Aaron could hear the capital letter in the kid’s voice. “I’m not in trouble, am I?”
The boy squinted at him. “Not unless you turn her down.”
That made Aaron nervous. Turn her down for what?
This was only a memory. It can’t really hurt me, right? In normal vee space, he’d have said no, but so far this experience had been anything but normal.
“Come on!” The boy turned and ran back across the bridge.
Aaron frowned. He climbed onto the bridge and looked down. His virtual stomach churned again, threatening to bring up whatever virtual things might be left inside. It was a long way down to the water below—at least ten stories.
It’s just a memory. He wrenched his gaze away from the water to look across to the other building.
“Come on!”
He forced himself out onto the bridge. It swayed and then stopped again. His knuckles were white on the rope rails.
“You okay?” the kid called.
“Yeah. Just a little sick—the flu, I think.”
Something zipped by his ear.
The boy whipped out a small gun and shot at it. It burst into smoke and flames and spiraled down to the water below. “Damned Hexers, always trying to squick our business.”
Aaron nodded. He remembered. The Hex was the gang that had controlled the northern part of the drowned city.
He willed his feet to take him forward. Maybe if he closed his eyes….
“Come on!”
Damn, the kid was insistent. Aaron opened his eyes and found he was on the far side of the bridge. He hoped to God he never had to do that again. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Gordy.” The kid looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You been smoking terfies again?”
Again? What, had Jackson been a terfhead? “No. Sorry. Being sick has my head all scrambled up.”
“Well, you better get it on straight before you see Her.” Gordy led him inside the building. They clambered down the access stairs a couple floors before coming out into a wide space. It must have been an office space at one point, but all the cubicles had been cleared out. In the center of the room was a platform that held a giant plas tank filled with blue fluid. Something huge sat inside, moving slowly in the murky darkness. It was like an aquarium.
Aaron stared at it, trying to work out what it was. Feeder tubes ran back and forth from the tank, and a small Sipson generator sat nearby.
“Well, go on.” Gordy pushed him toward the platform. A short flight of stairs led up to an open space in front of the aquarium.
Aaron climbed the steps, wondering what the hell was going on here. His father had never mentioned anything like this.
He stood in front of the aquarium looking at the thing inside.
It was a mind. A biomind, like they had used on Transfer Station. Like the world mind. Only he’d never seen one so huge back on Earth.
It shifted in the fluid, and a voice issued from a speaker at his side. “Hello, Aaron.”
EDDY LED them down the tunnel toward the enemy’s lair. Or at least that’s how he pictured it—like something from an old superhero tri dee. The mountain they were walking under would have a huge cavern entrance in the shape of a skeletal maw, jagged teeth above and below dripping with water—or maybe blood—threatening anyone who dared enter. Dead eye sockets peering out at the world.
That’s how one always knew it was the villain’s lair.
The reality seemed a lot more mundane. There were no markers, other than the subtle bits of world crafting they had found when they entered the tunnel.
He was a little worried, though. This cavern had no side branches either. While that was good for them, assuming the marauders hadn’t sealed them off after they passed like they’d done at the cavern entrance, it also made them easy targets. There was nowhere to hide if they should run into enemy forces coming from the other direction.
The weight of the rock above them weighed heavily on him, as did the oppressive silence.
Something shifted.
It took him a moment to figure out what it was. Eddy pulled the others to a halt and pointed to his ear. There it was again. A definite clang clang clang.
They moved more slowly.
Soon the tunnel brightened. A soft glow came from up ahead, lighting their way. After another three or four minutes, he could see the end of the tunnel at last, but his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the new light yet.
They edged up to it. As they got close, he gestured for them to get on the ground and crawl the last bit of the way.
Colin grimaced.
Eddy mouthed, “Sorry.” It was probably hard on the old man.
He moved forward on his hands and knees and peered over the edge. “Holy shit.”
The inside of the mountain was hollow, or had been hollowed out. Someone had filled it with glowing plants, creating a virtual Vernian jungle underground.
Huge stone columns reached up from earth to sky—or in this case, from Forever to cavern ceiling. Above, the vault of it glowed in bright blue patches… moss? Or something else?
In the middle of the jungle stood several enormous trees and a wide lake.
Eddy halfway expected to see a brontosaurus lift its head from the water, or to look up and see pterodactyls flying overhead. There were some birds—seagulls, like the ones they’d recently introduced over Lake Jackson a couple years ago. Strange.
In the middle of it all, near the lake, was a village, if you could call it that, made up of primitive wooden huts with thatched roofs.
There were several hundred people down there in the cavern too—adults and children—each one working industriously and silently, harvesting fruit, trimming plants, building dwellings.
“There’s something wrong,” Andy whispered.
“You mean besides there being an entire hidden world under this mountain?”
She nodded. “Look closely at the people.”
He watched them for a while. Sure, they were industrious. There was nothing wrong with that.
“No one’s talking.” It was Shandra, who had edged up on his other side.
He looked around. She was right. Not a word was said by any of the people he could see close by. Not only that, but they hardly interacted at all.
Eddy shivered, and his hand slipped unconsciously to the hilt of his long knife. “It’s Zombie Mountain.” The weekly tri dee serial had run for almost a decade and was eerily similar to the scene in front of him now. Except the zombies hadn’t been particularly good builders or gardeners. “What the hell’s going on?”
Chapter Seven: Crossings
A PIECE of Ana’s consciousness soared across the void, guiding the shuttlecraft toward its rendezvous with 42 Isis. She’d spent the last few months observing it through the scopes mounted on the outside of the world, checking and cross-checking her own calculations to be sure she had this right.
The last rendezvous had been accomplished with the help of a fleet of Earth ships, towing 41 Daphne to Forever and then aligning it for docking.
Ana had replayed the memories of that event from the world mind’s core. She’d gone over the impact as the new source of resources collided gently with what was left of 43 Ariadne, Forever’s original asteroid. She’d seen how Forever’s roots had immediately dug into the new food source, lashing it to the existing world and starting to feed off its rock and ice.
Forever created gravity via centrifugal force, spinning constantly so that everything remained on the ground and didn’t float up into the sky.
Each asteroid had its own spin and had to be aligned with Forever’s before docking, lest the two collide and tear each other apart.
With Keera’s help, Ana had designed a series of charges that she would deliver to the asteroid. When set off at the right time and in the right order, they would bring the asteroid’s spin in line with their own at the moment of rendezvous.
It was a project years in the making.
Now, as she flew
the shuttle toward their target, self-doubt stirred in her gut. What if her calculations were bad? What if she had failed to take into account something critical? The results could be catastrophic.
And yet, they had to do this. Under the original plan, the rest of the world building would have been done in near-Earth space, under carefully controlled circumstances. But Earth didn’t exist anymore. Not in any meaningful sense.
The project managers had long before calculated the necessary size for a generation ship like this, one that would hold enough resources for the journey if they were carefully recycled, and that would allow enough room for the inevitable population growth.
They were only about halfway there.
Though she flew the shuttle remotely, it felt good to be out in wide-open space again. If she carried the weight of humanity’s survival on her shoulders, why shouldn’t she relax and enjoy the view until it was time for action?
Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the Earth.
Genesis. “Jackson,” she whispered. “Where are you?” For all that she was an atheist, his worldview had changed her. He saw good in things where she saw only cold logic and hard science. Maybe a little bleed-through, now and then, wasn’t the worst thing.
She checked her clock. Two hours until she reached Isis.
Devon Powell slept inside the ship she piloted, so he’d be ready to help her set the charges when the small shuttlecraft reached Isis. Not exactly by the book, but they’d burned the book when the world had ended.
Ana settled in to wait and watch the stars.
AARON LOOKED around, confused. The mind had just called him by his own name. This was his father’s memory. How was that even possible? Though he’d been skirting the outer edges of possibility ever since he’d dipped into this virtual world. “How… what are you?”
The mind chuckled. “That’s a good question. I’m one of Jackson’s memory constructs. So I suppose I’m the sum total of what he knew about the original me all those years ago.”
“That’s… bizarre.” Aaron looked at Gordy, who seemed just as mystified as he was.
“You’re telling me.”
“Are you sentient?”
He could almost feel the mind shrug. “Who can know? Maybe I’m just a big Turing test. Do I seem sentient to you?”
“I don’t know. I mean, yes. But it would take a lot more time for me to decide.”
Her voice lowered an octave into the silky range. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Aaron laughed harshly. “Good point.” He was at a loss on how to proceed. This wasn’t anything like what he’d expected, although if pressed, he would have had a hard time explaining exactly what he had expected. Still, he had to press on if he was to find Jackson. “Can I ask you some questions?”
“Of course.”
“What were you. I mean, in real life? When Jackson knew you?”
“Ah, that’s a hard question to answer. Once upon a time, I was a woman. Her name was Lilith Lott.”
“You were human?”
“She was, yes. She was the commander of the Red Badge.”
“Ah.” Aaron considered the mind in front of him. There was nothing feminine about it except for the voice. He wondered what Lilith Lott had looked like, how she had lived her life. “And how—”
“Did Lilith become the stunning creature you see before you today?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Sure.” She still had a sense of humor.
“She was diagnosed with a fast-moving lung cancer and given two months to live.” He could hear the echo of that pain even in this copy, twice removed from the original woman. “She was resourceful, though, and she’d heard of this new experimental procedure to upload a human consciousness into a biomind.”
Aaron nodded. So it had happened before. “Did Jackson know Lilith, before…?”
“Yes. He helped her transition into her new form when her body was dying. He volunteered to be loaded with special blackware to help him accomplish the task.”
Aaron staggered, catching the railing to stop his fall. This explained so much.
Why they had this strange ability in their family.
Why Jackson had been so ready to accept the consciousness of Lex, the Hammond’s ship-mind.
Why Aaron could do what he could do.
“Were you… like her? Like the original Lilith?”
The mind stirred in its container, sending liquid sloshing about over the edge. “No. The technology was imperfect back then. Some days, I was calm, serene, logical. Others I was quite mad.”
Aaron laughed nervously. “Are you mad today?”
“No,” she purred. “You caught me on a good day.”
Given that she was a simulation of a memory of a biomind running in vee space inside another biomind, he had no idea how to take that.
“You’re from outside, aren’t you?” Gordy had climbed onto the platform and was staring at him in awe.
“Yeah, I guess so.” Did the denizens of these memories know they weren’t real?
“Take me with you! Nothing ever changes in here. It’s so boring.”
Aaron laughed. “You have a whole world to explore.” If only the kid realized how lucky he was.
“Nah, I can’t ever leave New York.” The boy looked crestfallen.
Of course. Jackson’s memories were of Gordy only in this one location. The boy had no existence outside of this place.
Aaron felt a deep sense of sadness, even if Gordy was really just an advanced collection of ones and zeroes. In the end, aren’t we all? “I wish I could. But I don’t even know where I’m going next. Or how.” He looked around the room, filled with tubes and machinery and dark corners, and wondered what it was like to be trapped inside someone else’s head.
The mind rumbled in its container. “You’re looking for Jackson.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
A tentacle lifted out of the blue water, holding something small and sparkling. “Take this.”
He held out his hand, and the sparkly thing dropped into his palm. “What is it?”
“It’s a bit of code dressed up in a pretty bauble.” She seemed pleased with herself. “Isn’t it shiny?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful.” She seemed to be tipping over to the mad side of things. Time to leave before things got even weirder. “What does it do?” he asked.
“Squeeze it tight and think of him, and the stars will crash down, the stars crash down, the galaxies fade, and the angels will play….” The last was in a singsong voice. The thing in the tank bounced around, sloshing more of the liquid out over the top. “I used to be beautiful, with the most wonderful hands to grab things. I was the Queen of the City. Now I’m a hideous beast that sings and wishes she had wings….”
Aaron looked down at Gordy, who looked frightened.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She had bad days. Really bad days.” He was shaking now.
Fuck it. Code or no, the boy shouldn’t be left to suffer through the depravations of a mad mind. He grabbed the boy with his left hand and closed his eyes, squeezing the bauble with his right, thinking about his father.
“Don’t go, don’t go, oh beautiful man…,” the mind warbled, reaching for him with her tentacles, but she faded away before she could reach him. Her calls were replaced by silence.
Aaron watched in horror as the boy faded too, his hand dissolving in Aaron’s grasp. The anguished look on Gordy’s face as he vanished tugged at Aaron’s heart.
He opened his mind to see his mother, Glory, standing there staring at him, her mouth hanging open.
“WE SHOULD go back and tell Aaron.” Colin was adamant.
“Tell him what?” Andy stared at the zombies below, trying to work out what was going on down there, in the strange cavern in the bowels of the mou
ntains. “That we followed a trail and found a bunch of narced-out people harvesting fruit under a mountain?”
“Well, basically—”
“We need to find out more first.” Drugs. It had to be drugs. Someone was dosing these poor people with something. Yet they didn’t walk like they were drugged. Their movements were crisp, clean, efficient even.
Maybe some kind of designer drug, then, tailored to suppress the personality? But where would you find something like that up here?
“Andy’s right.” Eddy was staring out across the wide space, his brow furrowed. “We need to find out more. We were lucky to get in here without running into anyone, and with the number Andy did on their front door… they’re going to know someone was here. Look!” He pointed to a green patch about halfway around the cavern. “Two fluffy white specks.”
“Our lost sheep?” Colin stared across the intervening distance.
Andy nodded. “Looks like it. So are we agreed?”
Colin looked at her, respect warring with concern on his face. “I suppose so. Though I’d feel better if we sent someone back to report what we’ve found so far.”
They all looked at him.
“All right. The old guy should go.” He laughed softly. “I guess that makes sense.”
Andy grinned. “Age before beauty.”
“Or wisdom before inexperience.” He kissed her forehead. “You be careful. All of you.” Then he backed away into the dim light of the tunnel.
Andy glanced back after him. He stood, waved, and then disappeared into the darkness.
She was glad Colin was out of harm’s way. He was in good shape for a guy his age, but she was worried what would happen if things got violent. She’d grown fond of him. He was the uncle she’d never had.
She turned her attention to the task at hand. “Where will we find some answers?” She pulled out her knife and tested its edge thoughtfully.
Shandra pointed across the wide cavern. “There’s an entrance to something—maybe another cavern?—over there.” Their shoulders touched.
Andy decided she didn’t mind.
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