The White Oak

by Kim White

  Behind me, I hear screams from the crowd waiting to get through the gate. The twenty-minute window has expired and the gate is closing. The pier is retracting into the sphere, as Lucas said it would. At the same time, the glass catwalk begins to shrink, and a dozen Keres float out of the gate and onto the glass. I can feel their presence on the catwalk and am amazed to see it buckle slightly from the force they exert on it. I back away until I am standing at the very edge, over the void. As the shadowy figures advance toward me, I can feel their gravitational pull. They are like black holes, drawing me in. I begin to slide toward them; the golden pen is vibrating in my mouth, warning me to get away. I look down at the vastness of the deep space, and the hard, glassy streets below. My hands tingle and I hesitate for a moment—knowing what I have to do, but not sure I can do it. I begin to inch backward along the catwalk though the Keres drag me toward them. Resisting their pull, I turn and walk in the opposite direction. My progress is slow. I’m leaning forward like someone struggling against a strong wind. When I reach the edge, I gather all my strength, close my eyes, and jump.

  Taken Prisoner

  I don’t frighten easily, but being trapped inside the Keres was almost as terrifying as death. I was already sore from the weird transformation I went through at the turnstile—when my blood turned thick and cold, and my nerves and veins hardened. My forearms burned where the keyboard had taken shape, and my palms had become hard and raw where two flexible screens had emerged. But that was nothing compared to what awaited me inside the Keres. It was like being inside a tornado—I felt that I was being pulled completely apart. Sometimes the pain was so intense that my eyes watered and I had to hold my breath and fixate on something else to keep from screaming.

  I looked through the creature’s smoky skin as she drifted out of the gate. I was surrounded by at least a dozen who acted like bodyguards, looking around cautiously as we floated into a vast open space inside the sphere.

  When we crossed the threshold and entered the City, I could feel something switch on inside my altered body. It was as though an invisible key was unlocking me. I should have thought about what that meant. I should have explored the implications, but I was so riveted by what I saw, and with its similarity to the game I’d been designing, that I was able to ignore not only the pain in my body but the concerns that were forming vaguely in the back of my mind.

  On the day my father was buried, I was working on a model for the rotational physics of a game world I was programming. The idea for the game had come to me when I was exploring the caves with Cora. We had reached our first dead end, and my instinct was to turn back and look for another route, but something made me take out my pickax and start hammering. I chipped at that wall for hours until I could push my fist all the way through to the empty space on the other side. I kept working until the hole was big enough to crawl through. After that, I stopped thinking of dead ends as ends. Instead, I thought of them as delays, barriers to be broken through, or more difficult pieces of a larger puzzle. The riddle for me was, Where would this tunnel take us? The answer that I’d begun to envision in my game world was that the tunnel would take us to the very center of the earth and keep us there, in a spinning puzzle, a tumbling circular lock as vast and incomprehensible as the orbits of the planets, something only the cleverest player could escape.

  The world I’d imagined was built on the inside of a sphere—an inverted world—so the physics was complicated. On the day I died, I was trying to determine the velocity of the rotation of the sphere based on the amount of centrifugal force necessary to keep the buildings and people rooted to its walls even when they were upside down. In other words, I was trying to build a world where there was no up or down. So when I first entered the City, looked up, and saw the skyscrapers hanging like stalactites above me, I felt as if I’d been given a gift.

  I saw what the other shades saw—the glass buildings with their dim lights, the streets laid out in a grid, the silver sphere in the center held in place by a thin beam of light that cut through the globe at the poles. But because of the transformation I went through at the gate, I knew much more. Instead of just being able to calculate it, I could see the math.

  After I agreed to it, this ability was conferred on me at the gate. The moment I made the decision, everything inside me began to shift and vibrate. My body clenched up, and I could feel a sharp pain in my chest as though my heart was being squeezed. The pain radiated outward through my nerves and veins. Messages that used to pass involuntarily from my brain to my muscles now required conscious thought. It took a few moments for me to realize this, and I still haven’t gotten used to it. “Lift your head,” I had to tell my neck to make it look up at Cora. She was pushing against the turnstile, trying to get to me. I could see how the turnstile worked. The math was part of my vision now, but it was limited by what I knew. I could see the firmware code used to operate the turnstile. I could see it register Cora’s tampering and issue a defensive command. I opened my mouth to warn her, but couldn’t get the words out quick enough. The gate zapped her with an electric shock that threw her backward onto the floor.

  As I looked around, I could see how everything worked. The gate, the orbiting metal rings, the operating systems of the entire machine-made City were built from recognizable equations. I recognized some of them right away; others were too advanced and appeared as a glowing hazy blur. The shades were more complicated than the machines, but I could understand some of their DNA. Cora was an altogether different story. She was one giant hazy glowing ball of math—there was so much and it was so complicated that I could not imagine being able to fully comprehend how a living person worked even if I had a hundred lifetimes to try.

  My captors carried me over the edge of the glass catwalk and drifted through the empty space before landing on the street below. There was a car waiting for us—a black sedan, built like a tank with air locks on the doors. The interior of the car was pressurized, and once inside, the Ker relaxed her tight, stormy center and released me. I could move and breathe normally again, and I examined my misty limbs for damage. There were no cuts or bruises, but every inch of me felt battered.

  Out the front windshield, the crystal buildings stood like canyon walls on either side of us. On each one, a dimly lit corporate logo glowed, and inside souls were trapped, moving like shadows, busy at mundane tasks. In my game, those ghosts are treacherous. They are slaves, but because they’ve enslaved themselves, they’re difficult to free. In the game, you have to free them to advance, but here I can’t imagine how you’d do it. The sense of despair is palpable.

  I wondered where they were taking me and I worried about Cora. How was she going to survive? If the Keres didn’t tear her apart, what other monsters would she encounter? Maybe she would die of hunger or thirst. I wanted to run back to the gate to find her, but that was impossible.

  The car stopped and the door gave a loud clunk and a hiss as the air rushed in. The Keres regained their intensity. One of them pulled me back into her body and glided out the door. We were parked in front of a luxurious building with high-level security. The doorman met us on the sidewalk and nodded when he saw me. He placed his hand on the palm scanner next to the door handle, and the door clicked open. Once inside, the doorman dissolved and rearranged himself into Lieutenant Garrison.

  “Release him,” Minotaur said, and the Ker obeyed, tearing herself apart. I fell to the ground, free to move on my own once again. “Come with me, son,” the lieutenant ordered. I followed, looking back over my shoulder at the Ker, as she wove herself together again, pieces of her smoky body assembling like strands of wind building into a cyclone.

  Lieutenant Garrison led me to an elevator bank. He pushed the up button and the doors opened. We rode a silver-paneled elevator to the 110th floor. When the doors opened, we were at the top of the City’s tallest building. Its roof was made of glass, like the rest of the building, and when I looked up I could see the City’s lights twinkling like weak stars in the half d
ark. The hallways were decorated with plush carpets, marble sculptures, and famous paintings. Expensive furniture filled the rooms and servants wandered around dusting and tidying. We passed through a great curving ballroom with windows that stretched from the floor to the high glass ceiling. The view was dizzying. There was no horizon. A grid of streets curved up along the concave surface of the City. Embedded in each street were geometric equations defining its coordinates. The cars and people were points moving across the grid along defined paths to their predetermined destinations. I could see the simple math for the movements of each point, but they didn’t operate independently. Each was part of a larger, more complex theorem. The entire City was built like this—simple parts that acted as components for a complex landscape. Looking on it from this perspective, I felt like the controller orchestrating from the tower.

  “This way, son,” Lieutenant Garrison said in a paternal, military tone that made me feel safe and privileged.

  The lieutenant led me through so many rooms, I started to think of the place as a palace, and I began to wonder about the man who owned it.

  “Is this your home?” I asked.

  Lieutenant Garrison almost broke a smile, “No, son—this is my father’s house.”

  “Who is your father?” I asked, wondering how anyone could have accumulated so much wealth. We passed through a room with nothing in it but piles of gold. It was almost as though Minotaur was taking me through all the rooms just to impress me.

  “You will find out who my father is when he wants you to,” Lieutenant Garrison answered. Then he stopped in front of a large metal door. “For now, you will wait in your quarters.” The door opened and inside was my bedroom—exactly the way I left it the morning of my father’s funeral. How did Minotaur know? I turned to ask, but he was leaving, shutting the door behind him.

  “Wait!” I yelled, just as the door closed and locked from the outside. I pounded on it, calling out, but there was no response. I kicked and beat the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Minotaur Reports to Minos

  Minotaur stands in Minos’s office in his soldier persona. “The boy has been captured, sir,” he says. Minos sits hunched over his keyboard and does not look up. Only a few days have passed since their last conversation, but he has aged. His hair has turned gray and his skin is sagging. The cycles are moving faster, Minotaur thinks. My father doesn’t have much time until this one is over. Minotaur tries to calculate how much time, but he isn’t good at things like that. He’s programmed to figure out how people behave, not how underworld laws function—or malfunction.

  “Explain this to me,” Minos says sternly. The surveillance monitors play a video of Cora and Minotaur walking across Asphodel. Minotaur cringes as he reviews his mistakes.

  “It was perfect until the Judges interfered, but we are going put it back the way it was meant to be,” he watches himself say. Minos glares at him and plays the next segment.

  “My father deepened this river and changed its chemistry so that it could support the rotation of the sphere.” The video stops and Minos fast-forwards “My father cooled the red magma at the center of the earth and used its iron ores to build the City. The rest of it was pushed out to the red desert—a forbidden place.”

  “What else were you going to tell her?” Minos asks angrily. “Were you going to tell her how I programmed the gate, how the Judges altered the regions, what our plans are for her brother, for her, for changing the course of history?” The questions are infused with sarcasm.

  Minos pauses, gazing at Minotaur and adopting a serious tone. “What has happened to you?” he demands.

  Minotaur pauses before giving his answer. The last time he talked to his father, Minos had been too preoccupied with Cora’s book of life to look further back in the surveillance tapes. That had given Minotaur time to consider what he would say when Minos finally discovered his mistake, and he was sure he would—his father never missed details or small betrayals. Minos was staring at him, waiting for an answer.

  “Father, I have thought about this many times since the incident,” Minotaur begins, “but I do not have a good explanation for what happened on Asphodel. I’ve tried to figure out what I was thinking, but that’s the problem. During those slipups on Asphodel, I went blank. It was as though I wasn’t thinking at all, which defies logic, but that is the only way I can describe it. When I am with Cora, I begin logically and strategically, and then something happens. I can see myself going astray, and I know that I should stop talking, but I can’t. I’m carried away by something that is outside my own powers.”

  Minos stares at him thoughtfully, the anger on his face melting into curiosity, then understanding. “Feelings,” he says. “You are experiencing emotion, something no program can replicate and yet . . . ” Minos looks at Minotaur’s code. “I’d thought this was the effect of the virus Sybil introduced, but when I found this surveillance track, I realized that either Sybil started writing this virus before you visited her, or something else is going on. Cora’s influence, perhaps. The virus might be designed to work in combination with the destroyer’s will.”

  Minotaur could feel himself begin to glow. Feelings. He had secretly coveted them since the day he was born, but he’d never dared say so. The first time his father had asked him to embody a persona, Minotaur had sensed how lacking his execution had been. No matter how thoroughly he analyzed the data, no matter how artfully he constructed the personas, something essential was always missing. In his portrayals he could simulate emotions with the right words, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language, but never having experienced feelings, he knew his performances lacked a certain authenticity. There was something inescapably mechanical in his portrayals, and this bothered him, though he never mentioned it to his father. After years of pretending at emotions, he’d grown to appreciate their mystery, their chaos and randomness. Sometimes they were predictable, one-dimensional, almost stupid—other times they were so confounding, complex, and exquisite that he was convinced humans really were as special as they thought themselves to be.

  “Don’t be too pleased about this,” his father says. Minotaur quenches the glow and tries to subdue his excitement.

  “Understanding emotions will allow me to better serve you, Father,” Minotaur offers.

  Minos stares at him for a minute as though seeing him differently. “You are a computer program—a child of my mind, a tool for my purposes,” he says firmly. “You are no more human than these monitors or this phone. You will never know humanity, and you must stop calling yourself my son. I am not your father.”

  The City of Glass

  Instead of falling through space as I had expected, I’m pulled by a centrifugal force against the wall of the turning sphere, or against the floor—I’m not sure which. The moment my bare feet touch the surface, something strange happens. The black glass becomes red sand. My feet sink into it, and the impact sends loose grains swirling up around me like sparks from a fire. Everything moves in slow motion, allowing me to see the granular components of the glass buildings and the metal shell underneath them. I know that I’m seeing something invisible, like the web I saw in Sybil’s library. I see how purposeful and man-made the city is, each particle programmed to work according to someone’s design. Then, just as suddenly, the vision is gone. The ground hardens under my feet and I’m standing on the cold crystal streets again.

  The transformation of the glass into sand and back again happens so quickly that I wonder if I’ve imagined it. Could I have survived the jump if the sand hadn’t broken my fall? I look above me to see if the Keres are following, but there’s no sign of them. If they’ve lost track of me, I know it can only be briefly. I have to find a place to hide.

  The buildings vary in height, but each one is shiny and black like polished stone, with irregular edges that make each structure glimmer like a faceted gem. Some are a hundred stories tall, forming steep canyon walls on either side of the shiny avenues. I’m in a forest of
dark crystal, where every surface is smooth and featureless, but shadows are moving inside each building.

  “Cora, in here,” I hear someone whisper. I see a faint silver light glimmering behind a storefront window, but the glass is too opaque for me to see through. I cup my hands against it and press my face up close to see inside. At my touch, the surface changes. The tinted glass becomes transparent. I can see a ghost inside, behaving as if she were still alive. She stands behind the cash register, tidying things behind the counter, waiting for customers.

  “Over here,” Minotaur, the knight in silver armor, whispers. He’s holding the glass door open for me. “Quickly!” he says, and I run to the door and step inside. He closes it behind me. “Put both hands here,” he says, indicating a spot on the door. At my touch the door seals up and the edges disappear. The clear glass darkens, but I can still see through it. “We can see out, but they have to get up close to the window to see in,” Minotaur explains.

  I breathe a sigh of relief and turn to look around the store. Skeins of yarn are organized in baskets on the tables and shelves. They seem to be different shades of gray, but if I look very closely, I can see a hint of color. They must have been brilliant at one time, but now their hues are faded. On the shelves and hanging from racks are exquisite hand-knit sweaters. The shopkeeper is moving from shelf to shelf, refolding the merchandise and neatening the baskets.

  “You won’t be able to hide from them,” the ghost says. She is dark gray and semitransparent, like the shades I saw on the ferry, but there’s something different about her. She’s flat as a card. I saw one shade transformed into a flat ghost at the gate, and he was sent to Region Two. That must be where we are.

  “What do you know about them?” I ask.

  As she turns to face me, she remains one-dimensional. Her face is like a drawing on a piece of paper. “I tried to run away from them, too, but they found me.” The shopkeeper appears to be in her sixties. She doesn’t seem upset as she recalls her experience with the Keres. “They wouldn’t tell me where they were taking me, and I was scared as heck until I realized that they were bringing me here, to my store, which is exactly where I wanted to be. I started this store with my daughter. If they’d simply told me they were bringing me here, I wouldn’t have been upset at all. There’s nothing to worry about, except that I haven’t had any customers in five years, and it’s no wonder—with these ugly yarns that don’t hold the colors.” The ghost is quiet for a moment as she fingers a skein that still has a slight red cast.