Mike had other problems. “Kim, sorry. This doesn’t just itch, it burns.”
“You can’t stay manifested. I’m not sure, but you might kill me if you get it wrong.” Her other hand glistened like black glass as it hovered over his cage. “I know how tired you are. Can you manage the transition?”
Manifesting was one of his base skills. “How hard can it be?”
“You really need to stop saying that out loud.” Another bang hit against her shield. “He’ll come through next time. Are you ready?”
The urge to sleep would’ve overpowered him if Kim hadn’t been standing there in that form. Black suited her. “Wait, what?”
Kim hurled Fee aside. “We have to do this fast. Three, two, one.” When she gripped the cage it melted away. He transitioned smoothly from full manifestation to hologram, fast enough that the edges only sparked. He held her gaze and couldn’t help it. “I love you.”
“I know.”
Another crash blew Kim’s shield to flinders and sent her into a wall. She came up coughing. “Who the hell lives in a realm with a haptic field set this high?”
Mike swirled through the rubble, still incredibly weak as recovery algorithms finally had the space they needed for proper repairs. “Ask her.”
Fee levered a construct block off her chest and then froze. “Do you hear that?”
Kim replied, “Yeah, I’ve been listening to him for a while now. He’s a pain in the ass.”
“No, listen.”
A giant fist clad in gold and red armor reached through, too large for reality but not too large for realmspace.
“You’ve found more playmates for me. Excellent.”
It scooped up all three of them up and hauled them into the breach. It shouldn’t have been able to do that with his holo. He’d have to figure it out later. Mike recognized that voice.
“Kim, is that?”
She fought against the fist’s grip. “It’s Ozzie; I can’t explain it.”
When Ozzie’s arm pulled him through the hole he lost all orientation, and then evaporated.
Chapter 54: Kim
The fist construct vanished when they crossed the realm’s threshold. Mike and Fee were gone, and Ozzie renewed his onslaught. Over a cascade of punches he said, “That’s, what, the third time you’ve watched him die?”
Kim aimed a kick at his face but he dodged out of range. “He’s not dead.”
“Are you sure?” He tried to sweep her feet out from under her with his own kick.
She vaulted over his head before it could connect. His upward punch still managed to send her sprawling.
“No, but I don’t need to be sure. I have faith.”
She’d learned so much from Mike in such a short time. In the midst of this lunacy there was a center, a certainty. It held her heart still and at peace.
She feinted left and then landed three quick punches into his gut before she danced away.
Ozzie wasn’t supposed to be here. Nobody was. He was dead; Spencer and Helen both said so. Kim had seen pictures of his body. People don’t wake up from a spike through the chest. But it looked like him, sounded like him and, most importantly, fought like him.
Kim was in love with an AI hybrid—who kept not quite dying on her—fighting for her life, naked, in a pocket dimension of the universe. An undead Chinese maniac dressed in red-and-gold Asian armor fit right in.
Ozzie was stronger than she was, and too many of her blows glanced off his armor. Kim was faster and knew how to manipulate the energy around her. She rammed both hands into the ground, and it gave way like foamed clay. She sent a flat sheet of power at him. The purplish lightning intertwined into a carpet that knocked him off his feet.
He got up, smoke curling from the gaps in his armor.
She braced for his next attack. “I bet that stung.”
He nodded. “Just a little. How does it work?” He circled her cautiously, keeping his distance.
She kept moving along his circular path. “You spend all this time trying to unscrew my head and now I’m suddenly gonna start spilling secrets? Tell me where you got the armor. It’s cold in here.” It wasn’t really, but she was sick of his leer.
Kim had to be careful as she walked. The geometry of the realm didn’t always stay classical. There was no way to tell when a new wall or pit would suddenly appear. Their fight had broken holes into other spaces. Some were realms, but others went into realspace. That wasn’t supposed to happen either. She shouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between real- and realmspace, but it was there.
Ozzie said, “Why don’t I show you? It’s not just about manifesting armor.”
A spear with a knife on the end appeared out of nowhere. She whirled away but it still managed to cut her arm. It wasn’t deep, but it hurt like hell. Her blood flowed pink and purple like the static of her power.
Kim had faith that Mike was still alive. She just needed to last long enough for him to find her. The butt end of Ozzie’s spear slammed into her, crashing her into another invisible wall.
Mike needed to hurry.
Chapter 55: Zoe
She lived to be the center of attention. Every artist did. Mike had told her once to be careful what she wished for. Now she finally understood why.
Zoe had gone over her decisions time and again. The only way to get Fee to abandon her ridiculous plan was to prove there were thousands of enslaved unduplicates somewhere in Chinese realmspace. The only way to do that was to find them. The only way to find them was to trust someone who knew where they were. The only way to see them was to follow that person.
He was supposed to be a realm developer, a mid-level manager, someone who muddled through a big project in a small way. He turned out to be a super-maniacal genius, one who literally worked in a dark tower overlooking his horde of slaves.
There were 5,120 of them. Zoe knew that because she was in charge, sort of. The maniac, Ozzie, put her in control of it all. He’d placed her in a cylindrical construct of glowing data centered in a control room at the top of the tower.
“I needed a focus for them,” Ozzie said. “They’re mindless otherwise. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was when the focus found me.”
She provided exactly that: a focus for all their poor, deformed minds. He not only somehow produced them all, he managed to hold them just below true consciousness. It created an amalgam, a hyper-sophisticated calculator with enough self-awareness to solve his transformative equations.
She wasn’t consciously coordinating the calculator. It passed through a level that made it feel like a distant memory, a song she couldn’t quite remember. It was a good thing for him, otherwise she’d kill him on the spot.
But she couldn’t kill him. He’d done that himself. Ozzie had placed her in this prison, turned it on, and then killed himself. She watched him coordinate the entire process. He bribed the guards of a navy stockpile to walk away, and then got a group of criminals to place mines in the path of the riverboat. He used an explosive contraption to stab himself in the back with a chunk of balcony railing. She watched Spencer and some Chinese woman jump off the balcony right before Ozzie killed himself.
The instant the bomb flung his body out of the cabin the entire system he'd plugged her into surged to life. It was so painful she had to fight against a restart. Once she’d regained control, there was Ozzie, standing in front of her like nothing had happened.
So she was now the heart of a machine solving equations that held a human consciousness in realmspace. It would be miraculous if it wasn’t so horribly, horribly wrong. Her link went both ways, and his thousands were all now as aware of her as she was of them. In Genesis, God warned his creations not to partake of the Tree of Knowledge, and now Zoe understood that too. They had barely enough knowledge to perceive what they could become, what they might be. There was no hope of that ever happening and they all somehow knew it. Their suffering was a solid, endless thing.
Then Kim arrived. Alarms went off in the
control room. Ozzie’s surprise was strong enough that Zoe felt it through the link. He switched his main monitor to a realm he’d been practicing in for days and swore out an impressive string of Chinese, English, and—she thought—Arabic. Apparently someone had gone back on a deal of some sort. Zoe was glad it pissed him off so much.
She had worked out how to control the cameras and probes Ozzie had scattered around that place days ago. She was pretty sure he knew about it, just like Zoe was pretty sure there was nothing she could do with them except have a look around.
The fight started out like a replay of their championship, but then Ozzie bashed Kim into a wall and it broke. That wasn’t normally possible in realms. She even recognized it: a remote part of a Cylon resurrection ship from the realm reboot of the classic sci-fi series.
Kim bashed his head through a different wall. The unduplicates below her adjusted their song slightly and suddenly Zoe knew that wasn’t a realm on the other side. It was a real redwood forest, probably in the US. The hole was high up in a tree but Zoe could clearly make out realspace tourists as they dodged away from the flying bark and branches.
Wherever, whatever they were in, it wasn’t a realm.
The fight went on. Ozzie threw Kim against another wall and she went through it. A shield flared over the gap. It took him a few tries to bash it apart, sparks flying off it and his armor.
When she saw inside the gap, Zoe couldn’t believe her luck. Kim had found Mike.
And Zoe had found Fee.
Finally, there was something she could do. Acoustic harmonics were part of Ozzie’s equation—the music she’d heard—so Zoe concentrated on her downlink into the masses below. The routines monitoring the checksums would tolerate some deviation, but not much, and it wouldn’t be easy to control. Zoe went for the simple and straightforward. She shouted, as loudly as she could, “FEE!”
On the monitor, Fee’s head snapped up and looked straight at the hole. Zoe shouted again. This time she was certain Fee heard her. Fee moved cautiously forward, but then Ozzie used one of his rope tricks to drag them all back through the breech.
Fee vanished as she crossed the border, but in the next instant appeared inside the the cave. She stumbled and fell on the debris scattered across the catwalk. When Fee picked herself up her expression was priceless. Finally, after all this work, Fee believed her.
With every ounce of her concentration, Zoe pushed a single command to the thousands below her. As one, they changed position, raised their arms, and pointed her way.
The outside door slid aside moments later. Fee smiled broadly. “I should’ve known I’d find you in the middle of all this.”
On the monitor, Ozzie manifested his sword-spear and attacked Kim like he was teeing off a golf ball.
“Close the door, Fee, we’ve got work to do.”
Chapter 56: Tonya
She figured out that Kim and Mike were inside a private realmspace when Helen couldn’t reach it from what she called her real self.
“I need a connection,” she said. “I need to get in there.”
Spencer didn’t look up from scanning all the control panels in the room. “What, so you can turn us in to the cops again?”
He said it in the twisted way Tonya had come to associate with Spencer making a joke, but Helen reacted like she’d been hit with a brick.
“I cannot apologize enough for my betrayal, but I can help. If you get me in there I can unlock the doors. Tonya can attend to them.”
Ever since Kim had jumped to realmspace, she'd started developing cuts and bruises all over her body. Realmspace didn’t do that. People wouldn’t use it if it did. Nevertheless, Tonya could not ignore what she was seeing. Kim was below them in some sort of small hospital; they didn’t know the right route down, let alone have the ability to unlock who knew how many doors.
“We don’t have much choice but to trust her.”
“Fine.” He punched a series of buttons. “You’re all just lucky they buy cots, otherwise I’d never know which button to push.”
Tonya’s nerdiness was on the theory side. Hardware geeks like Spencer could lose her in a second. “What does a bed have to do with this?”
He shook his head. “C-O-T-S. It means commercial off the shelf. They’re Chinese. They didn’t make any of this. It’s all cheap knockoffs, probably stolen.” Helen sputtered and he held a finger up in her face. “People who sell my friends out don’t get to call me racist.”
“I didn’t sell them out, Spencer. I didn’t do it for money. You have no idea how ashamed I am. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was wrong.”
He was smart enough to let it go for now. “When I let you in there, you’ll own the infrastructure. You open the doors first thing. Tonya can help them.” He pressed a button and a chair in the corner turned on.
“You have my word.”
Helen sat down, closed her eyes, and not two seconds later her voice came over the speakers. “Tonya, there’s someone else in the building. What the hell?”
She was as easily distracted as her brother. “Helen, what’s going on?”
A camera screen drew itself into her enhanced vision. It wasn’t very clear, but it didn’t need to be.
Chang.
Helen said, “He flew over on a helicopter requisitioned by Ozzie, which is impossible. It’s still on the roof. The forgery is perfect.”
Maybe slavers had access to other people with talents like Kim and Ozzie. “It doesn’t matter, Helen. Find me a way down there and open the doors.”
“I can’t unlock them selectively. I have to open all the internal doors. If I do that he might find you.”
A cut ripped across Kim’s arm and bled freely.
“I can handle him.” Like she had a choice. “Helen, open the doors.”
“Tonya, he—”
Mike had another seizure.
“Open the damned doors, Helen!”
They hissed apart and Tonya ran. Spencer shouted something behind her about finding a patch cord. Linking a private realm to the public networks was how they’d broken into Watchtell’s network, and they’d need all the help they could get. Spencer was definitely up for that job.
Tonya passed a break room, then backtracked. Praise God, someone had stockpiled first aid kits in it. She rushed onto the main floor with her arms full.
Chapter 57: Helen
In all honesty she couldn’t pray to Father’s ancestors anymore for Tonya’s success.
The Snake Mother hissed in her ear, “No, you can’t.”
She stumbled and froze mid transition into realmspace. “You are not here. I will not allow you to be here.”
“Oh, don’t worry, dear. I’m very dead, no threat to you at all.”
It was true. The presence beside her was a shadow of the one she’d fought. “What do you want?”
“For you to listen. You’re in this mess because you’re naïve. I know how awful people can be, because I am as awful as people can get. Keep me on your shoulder. I might prove useful.”
Helen cautiously moved toward the last realm location she had for Mike. “Why haven’t you spoken to me until now?”
The laughter echoed in her real self’s samplers. “It’s the Ghost Festival, dear. I’ll never be stronger than I am now.”
Thank…everyone’s ancestors for that. If this was as strong as the demon would get, she could more than handle it.
Helen completed the transition and entered a room built of flagstones with a hole punched through one side. The haptic field was turned up to maximum, so what came through the hole was modeled as actual sound. She recognized the meaty slaps and thuds from movies and training films. People were fighting. A black figure covered in purple lightning sailed past the opening.
The moment Helen crossed the boundary, everything spun violently.
“Finally, I thought you’d never get here.”
“Ozzie?”
He stood in front of her covered head to toe in ancient Chinese arm
or. A petulance she’d grown all too familiar with bubbled through his voice. “Everyone keeps asking me that. It’s like you all thought I was dead.”
“You are. I held your body in my arms.”
“Aw, sorry I missed that.” There was the sound of running feet, rapid and light, different from Ozzie’s clanging, armored steps. “Enough chit-chat though. Time for your special purpose. Fire true form, please.”
The command accessed subroutines she didn’t know existed. They didn’t exist; they couldn’t. Helen wasn’t an unduplicate. Her core wasn’t made up of computer code. She couldn’t be rooted, didn’t have a command line, but in spite of all that her threads flew apart and rebraided. They formed a new shape, one that Helen could not fight. More mythology, worse than the snake mother, because it happened to her real self. She had scales now, a snout, four clawed feet and an elongated body.
“I’m impressed,” the snake mother whispered to her. “I thought my transformation was profound.”
“Can you help me?”
“With this?” Her laughter purred and set Helen’s now too-sharp teeth on edge. “No, you’re on your own now, dear. Have fun, I’ll be watching.”
Ozzie grabbed her around the neck. “Fire breath now.”
She blew out a stream of flame and realized the dark form in front of her was Kim. The lightning that coruscated over her obsidian body picked up speed as she dodged the flames.
“It’s been fun, Kim,” Ozzie said as he wrapped Helen’s new body around his arm. Kim stopped, distracted no doubt by the Chinese dragon Helen had become. Ozzie reached behind her ear flaps, pressed her skull, and Helen lost what little control she had over this body. He used her jaws to grab Kim’s throat. Helen tried to be as soft as she could but her snout was too long and her teeth were too sharp. She tasted blood and hated it.
Ozzie slapped Kim twice.
“Wake up,” Ozzie said with insane finality. “Time to die.”
Chapter 58: Kim
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