by Paul Anlee
The room looked exactly like it had in New York. She had no doubt Trillian was already in the maze, or soon on his way. They had to move fast. He could be closing in on them even now.
“We’re in the GameRoom maze I designed. Trillian somehow expanded my pipe and brought the entire city over. At least, I hope it’s just the city. I don’t think this inworld could handle the whole of Alternus.”
“Well, that would explain why it looks like this.”
Darya walked over to the window. New York was barely recognizable. Streets and buildings looked like a 3D jumble. She spotted a familiar shop on Madison Avenue, but no more than a few meters past, the street butted into a brick wall. Early morning pedestrians flowed along a section of sidewalk that appeared to come from nowhere and go nowhere. This is definitely not my New York.
She traced the brick wall upward a few stories and saw a section of the Brooklyn Bridge jutting away at a right angle. The span ran about fifty meters and stopped abruptly, truncated in open air with nothing supporting it. Okay, so where did the rest of the bridge go?
To their three dimensional eyes and minds, ten dimensional New York was a confused mess. The local Partials seemed to be oblivious to the changes. They continued along their merry ways to jobs, schools, and shopping as usual.
The transition must have translated the Partials properly.
The Fulls were not so lucky. The Supervisor permitted them to see only three dimensions at a time. Fulls could be easily identified by their hesitant, fumbling, and awkward movement.
Darya shivered. The maze was only intended for the three of us and Trillian. Not for millions of Fulls. What a mess!
“Let me see!” Timothy joined the two women at the window. “Good God! What happened to the city?” He put his hand to his head and sat heavily on the nearest bed.
“Listen, we don’t really have time to discuss this right now,” replied Darya. “We need get moving before Trillian maps our location.”
“I can’t go out there,” Timothy objected. “One would have to be insane. And if you weren’t at the start, you would be very quickly!”
“I know it looks scary,” Darya responded reassuringly, “but it’s perfectly safe. If it’ll help, close your eyes and hold my hand. I’ll guide you. We can’t stay here any longer. We have to go now.”
“Very well, I’ll follow you,” Timothy relented. “But I’m not walking around out there with my eyes closed.”
“Okay, let’s form a chain until we can get used to it,” replied Darya. “Your bodies know how to move around in this world, even though your eyes can only perceive a small part of it at a time. Let’s go.”
They joined hands and Darya led them into the hallway. They got about four meters before a street, busy with rush hour traffic, crossed their path. Cars and trucks proceeded as if nothing were unusual. They were visible only a short distance before disappearing. A few hundred meters above, they reappeared. It was as if they were driving through some invisible portal.
“Why aren’t they disturbed by this?” asked Mary. “How do they stay on the road?”
Darya explained the rules of the maze, and how the transition translated Partials into ten-dimensional beings but left the Fulls handicapped.
At the edge of the road, Darya led them in what she thought of as the “charmed” direction. They emerged in another part of the hotel corridor. A man stepped out of a room a few doors down. Darya took a protective stance, ready to defend or attack if necessary.
“Good morning,” the man greeted them, and he headed to the main stairs.
Darya moved quickly, and stopped his door from closing all the way. She dragged the other two into the room behind her.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Timothy announced from the entranceway. The floor extended only a few meters beyond the threshold. The entire back half of the room was gone and in its place was open air. That alone might have been fine but the view was no ordinary street or cityscape. They were looking straight down onto the tops of buildings and traffic gridlock from a good kilometer above.
The Footman’s instincts told him he should be falling; he pawed the entranceway for something vertical and solid to hold onto.
“Great effect,” Mary whispered appreciatively. “This is the first time I’ve seen it simulated inworld.”
Darya smiled. “I didn’t really expect this. It’s weird how the system combined local gravity and the ten spatial dimensions of the maze. On the plus side, it’ll make it harder for Trillian to find us. Let’s keep moving, though. He’s surprised us before.”
She marched toward the open sky, pulling the other two along.
Timothy kept his eyes locked on the floor. His senses told him he was walking toward a deadly precipice. He wanted to throw himself down and cling to the carpet, but he wasn’t going to let these two women appear braver than he was. He allowed himself to be dragged forward.
Just before they leaped out into the open air, Darya led them “blue-ward” and they found themselves in the other half of the room, looking out a small window at the fire escape.
“How did you figure out which way to move?” asked Mary. “I felt the direction you pulled us and I know I can move that way too, but how can you tell the floor continues in that direction and not others?”
“You have to go by touch, not sight. At the boundary, I just stuck out my toe and moved it around in all possible ways until I could feel the floor.
“Ah, okay.” Mary looked behind them. From this side, the half of the room they’d just left was no longer visible. In its place was a wall of water. The Hudson River? She took a tentative step toward the boundary and felt along the edge with her toe. At first, it met cold, murky water. After probing around a little, the tip of her toe disappeared from view. “I think I can feel carpet, here, in this direction.”
“It will take some getting used to before you’re able to move around with any confidence,” said Darya. “Fortunately, the same will be true for Trillian. I’m hoping that’ll buy us enough time to figure out how to get around his blocks and get us back to our trueselves.”
Mary glanced at Timothy. “What about him?”
“If we can figure out a way back, we should be able to send Timothy into Gerhardt’s body.”
“I’m not sure how much I’d like that. I’m quite content in this body,” said Timothy.
“You’re not really in a body, Timothy. Remember? Right now, you’re just some code running on inworld hardware.”
“Yes. And I have no idea what that means.”
“I know. Just trust me. You don’t want to be here if Trillian decides to deactivate the local inworld sims.”
“Do you think he’d go that far?” Mary asked. She couldn’t believe it would come to that.
The Cybrids relied on the inworlds to help maintain the link to their ancestral humanity. While select inworlds had fallen into disfavor from time to time, and some had been permanently deactivated, none had ever been turned off while inhabited, not once in her exceedingly long memory. People could die that way.
“I admit it’s extreme. But when was the last time you heard of a Shard hacking across inworlds? In fact, when was the last time you heard of a Shard inworld at all?”
“You’re right about that. Trillian is unusual, and he’s driven.”
“I think he’s determined to catch us, or at least me. It wouldn’t have been that hard to remove power to all inworld hardware and kill us. He could have ended the rebellion right there.”
“Along with several million Cybrid deaths?”
“Do you really think Alum cares about that? It might delay His program a few million years while He rebuilds the construction force. Just a blink of an eye for the Living God.”
“Okay, so what’s your plan?”
“First, we have to find somewhere safe, somewhere we can think for a while.”
“Like where?”
“What about Gerhardt’s office at the Fed? I still have my key
.”
“Are you forgetting that Trillian killed Gerhardt?”
“No, that’s why it’s perfect. He won’t expect us to go there.”
“You can predict what a Shard might think?”
Darya almost reacted to Mary’s little dig but caught herself in time. Pushing back wasn’t going to help any of them. “No, not at all. It just seems like our best choice. It’ll buy us a few hours or days to figure out how to get out of here.”
“In that case, lead on,” Mary offered, and waved them through with an overly theatrical gesture.
The pair followed Darya through the window, down metal stairs and a rickety ladder that rolled down to the alley. From there, they made their way through a folded ten-dimensional New York, from Lenox Hill near Central Park to Wall Street in south Manhattan. It was a long and difficult six kilometers, made harder by having to stop and feel their way forward at the ten-dimensional folds where they couldn’t follow visually.
As they walked, Mary and Darya devoted most of their processing power to analyzing their predicament. The sight of two women and a man walking hand-in-hand didn’t draw more than moderate curiosity from people they passed along the way. After all, this was New York. Almost anything was acceptable if not already commonplace.
Darya thought she spotted Trillian more than once while they walked. He would disappear around a corner before she could be sure. After a while, she attributed it to nerves.
“I think I have it backward,” Darya realized as they passed through the neighborhood of the Empire State Building.
“What do you mean?” Mary asked.
“Well, you know how the Alternus inworld is different from the standard approach used in other inworlds?”
“Yes. Usually, our minds remain resident in our bodies and just communicate with the virtual worlds.”
“Right. Normally getting in and out is just a formality. The accepted gates or portals are a convention and only enforced by the Supervisor.”
“That’s why we got trapped in Lysrandia that time.”
“Exactly. Since my modifications, that can’t happen again.”
“Except in Alternus.”
“Yeah. I had to set it up differently. First, the normal communication bandwidth wasn’t broad enough to provide such a high degree of realism. Second, in order to inject the concepta virus, I needed full access to each Cybrid’s full mental system.”
“So, when we enter Alternus, we copy in our full personas.”
“Not really. It’s more like we inject or transfer them. There’s no copy left behind in our trueselves. When we leave Alternus, we’re moved back into our external body’s CPU again. It’s a move, not a copy.”
“Okay. So what’s your point? What do you have backward?” asked Mary, perplexed.
“I don’t think we left the Earth sim hardware and went into the GameRoom. I think Trillian’s interference pulled the GameRoom into Alternus.”
“What? Why do you think that?”
“Because I haven’t noticed any degradation in my thought processes. It feels like I’m still running on quark-spin hardware, not the standard stuff. If we’d injected our personas into the GameRoom without being able to access our trueself bodies, I’d feel slow as molasses here.”
“I haven’t quite figured out how to make that interface yet, to the inworld quark-spin lattice. But okay. I believe you. We’re still on the Alternus hardware, not the normal inworld stuff.”
“We’re separated from our bodies, but I don’t think Trillian is separated from his.”
“If he hacked in from DonTon, then he would use the normal communication channels. His main processing would still be in his own body. Wouldn’t it?”
“I think so, and that could give us an advantage.”
“It hasn’t helped us much yet. He had more control over the Alternus Supervisor than you did.”
Darya frowned. “You’re right, but he had a lot of lead time to plan and set things up. We’ve had almost no time at all to react.
“You know, it’s possible our bodies may have been physically disconnected from the inworld recharge ports. That’s the only way Trillian could guarantee we wouldn’t get past a software blockade.”
“But our bodies weren’t disconnected earlier,” Mary countered. “Unless, do you think he found our trueselves and placed them in custody? If that’s the case, we’re done. Where could we possibly go?”
Darya stopped walking. She placed her hands on her hips and looked around at the infuriatingly confusing paths around them. “I have no idea...yet.”
* * *
Three exhausting hours later, they walked into the FRBNY building. Darya’s passkey got her into the lobby, where she confidently signed in Mary and Timothy as her guests. The three passed through the metal detector and security check and were waiting for the elevator when they heard a voice that chilled them to their virtual bones.
“Ah, there you are!” Trillian said cheerfully as he walked toward them.
Darian grabbed Timothy’s and Mary’s hands and pulled them “strangeward” then “redward” for a few steps. They emerged from inside an unknown building onto a sidewalk that ran alongside the United Nations Plaza. They ran another hundred yards, and came to a stop near a street corner where the sidewalk ran under some trees. Trillian was nowhere in sight.
“Where do we go now?” cried Mary. “He’ll chase us until we have nowhere to run.”
“I think we’ve lost him for the moment,” gasped Darya. “How did he find us so quickly?”
The hotdog vendor at the corner looked up at them, smiling. “It wasn’t all that difficult.” He wore Trillian’s face.
Again Darya grabbed her two friends and pulled them in a rapid succession of other-dimensional directions. With each change in direction, she ran a few meters. After half a dozen rapid twists and turns, they found themselves in what looked like an empty office complex.
“What is happening?” asked a confused and angry Timothy. “How can he possibly follow us through this?”
“He can’t,” answered Darya. “I think he’s found a way to use our city against us.”
“He’s cloning himself into the Partials,” said Mary.
“Yes. Before long, he’ll be copied into every Partial in the city. We’ll never be able to avoid him wherever there are people. He might even be overwriting some real people.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past him at this point. He’s single-minded. It seems like Alum is really serious about getting to the bottom of our resistance.”
Darya pondered their options a moment. “Listen, I think I have a way to get you two into trueself bodies, but I can’t do it from here.”
“Okay, which way should we go?”
“No, I mean not here in the GameRoom. We need to get to Vacationland.”
“Why? What’s there?”
“There’s a portal to an ancient radio transmission device. We used to use it for local communications, back before the broadcast lasers were installed. I can access it and transmit our personas back into our trueselves.”
“Why not from here?”
“Given enough time, I probably could.”
Mary looked around the empty offices, calculating. “How much time do you need?”
Behind them, the doorknob of the entrance to the offices rattled. Darya hustled the three of them into one of the smaller rooms off to the side.
“More time than we probably have,” she answered. “That could be just another Partial or even a Cybrid, or it could be another Trillian clone. It won’t take me long to hack into Vacationland. I set up access to the ancient radio control room through one of the plantation service sheds over there.”
“Service sheds again? Like in Lysrandia?”
“I know, maybe I’m becoming too predictable. Anyway, I still have the interface pipe code that brought us here. It should be easy to alter it to take us to Vacationland.”
; Darya closed her eyes to shut out distractions and made some quick alterations to the code. As she was finishing, footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the office.
They huddled behind a solid partition separating the two sides of the room and listened to the door opening. A few seconds later, someone uttered a disappointed, “Hunh,” and the door closed with a thud.
Darya peeked around the edge of the partition. The room was empty. She breathed a sigh of relief.
The sound of morning greetings in the outer office filtered into their room through the small louvered window above the office door.
“We’d better leave while we still can,” whispered Mary.
Darya nodded, “I’ve expanded the bandwidth using some of Trillian’s alterations to the original pipe. We can all go together this time.”
“Without bringing all of this with us?” Mary swept her hand out to include the weird extrapolation of New York.
“No, I’ve filtered that out, and I don’t think Trillian will be able to track us from here. Not very easily. The pipe winds near a few other inworlds, and I’ve opened a few side portals as decoys to throw him off. It’ll take him long enough to figure out where we’ve gone.”
“Long enough to what?” asked Timothy. The poor man looked bewildered and exhausted, though he was doing his best to keep his signature “stiff upper lip” intact.
“Long enough to get us into real bodies,” replied Darya. She could see a shadow reflected on the tile floor outside the door. Someone was standing there. She opened the transfer pipe above the three of them.
As she activated it, Darya stood up to see who was entering the room. The last thing she saw before her persona transferred to Vacationland was Trillian leaping over the partition, trying to get into the pipe.
The pipe snapped shut in front of him. Darya smiled in transition. Trillian flew harmlessly over the desk and crashed into the wall opposite the door.
45
Reverend Alan LaMontagne, former Spiritual Leader of Yeshua’s True Guard Church of the Prophet Alum, was dying.