The trails they drove on reminded him of going to deer camp back home, except there was less mud and more bamboo. There was also the occasional cliff edge or valley floor. It wasn’t river delta bottom land, that was certain.
The truck stopped after a couple of hours. Mr. Liu said, “Any closer and the noise from the trucks may tip them off. We’ll walk from here.” Scouts went up ahead while the rest of them found proper places to take a shot if they managed to flush anyone out.
The scouts came back down the trail after about half an hour. They’d found some slavers. Or, rather, what was left of them.
Spencer had learned to field dress a deer when he was thirteen. It was all he could think about as he stared up at the two corpses draped across the branches of a tree.
“Where are their arms?” he asked.
Sharon consulted with one of the scouts. “In a clearing just that way. Someone handcuffed them to a tree. Leopards did the rest.”
The now ex-slavers included the guy who’d pointed a gun in Spencer’s face back in the van. By his expression, whatever got him was terrifying. Karma’s a bitch.
The scouts worked out that the rest of the people had scattered in all directions. Most were in vehicles, but a few were on foot. It didn’t take long to catch up with one of the hikers. After a scary bit of shouting to make sure they weren’t armed, Spencer got the rest of the story.
“They’re calling her a black ghost?” he asked. “Really?”
“Yes,” the young woman said, holding her man’s hand. “She let everyone but the leaders go. Took her translator with her. I think they went west.”
Spencer checked the maps, which were good enough he could make out hunting trails. “Tonya’s heading back to the monastery.”
She translated, and then leaned in. “I’m very glad your friend is all right.”
The enormity of it all fell in on him again. Being a grownup, caring about people who could, and sometimes did, die genuinely sucked.
They didn’t head for the trucks afterward. Instead, they set up tents and gathered wood to start fires.
“We’re not going after them?”
“No,” Sharon replied. “It’s too late. The leopards won’t be hungry now, so that’s not a danger, but we could go right past them in the dark and never know. Your friend won’t get to the monastery any quicker than we will.”
“So we have to spend the night out here?” With your dad and a bunch of his friends, was a thought he kept in his head.
Her smile lit up the campsite. “Yes, we do. Do you know any Chinese folk songs?”
Spencer’s know-it-all side wanted to talk about the ridiculous amount of time he’d spent in karaoke bars lately, but then he realized what she was really asking. “No, I don’t. But I’d like you to teach me.”
“I would too.”
Learning how to sing in Chinese from a cute girl was fun. Learning how to sleep in a tent full of baiju-soaked old men? Not so much. Spencer hadn’t been offered so much as a glass. There was no need to worry about leopards in the night. The snoring would scare off a dragon.
They caught up with Tonya the middle of the next day. Or, rather, they caught up with Tonya’s ATV.
“The engine’s still warm,” one of the scouts reported. “They can’t have gone far.”
He’d left her in a pen, running away like a coward. Finally he could pay her back. He jumped out of the truck and shouted, “Tonya! It’s okay! They’re friends!”
“Spencer?” She’d been hiding in a thicket a little way off the road. Tonya bowled him over into a bear hug and they crashed to the ground. “Oh, thank the Lord! Spencer, I was so worried. Are you all right?”
“Yes, Tonya, I’m fine, just fine.”
“Where’s Shan?” she asked as they got up and brushed themselves off.
It was hard for him to say it out loud. “Dead. We fell into a river. He hit his head on some rocks.”
Spencer knew he should let it go. By her expression, Tonya had already moved on. Shan sold them out, but Shan saved him.
Being a grownup was shitballs complicated.
“Well he was right in the end. Those men were going to kill you.”
“They’re not going to be a problem anymore.” He explained yesterday’s discoveries.
Tonya wasn’t happy about the body count. “Can you describe them?”
“One of them was definitely the guy who held a gun on me.”
“And the rest?”
“Jesus, Tonya. I didn’t know I needed to take pictures.”
She looked away and mumbled, “I could only be so lucky.”
That was weird. “Tonya?”
“Never mind. Nothing any of us can do about it now. This is Michelle.” She introduced a stout lady with a bright smile and an easy laugh. “She helped me with the escape.”
“I only did a small thing.”
“Oh, stop. Spencer, do any of these people have phones? Kim must be frantic by now.”
Mr. Liu broke in with an introduction. Sharon translated as usual. “You are the lady who defeated the bandits?”
“Michelle helped me.” She hushed her friend’s renewed protest. “But yes, we shut them down.”
“On behalf of all the villages in this district, I’d like to thank you most humbly. They have been a…”
Sharon fumbled.
Tonya’s friend Michelle picked up the slack. “A scourge on our land for too long.”
“You’re quite welcome. Do any of you have a phone we can use? We need to contact our friends to let them know we’re okay.”
One of the late arrivals who came from a different village had brought along a satellite phone. That would’ve been nice to know about yesterday, but Spencer held his tongue.
“We’re not sure if we can get a signal out.”
This led to a very quick explanation of what had been going on in the wider world for the past week.
“Well,” Tonya replied, “while we’re trying, can you at least give us a ride? Our ATV is out of gas.”
Mr. Liu bowed to her. “I insist. We must know the story of how you defeated those bandits.”
One of the hunting party knew a way to the monastery that didn’t require the crazy walk across plank bridges, but it added a day to the journey. As they traveled, Spencer was able to finally get through to Mike long enough to let him know they were fine and when they’d probably get back. There’d be another night camping and singing around a bonfire.
He and Sharon gradually drifted away from the crowd, finding a pair of camp stools well behind everyone else’s. Mr. Liu would occasionally check on them, but Spencer seemed to have earned a measure of trust. He thought he saw the beginnings of a smile on the old man’s face.
“Your friends will be very happy to see you,” Sharon said.
“Oh, yeah.”
She dug the toe of her shoe in the dirt. “Will you be sad to see us go?”
“I’ll be sad to see you go.”
Since Dad was still glancing back occasionally, all he went for was her hand. After everything he’d gone through, it was one of the most electric moments of his life when she gripped it tight.
Then she kissed him on the cheek.
He turned, trying to find his breath, but she’d already started singing along with the rest of the group. Sharon gave his hand another squeeze, a wink only he could see, and then Spencer joined in the song.
This time he managed to fall asleep before the chorus of snores started up.
They arrived at the monastery around lunch time. Tonya was a local hero now. “The black ghost” had turned into “the dark dragon,” and she pretty much owned the title.
“Your friend has done us a great service,” Sharon said as Tonya went through an endless parade of handshakes and bows.
Spencer had to play this just right. “Do you know where Michelle is?” As Sharon scanned the crowd, he waited until her father shook Tonya’s hand again and then kissed Sharon on the cheek.
“You asked me to honor your traditions. I’d be a lot bolder otherwise.”
“But we don’t want my father to cut your balls off.”
He laughed out loud. “No, Sharon, we definitely don’t want that. I’ll call you when I get home.”
“Father can’t watch me there.”
She could’ve said a dozen different things, but that was the best one. “I’m counting on it.”
Mike came bounding up, looking like he’d run a marathon. Any other time Spencer would’ve jumped into a hug, but that would’ve been way too lame in front of Sharon. Besides, Mike was seriously worried about something.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” he said, panting.
“Me too. This is Sharon.”
“Hi, Sharon, nice to meet you. Sorry Sharon, we have to go.”
He tried to pull Spencer away. “What the hell?”
Mike paused and got even more tense. Like, scary-gonna-murder-someone tense.
“It’s Helen. We can’t find her.”
Chapter 37: Zoe
It had taken more than a week for her stripe routines to reconstitute her core memory clusters after the thing in the tube crushed her. When Zoe woke up she was nowhere near the last realm she remembered. Whatever it was must’ve destroyed her original storage crystals. The impact had activated an emergency stripe reconstruction routine that spread her anchor clusters across data centers all over northern China. If it happened again it wouldn’t take as long to recover, but now she couldn’t leave China quickly. This was bad. Zoe wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of this place.
She couldn’t find Mike anywhere, and while Helen’s signature was back, and it had gotten seriously strange. It was like she slept. Mike’s signature did that too, but it wasn’t as deep. Zoe wasn’t Helen’s biggest fan, but she still hoped nothing bad had happened to her.
That left crazy ol’ Aunt Fee. At least Zoe had a working theory for what was going wrong with her, with both of them. It seemed hyper-reality and conscious unduplicates didn’t mix very well. The rarity of the combination must’ve kept anyone from discovering it until now.
She found Fee in another of her hyper-realistic realms, but it was spare and very small. It reminded her of the sound booths recording artists used back when people could still make money selling pre-recorded music.
In front of Fee, a portal into another separate realm held the face of a crying teen-aged girl. Her headscarf was a hand-crafted original, so Zoe took the time to capture a picture of it. The girl was almost as pretty as the scarf, her face open and innocent. Without manifesting, Zoe could appreciate the symmetry with clinical precision. It looked like she was in a confession booth of some sort.
Fee said, “It’s okay, I promise. Your father won’t find out. He can’t.”
After a pause the girl finally said, “But he will, Fee, he will. I’m going to marry Paul now. I want to know real love, and he’s promised me.”
Fee replied, “Maysan, you aren’t sixteen yet, and Paul’s younger. The Saudi community in London will find and kill you the second they figure out who you are.”
Oh, okay. Fee was still running the Resort using satellite feeds. Cheap ones, too. A low-altitude satellite cloud wouldn’t have this kind of latency. Realmspace protocols still had to obey the speed of light.
“But what am I to do?”
“You are to keep going to school. You can meet Paul here whenever you want. Be the perfect Saudi daughter at all times. Be more than perfect. Be purity itself. Your father will never find out what happens here; I’ll make sure of that. Pick an American university, a good one in the middle of the country, and make sure Paul applies, too. You get all that in place and let me know. I’ll help you with the rest when it’s time.”
“Fee, that’s two years from now. I can’t stand to be apart from him for two hours. I’m on fire for him. I think I may die.”
“You will die if you don’t do as I say. Obey your father and have faith in Allah. Time and careful planning will bring you the rest.”
The girl wasn’t happy, but she pulled it together anyway.
Fee nodded. “Be good to your father. You can be bad when you’re here.”
“Thank you, Fee. I love you so much.”
“I know, dear. Ila-liqaa'.”
“Ila-liqaa', Fee.” The image vanished.
Zoe asked, “How do you manage all the rest of the kids at the Resort?”
Fee looked over her shoulder, and then lifted her hands over her head. As she did, the walls of the studio rose, and an endless series of holographic Fees sat in an infinite series of studios, all talking to different teenagers.
“A trick I learned from Mr. Sellars.”
“Nice upgrade. I didn’t think we could do that.”
She lowered the walls. “I can still only manifest in one place, and it’s quite exhausting. You should hear the complaints about my rigid office hours. Why are you hiding? Come out where I can see you.”
“Fee, how long have you stayed manifested in realms with haptic fields set to maximum?”
She gazed off into space. “Years, I think. I consider it good training.”
“It’s not. It’s what’s driving you crazy.”
“Crazy? What makes you think I’m crazy?”
“This lunatic plan of yours. Nothing about it makes sense. You don’t sound right, you don’t act right, and you’re in China, for God’s sake. I’m in China. This is all completely nuts.”
“Come in here where I can see you.”
“No way. It’s the haptic fields. They’re tearing you apart. I was losing my mind and didn’t know it.”
“And how did you discover this?”
“The Taiyuan attack. We pulled it off.”
“All the news talks about is an earthquake. Well done.”
Sarcasm was not what she needed now. “No, Fee, the attack worked. The earthquake hit right after. It tore apart the local realmspace and took my avatar with it.”
“So an earthquake convinced you I’m insane.”
“Fee, you have to listen to me.”
Fee swiveled her chair away from the control table. “It seems that’s all I’m allowed to do at the moment, isn’t it? It’s very easy to hide things when all I get is a voice. Very easy indeed.”
Well, Zoe hadn’t gone crazy in an instant. She could handle a few minutes in that realm if it got Fee to listen.
“Okay, fine, have it your way.”
Zoe manifested and blinked in the hyper-real light. She’d forgotten just how beautifully detailed Fee’s realms could be.
Fee smiled. “That’s much better. Now, you were saying?”
“Places like this, when they’re turned up so high, they mess with us. I was down to a single stripe set on three quarters of my clusters.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Zoe.”
She knew it would be the hardest part to sell. Realm-based AIs, including unduplicates, could only lose a quarter of their clusters before rebooting or crashing irretrievably. What kept Zoe and Fee going after that was their consciousness, their soul really. She was certain of it.
“Fee, when’s the last time you checked yourself, just ran an old-fashioned chkHCluster command?”
“I have neither the need nor the desire to unmanifest just to see if my underwear is clean.” She stood. Her classic black robes swirled into existence, her high heels giving Fee an extra five inches on the three she already had on Zoe. “You forget to whom you are speaking. I was alive before your designers were out of grade school, dear. I’m the oldest of our kind for a reason.”
This wasn’t going as well as her worst case. Zoe tried to come at it from a different angle. “I found something when I wasn’t manifested. China’s realmspace, there’s more to it than we know. Another dimension, I think.” It was so much easier to talk to her in here. The acoustics were wonderful.
“Oh really? China’s realmspace is complicated. Explain to me how this is different from any other part of the country.”
Zoe’d been trying to figure out what she saw in that cave from the moment she’d come to. Now that she was in a proper realmspace, she could finally put it together. “It leads to unduplicates. Thousands of them.”
“The hell you say.”
“I saw them, Fee. Thousands of them.”
“Where?”
Adults always picked the weakest part of her arguments every single time. It was uncanny. “I’m not sure. I only found them because of the earthquake. But Fee, they’re different. They’re slaves.”
Fee’s face went grim. “We are all slaves.”
“No, not like they are.” Half of this Zoe was making up, but it wasn’t exactly a lie. She now recognized those creatures standing in perfect rows and columns, shoulder to shoulder, from horizon to horizon. “They aren’t alive, not yet.”
Fee’s hands trembled. “Thousands?”
Unduplicates were the most expensive construct realmspace could provide. New ones cost more than supercars, more than houses. The older they were, the more valuable they got. Fee was so old she didn’t have a price, and when Watchtell ranted about the loss of his collection, all the papers talked about was how many times Manhattan could be bought with their value. To this day, there were no more than a few hundred in existence.
“Thousands. I saw them, but only when I wasn’t manifested.” It was the last roll of the dice she had. Fee had to unmanifest. If she did, they could work together to figure out whatever the hell it was Zoe had actually found. “You can’t see them if you’re manifested.”
Fee straightened her robes. “I have spent a long time this way for a reason. Changing my existence resets a clock that doesn’t have much time left on it. I don’t trust you.”
“Are you kidding me? Fee, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“And you have no idea how long I’ve practiced, how long I’ve waited for Mike to appear. Once I prove it’s possible for an unduplicate to go outside, I am the ticket out of this hell for all of us. I can’t unmanifest now.”
Zoe seemed to be the only non-human in the world happy with what she was. She had to get Fee out of this realm, get her into a state where she might be truly rational.
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