The Reality Incursion (Deplosion Book 2)

by Paul Anlee

  If Trillian could hack across inworlds, she could too. He’d come from DonTon, so she was definitely not going there. But where, then? The choices were fairly limited as to what was both convenient and a good place to hide. That left a few playing fields. Vacationland would work, or maybe that ridiculously bizarre inworld, the GameRoom.

  Darya smiled. The GameRoom was always Gerhardt’s favorite. It had the loosest physical laws and the most flexible access to Supervisory changes. She’d be on more even footing against Trillian there, if he could track her into the GameRoom at all. Did he think to expand the trueselves-block to all of the inworlds?—she wondered. Maybe they could get back to the outworld through one of them.

  Like many engineers, years of tinkering with software security systems gave her a deep understanding of the machine-level implementations of code used to program inworld simulations.

  Over millions of years, the code had migrated from what used to be called “high-level languages” to programming environments that would be hardly recognizable to a human engineer of old.

  Keeping abreast of those developments and contributing to the advances brought her satisfaction, when she wasn’t pushing asteroids into new orbits. Now her hobby was about to save their lives.

  She hoped.

  Darya began assembling low-level code to probe the boundaries between inworld Alternus and the GameRoom. Trillian’s control of the Alternus Supervisor had to be incomplete or faulty. Otherwise, he would have located the group by now and altered the sim to trap them.

  Timothy groaned and put his hands to his head. “What’s wrong?” Darya asked.

  “My head hurts,” he complained. “It just started now. Do you think that means he’s nearby?”

  “No, that’s probably just me,” she replied. “Let me find a different place to work. A little distance might reduce the effect my coding has on your persona.”

  She walked over to the bar and ordered their best single malt scotch. She took one sip and grimaced. Wow, maybe that’s your best, but it’s far from the best.

  She closed her eyes and set to work. Her quark-spin lattice generated code at a rate that would have astonished ancient programmers. She hoped it was fast enough. After about fifteen minutes, she’d constructed a probe, located a circuitous route to get them from Alternus to the GameRoom, and established a few basic conditions for the game they would arrive in.

  The conduit was thin and slow. It would take them each a day to make the transfer, and she was pretty sure they wouldn’t get more than an hour here in the café before Trillian found them.

  Darya wove code as fast as she could to construct a higher bandwidth route. She was in such a focused programming frenzy she didn’t notice right away that the room had fallen silent. She looked around to see why conversation had stopped.

  The sports programs on the television screens above the bar and around the café had been replaced by unflattering photos of her, Mary and Timothy. A scrolling announcement below the photos instructed viewers to “Contact the number at the bottom of the screen if you see these individuals.”

  Darya looked around. A number of customers already had their phones out and were texting something. Apparently, it’s only our phones that are blocked. Time to move.

  Her hack into the GameRoom was almost finished. She let a high-priority background process complete the job while she sent a message to the Supervisor, asking it to create a diversion. She left her unfinished scotch on the bar and walked back to the booth where the others waited.

  Mary greeted Darya with an expectant, wide-eyed stare. She looks exhausted—Darya noted. Even Timothy was having difficulty offering any comfort.

  “I’ve asked the Supervisor to spread a few virtual ghosts of our likeness around the neighborhood,” Darya reported. “Hopefully, that’ll lead to a flood of information to Trillian. We might be able to delay him by a few minutes or hours; there’s no saying how long we have before he gets here. In the meantime, I’ve set up a data pipeline between us here and the GameRoom.”

  Mary’s eyes lifted at the mention of Gerhardt’s favorite inworld. She drew in a breath to speak. “Darya…,” was all she got out. Her openly skeptical look finished the sentence.

  “I know,” Darya replied before Mary could launch her protest. “It’s a strange choice and not even nearby, but that could work to our advantage. It’ll take Trillian a while to check out this inworld and any others nearby, like Casa DonTon.

  “Once we’re in the GameRoom, I can start looking for a way back to our trueselves. To help buy us some time, I set up a game that might make it harder for him to locate us there.”

  “What kind of game?” Mary asked.

  “It’s a ten-dimensional maze.”

  Timothy looked confused, but Mary accepted the notion without a blink. “Okay, how do we get there?”

  “You don’t have to do a thing,” answered Darya. “I’ll send you. Once you’re in, don’t move anywhere. And I mean it. Not anywhere; it could be dangerous. I don’t have time to program 10D vision for us, so moving around will be tricky. But it’ll be equally tricky for anyone to find us. Just stand still, and we’ll come in right beside you. Okay?”

  Mary nodded. Darya connected Mary’s Alternus persona to the GameRoom transfer pipe and activated the Send command. She was pleased to see her background processing had found a faster route between the two sims. They’d still be limited to one person at a time, but it could process in minutes what the other route would’ve taken hours to complete.

  A small portal, like a literal funnel connected to a piece of pipe, floated above Mary’s head. It drew further attention from the café patrons but Darya’s threatening scowl encouraged them to go back to their texting. A few snapped quick photos, anyway.

  It would have looked funny—Darya thought—if the tube sucked Mary head first up into the cosmos but reality, even inworld simulated reality, didn’t work that way. Instead, Mary dissolved, gradually growing less substantial, more transparent, and increasingly poorly defined. The process took a few minutes, and Darya sighed with relief when Mary was completely gone.

  Darya turned to Timothy, “Okay, my friend, you’re next.”

  The front door of the bar café slammed open with a bang, startling everyone.

  Trillian stood in the doorway. He pegged his hands triumphantly to his hips and looked around the room. His chest was puffed out and he was beaming with pride, like a caricature of a swashbuckling pirate. If his presence hadn’t been so terrifying, Darya and Timothy might have found it comical.

  Purely by chance, he’d witnessed the last two seconds of Mary’s transfer through the window. I arrived too late to prevent sweet Mary’s departure but, no matter. Darya is the main prize, and there she is. Idiots! They chose a corner booth away from the exit. He set his jaw and strode over toward them.

  Timothy jumped in front of Darya and extended his arms, valiantly intending to block the Shard’s access to her.

  Darya was ahead of them both. The Alternus sim was not amenable to “magic” tricks. She could alter the physical properties of a few, incidental props with limited, local effect, but she couldn’t simply “disappear” herself or any other player, or make a giant fighting troll appear. She’d tried and the Supervisor ignored her. Since Trillian had hacked Alternus, it seemed she had less influence over the inworld sim.

  But she was still far from powerless.

  She instructed the Supervisor to adjust the strength of the supporting ceiling beams and changed four stories of wooden walls above into cement.

  The whole structure above Trillian creaked. His smirk disappeared as he noticed the ceiling starting to collapse.

  Darya grabbed Timothy and pulled him out the back door as the building came down.

  Trillian darted back out the front door.

  Darya and Timothy escaped into the back alley, and right into the sights of Trillian’s watchdogs. Their guns were drawn.

  He’s counting on my inability to retur
n to my trueself and my unwillingness to leave Timothy to his death—she thought. But, if Trillian thinks I have no option but to surrender, he’s in for a surprise.

  She couldn’t make their guns disappear, but she could change the chemical properties of the gunpowder in the bullets. Like Trillian, she could convince the Supervisor that the bullets were charged with something beside gunpowder.

  She and Timothy approached the two thugs, angry determination in their eyes.

  Trillian’s men aimed their guns to cripple her and pulled the triggers.

  Click! Click! Click!

  Her satisfaction at their useless weapons was plain to read on her face. She shoved Timothy hard into one of the thugs and lunged at the other.

  The man easily blocked her punch, and swung the butt-end of his pistol at her head. Rather than back away, she surprised him by stepping in toward him. Blocking the gun wrist with one hand, she chopped hard into the crook of his elbow with her free hand.

  The man grunted. The chop hit its mark, and he was powerless against the reflex reaction that shocked his muscles into giving up their grip on the pistol. He ignored the skittering gun, and reached out to yank the troublesome woman closer before she could get away.

  Darya pulled down sharply on his stunned arm, throwing her assailant off balance. He stumbled forward and she drove her knee into his groin. A strangled, animal sound escaped the man’s vocal chords as the incapacitating pain registered and he bent forward. She delivered a punishing elbow to the back of his head. He crumpled. One down, one to go.

  Timothy was enacting a commendable imitation of boxing with the second goon, and somehow managing to keep his opponent at bay. Barely.

  Darya retrieved the fallen gun from her attacker and messaged the Supervisor. It filled with gunpowder once again, and she pointed it at Timothy’s sparring partner. “Leave now, and don’t come back.”

  The man recognized a good opportunity and bolted.

  Timothy was visibly shaken but there was no time to comfort him.

  “We can rest later. Come on, we have to get out of here right now.” Darya grabbed his hand and pulled him over to a locked door across the alley. She shot off the lock and pulled Timothy into the building. Together they ran up three flights of stairs before bursting through a door into a long hallway. They ran two-thirds of the way down the corridor until Darya spotted a door without a “Housekeeping, please make up room” sign on it. She hoped that meant it was vacant.

  The lock was electronic and Darya had no trouble figuring out the access code. She pulled a credit card from her pocket and inserted it into the lock, convincing the Supervisor that it had the correct magnetic coding. The lock flashed green and she passed inside, yanking Timothy behind her.

  “Ow!” he yowled. She realized how keyed up she was.

  Darya looked around the darkened room, giving her eyes a few seconds to adjust from the hallway lights. The two double beds were rumpled and, thankfully, empty. She found the light switch and a bedside table light came on. She sat Timothy down on the bed.

  “I’m going to send you to the GameRoom with Mary. You’ll appear right beside her. I hope she hasn’t gone anywhere. The two of you stay right there. Do not move! I’ll be along in a few minutes, okay?”

  Still in shock, Timothy could only nod in dull agreement. Darya focused and a portal opened above the Footman. She watched him fade and disappear.

  She initiated her own transfer. The room shimmered and twisted. That’s a weird effect—she thought—not at all what I expected.

  The transfer pipe bent and gyrated as she poured through it. She watched the television and heavy table below it get drawn into the pipe along with her. The portal expanded in diameter. What the…! That’s not right!

  The pipe soon engulfed everything in the room and continued to grow. She looked around frantically. Something’s wrong! What’s happening?

  Through the confusion, she heard laughter—Trillian! He found a way to interfere with our escape!

  Rather than trying to stop her, he’d made adjustments to include the entire neighborhood in the pipe, including himself. Darya had to admire the move.

  Even through the pipeline distortion, Darya could hear his ominous tone, “You are not going to be so lucky this time.”

  How is he tapping in? I have to block him!

  She reviewed her code for the pipe but with her brain in transition between New York City and the GameRoom, it was impossible to focus on whatever changes he’d made.

  She could only watch as all of Manhattan was pulled along into the GameRoom with her. Millions of people, mostly Partials, some real, were sucked out of the Alternus inworld and mapped onto her maze.

  She’d modeled the maze on ten-dimensional mathematical formulas describing the physics of antique string theory applied to the virtual particles comprising protons. She’d permitted movement in all ten dimensions of the maze, providing there was some supporting surface but vision would remain restricted to three dimensions.

  The idea was to create a place where they could easily hide. She hoped it would give her enough time to get all three of them back to the real universe.

  She watched the busy streets and high rises of New York being pulled into the maze, and mapped onto the ten-dimensional topography. She had to assume her hunter was now in there somewhere, too. He wouldn’t even have to search the neighboring inworlds for them.

  And now, thanks to his meddling with the program, she wasn’t sure any of them would ever find their way out.

  39

  In the decade following the final acceptance of the Vesta Project, ship after ship delivered millions of Cybrids to the asteroid belt. Most went directly to Vesta. Hundreds of thousands were assigned to explore the rest of the belt.

  The Cybrids worked around the clock, constructing enormous tunneling machines, the largest and fastest ever devised. In less than ten years, they completed four of the six primary tunnels, with smaller service tunnels below each. In space, there were no environmental concerns to slow them down. Their methods were effective but not at all delicate.

  Where possible, they refined metals from the debris removed from the planetoid. The rest they melted as slag and deposited into rocky structural reinforcement bands on the outer surface.

  The first on-site hiccough came early in the project, as data began pouring in from the explorer Cybrids. Initial analyses were disappointing but not entirely unexpected. Vesta and the other asteroids in the region were critically low in nitrogen-containing molecules, and until they found a supply, they’d be unable to establish sustainable life on Vesta.

  The Cybrids wasted no time. They kicked into problem-solving mode, came up with a simple solution—to extract all the nitrogen they needed from the atmosphere of Titan—and were awaiting final approval before the human project managers had finished reading the initial analysis.

  One team of Cybrids went to mine nitrogen, while others rounded up the enormous chunks of ice from among the asteroids and placed them inside the Vesta tunnels. They used some of the icy bodies to fill lakes and streams inside the colony tunnels. Next, they electrolyzed some of the water to produce oxygen for the atmosphere and mixed it with the nitrogen.

  When you had no shortage of energy for propulsion or construction, you could work miracles. Kathy’s Cybrids had done exactly that: worked miracles.

  Even Kathy was impressed with the performance of her Cybrids. Around the globe, excitement and hope for a brighter future was growing. Investors were buzzing about great new businesses that would be opening as the mining and refining operations extracted the resources out there. It was a heady, invigorating time for science and engineering.

  Sometimes Kathy and Greg forgot how it was all going to come to a spectacularly disastrous end.

  As Kathy had feared, a number of high-profile individuals—all oblivious of Project Vesta’s true purpose—banded together and publicly called for the project to redirect some of the most valuable metal-rich planetoid
s to an accessible near-Earth orbit.

  To placate them and to reduce the likelihood of project-halting riots, the team shipped a few token packets of commercially valuable minerals Earthward.

  It took some artful finagling by Kathy and the team’s best spin talent to explain the negligible, slow return on global efforts and investment to date, and to hide the fact that the bulk of the extracted resources were being kept out past the Mars orbit.

  Kathy became adept at public relations, spinning politics, economics, and statistics on the fly. The scent of new growth and new resources to exploit was tantalizing to the money hounds, who were only going to get more restless as the project wore on. For the moment, the worst of them were being held at bay.

  The Cybrids stationed on Vesta focused on constructing, sealing, and pressurizing the colony tunnels. Once that was done, they moved into the habitats to construct buildings, and to plant the first fields and forests.

  One rocket from Earth contained nothing but bacteria, algae, protozoa, and other microorganisms necessary for a healthy ecology. Another took a cargo of invertebrates. Worms, insects, spiders and a host of “creepy crawlies” were critical to any place that could autonomously and indefinitely support human life.

  Along the way, Kathy and Greg learned more environmental biology than they’d ever had interest in acquiring. In the end, the team felt it better to err on the side of caution and shipped everything they could think of. It would be easier to sort out imbalances later than to suffer the need of an organism that no longer existed.

  Freshwater and saline environments were both provided, though the new marine “oceans” were tiny compared to Earth’s. They were able to save the dolphins, but larger marine organisms like whales would perish with the planet that first gave birth to them. They froze a few symbolic samples of embryos, eggs, and sperm but it was unlikely any of them would be viable before a habitable ocean could be found or constructed.