. Basically, it was a kind of lock.

  “I’m not sure I can do it,” he said as the tiles covered the two characters again. “But I definitely know someone who can.”

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 34: Tonya

  The sky slowly turned from black to slate gray as the forest rustled around her.

  “Hey!”

  She closed her eyes. Spencer was safe now, or at least out of this hell. She said another prayer for him.

  “Hey!”

  Someone rattle the cage door, so Tonya finally looked up.

  It was Mr. Pistol, the one who'd almost blown Spencer’s head off in the van.

  “He come for you.”

  She rolled away from him. No reason to pay attention to thugs, especially when they didn’t speak English properly.

  “I no talk good this way. You pay attention.”

  Maybe if she said a rosary she’d fall asleep, and then he’d go away.

  A clear American voice came out of Mr. Pistol. “Tonya Brinks. Look at me.”

  She scrabbled into the back wall of the cage. The girl on the other side groaned and turned over. Nobody here knew her last name, and Mr. Pistol suddenly had an American accent.

  Pistol blinked twice, and even after that his eyes still weren’t quite right. He grabbed the door and held on, wobbling, bowing the wire of her cage in and out.

  Great. He’s nuts.

  “It hard this way.” The words were a struggle, coming very slowly. “No English this time. You no ignore me. Not again. I lose control.”

  “Who are you?” Maybe Pistol was an undercover agent.

  “Not matter. Pay attention. No fight him.”

  Okay, probably not. Agents wouldn’t be half in and half out of cover. Or whatever this was.

  “Fight who?”

  “You always doubt, you always lose.” He took a deep breath. “No fight him this time. Promise, please?”

  Pistol had beaten Shan to the ground when they first got to the camp. Polite wasn’t in his vocabulary. Tonya had no idea who him might be, but hundreds of hours in fantasy realms had still taught her how to answer this kind of question. “Okay, I promise. Why?”