He winces, and winces again. Sucks air between his teeth. This isn't pain, exactly, but each slice cuts keenly. Cisco feels himself sliced up and sliced, with every slice turned this way and that, and every section is the whole of him but different. It's a hackattack. He can see himself looking back at himself from behind the desk. He sees himself, from behind the desk, standing just inside the door blinking and gaping.
Three of him stand on the guests' side of the counter, all following the desk clerk's stare to look at him. And he sees himself through their eyes. His eyes. His guts twist with a gruesome malaise magnified many times over by its uncertain center. He leans against the doorframe; he braces himself against the reception desk. He reels back against the suitcases behind him, and two more of him come in off the street to gawk.
Somebody has hit him with a prism. A neat bit of engineering, and a fine practical joke if you want to drive a person insane. Prisms are sometimes used in therapy, under controlled conditions and with only mixed success, to encourage patients to disintegrate, assigning constituent selves to the various prismatic clones, encouraging them to come to terms with each other, and then reintegrating the personality.
Cisco notes in passing the half‐eaten sandwich in its greasy brown‐paper wrapper on a shelf beneath the counter. He smells strong cheese. Excellent detail. He watches himself almost fall over the suitcases on the other side of the desk. He watches himself—two more of him, fresh off the street—and he sees himself smirking at himself as he almost falls over the suitcases on the other side of the desk.
Flashback. A vivid dream, precious relic of his missing childhood. A city street. A pre‐mall city with big buildings and shop fronts all around. And he's scared because he has lost his mother and father to the crowds. But he spots them again just as panic starts setting in. Walking arm‐in‐arm towards him—smiling, he thinks, though he can't really see their faces. He runs to meet them. And now the nightmare really begins. All the other people around his parents are smiling in the same unclear way, and they're all his mother and father. The whole street, the whole city, is full of nothing but identical couples all dressed alike and all smiling at him in the same way. The sense of aloneness and loss overwhelms him. He remembers waking in terror, crying, and his mother comforting him. But he still can't bring her face to mind. Maybe he has added that bit to the dream in the years since. And his father isn't there at all.
He can't find his console. Reflexively, he reaches for his locket, which of course isn't there either. He pushes past himselves to walk back out onto the street. Focus on one thing; get back to the portal. Don't look at anyone. Breath deeply and calmly. Eyes down and make a beeline for the portal. No problem.
All of himselves watch as he leaves.
•
Cisco steps out of the hotel into a stampede. The sky is full of black cloud and fire and lightning, the air thick with ash and dust and rumble of storm and hooves. He backs against the rockface as hundreds of ridiculous creatures, big as dinosaurs, thunder past goggling in all directions out of huge crystal‐faceted compound eyes, furry tentacles lashing about as ash and fiery stones rain from the sky, pathetic witterings barely audible above the slobbering of the large orifices under their eyes. They stink of something so foul you want to congratulate the worldsmiths. In the distance, a sullen great volcano spews ash and fire, runs with lava. A lightning tiara flashes around its thunderhead turban.
He retreats into the cave, tries to go back the way he came.
•
Cisco steps from the cave straight out onto a frozen pink sea. Into utter disorientation. He has stepped through a vertical portal entrance and emerged from a horizontal exit that leaves him sprawled on the ice. He picks himself up and turns to survey this new World. It isn't meant to be Earth; the horizon is too distant.
There's no discernible curvature in all this vast pink landscape. And it's utterly silent. Except for the pulse of blood in Cisco's ears, the crackle of vertebrae when he drops over to let his head hang loose, hands flat on the textureless pink ground, which is at body temperature. All is plastic anonymity.
Pink ice extends to the horizon in all directions, the peaks of mountain ranges barely poking into view here and there, unreasonably far, and two smallish suns shine through dim, rainbow‐hued haloes in the claret sky overhead. Cisco looks down just in time to see a hole in the warm ice wink shut. His portal. Then he looks up and the horizons zoom away from him. He is his universe, and the universe yawns. The suns retreat vastly higher. Cisco finds himself dwindling to a singularity, a point of pure panic that threatens to explode into chaos.
Stepping to where the hole was, he's enveloped in a total pink‐out, swept up in a blizzard of saccharine nothingness.
•
No cold, no sting of snow or lash of wind. A rosy cocoon that quickly loses both its color and its intimacy. Cisco is suspended in a featureless, colorless, dimensionless void. You can't even call it a space, there being no direction, no distance. No up, no down. He tries to shout, but there is no sound. He tries to turn back the other way, but his body isn't there.
Cisco is nothing but a point of pure consciousness. This is bad. Maybe the worst. He is conscious and that is all. There is nothing to be conscious of. His mind runs out in all directions. Still, in his mind he hears Leary's words. That's frig all. Cisco subvocalizes it. His panacea. This is a World, after all. And he is Cisco Smith, alpha test pilot. No sweat. He lets himself flow with it. With whatever they want to throw at him.
But he is nowhere and there's no place from where he can begin the search for himself. It's a kind of vertigo. A sense of being very, very high with nothing below. He shrinks in on himself. And shrinks. He clutches a center deep in his gut, holding hard to himself. He falls through a portal into a box, the dimensions of which are himself. Crammed into this space that is no space, just a horrible intimacy from which there's no escape. He breathes evenly and deeply, seeks the kernel that lies inside himself, his brait. “That's frig all,” he manages to tell himself, an act of desperation.
Then he feels another in the box with him. A poorly defined presence. But it shifts and grows. Burgeons. Threatens to displace him. But where is there to go? A touch of ancient dread, grimmer than death, gibbers at him. Cisco is compressed in the grip of an annihilating fury, squeezed away from himself.
Worldsday
“Thank God!” Dee Zu says. “Tor.”
•
The rest is easy. She's back in her apartment, safe and sound but hurt that Tor didn't make love to her. And ashamed, at the same time, unable to shake the keen sense of having betrayed Cisco. She checks her tank, which is empty except for Leary.
Looking glad to see her but anxious, he says, “He's still in there, isn't he?”
“I'm going back,” Dee Zu replies.
“What? No, you can't.”
“He may need help.”
Worldsday
“Here, Cisco. Here. Come back!”
And he does go back, sort of. He's neither here nor there; he's slipping back there when a second voice stops him. “Cisco!” It's Dee Zu. “Cisco. Come this way. Look.” There's light. An ill‐defined portal. Something tugs at him. Someone. He can't see her, but he knows it's her.
The jump button. It's flashing. Automatic recall.
You get a ten‐pulse delay with automatic jump recalls. Cynics in the corps say this is so the test pilot has a last chance to formulate a report on whatever trauma is going down before he frags. The ten pulses seem like a hundred. Then Cisco is home. Safe in his apartment in the ESUSA Mall. Shakier than he likes to admit even to himself. He kills the suspension field and steps out of his cradle. Without being asked, a chair assembles itself behind him, and Smoke moves to his side.
Who has done this? How had they managed to hit him? Nobody but MOM understands the codes these days. If someone's hacking the Worlds, who on earth could it be? Cisco believes he knows. It's either Sky or, as unlikely as that may be, it's Brian. But whic
h? And why?
“Doll,” he says. “Make me a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Make me two of them.” He waves at Dee Zu and Leary, who are in the tank, both of them talking at the same time.
The Doll actually serves up the sandwiches, with coffee.
Now Joy pops up in the tank, and Eddie Eight. It's a full house.
“Hey, man,” Eddie Eight says. “Look at this!”
Cisco looks before he remembers not to.
Monday
He's outside. In the corridor.
He switches in and out. Cisco and anti‐Cisco, quantum particles winking in and out of a void. He is multiples of himself, but these selves are disparate, each distinct from the other, no one standpoint from which he can say: “This is me; those are the others.” This is worse than the prism. Some of them, at least, are him in some sense, yet none is him. Then he's mostly back again. He's Cisco Smith. But he's outside his apartment.
Everything is still. Even the nanobot legions have ceased their all but subliminal commotion. Featureless gray RokBot panels soar upwards on either side of the corridor; the ceiling arches away into the dim recesses above. Outside the apartment but still inside the mall, his sense of immense spaces is complicated by an attack of acute claustrophobia. He has no idea how he got here. Or how he has managed to negotiate the force‐field baffle designed to keep these corridors secure. He needs to get back inside. It's dangerous out here. Insanely dangerous. But any trepidation is outweighed by fury. By the imperative of doing this thing. He doesn't understand the anger. Cisco is one way; anti‐Cisco is the other. Cisco tries to look at his predicament. He knows what to do, knows he must get back to his apartment without delay. He needs sterilization. But he is even more preoccupied with remaining self‐aware, with resisting the black hole of oblivion. Blessed surrender to rage, to the Other. To another agenda, a simple world of absolutely focused mission. It's this side of him that's leading him away from his apartment.
Now he recognizes where he is. Where he's going. The hectic emotional stew includes both unease and excitement at a wet encounter. After all these years. The last time, they were still children.
The vast stillness is broken by a tiny voice. Cisco freezes as something pops out from around a corner. “Hi,” Toot says, raising a paw, holding an item up for inspection. “Look at this.”
Cisco is annihilated by the rage. A memory of childhood almost surfaces just as he loses himself.
•
All is dark. But he has the sense of another in this darkness; a subliminal conjunction of cues tells him he isn't alone. There's someone else. Not himself. Neither Cisco nor anti‐Cisco. It's Sky. Briefly, caught in a smoldering snarl of emotions, part of him believes it.
He drops to a crouch. Gravity weighs heavier than it ought to. He feels drugged, disenabled. “Lights!” he barks. It remains dark. He spins, delivers a solid kick with the heel of his right foot, probably to a thigh; a hammer blow with the heel of his right hand encounters what feels like a skull. “Lights!” He raps it out again. To no effect. He hits the ground rolling, still in the dark, moving away from the counterattack as the floor softens and heaves, cushioning him. This slows him, throws him off his pace. Contact is more positive in the Worlds than it is in mondoland.
A woman's voice. “Lights!” And there is light.
Cisco's instincts vie with anti‐Cisco's for control long enough for Dee Zu to score. The jarring kick misses his throat, but he feels something snap. He lunges backwards off his front foot to avoid a second kick and ducks another, ducking into the sickeningly wet pain of his broken collarbone. He flips away, holding back. Impaired by gravity. Confused. Quick as thought, then, he launches off his back foot, right fist snapping to full extension, going for the killshot. But Dee Zu is fast. He only grazes her, ripping the skin under one eye to spatter her white gossamer nightdress with blood. He's in the center of the living room now, vaulting her sweep kick to unleash a hook kick to the neck, another lethal blow that fails to connect. He spins with the momentum of his kick and lands in a crouch.
Now Cisco is back. He watches as, bleeding from the mouth and nose and favoring her left leg, Dee Zu retreats, her face mirroring his own alarm and horror. He feels a sharp pain in his right ankle, and he kicks reflexively to send Toot hurtling through the air to bounce off a wall that shrinks away to absorb the impact. What's Toot doing here?
Blinking against the sudden glare, Cisco sees her. The sense of déjà vu is overpowering. Except that this isn't Lars King. It's Dee Zu. Right here in Cisco's living room. How has a telep managed to wander out of the holotank?
But this isn't Cisco's apartment. The rooms are laid out exactly the way they are in his place, but now he registers the subdued pastel walls, the big stuffed teddy bear. Lars King had invaded his apartment; now he finds himself in Dee Zu's.
“Bad man.” Toot is gnashing at his ankle again.
He also hears Sissie's voice. She isn't whining, but she is sounding overwrought. She's standing in the holotank, wearing a natural avatar, an everyday, seventeen‐year‐old kid. And now anti‐Cisco is raging. Why doesn't she just op out, if she's going to?
“No.” Dee Zu retreats.
He goes after her.
There's the voice again, the silly one: “Cisco!”
He goes for the kill.
“No.” This is a different voice. Another woman. And she's waving at him.
Waving something. “Cisco!” she shouts.
Cisco is nothing but a fucking wimp.
“Oh, God. Get out. Let the DisposAll look after things. Go on. Get out now!”
•
Cisco is here. He's tracking. Present and largely accounted for. He knows he's outside his apartment, and this is alarming. He's in the corridor. Toot is with him, which exaggerates the dreamlike quality of things, and the pet is squeaking baffle‐code strings as they proceed from cell to force‐field cell. “Hurry!” Toot tells him. “Hurry.”
•
At home in his own apartment, Cisco is himself and he isn't. He hurts. There was a dream of mirrored shards on a mirrored floor with shards of himself strewn across it. He was multiples of himself and he was fragments. Cisco has been dreaming. He and Dee Zu were fighting. Really fighting. No game.
He comes fully back to himself, aware, sick with the realization. This was no dream.
•
Joy is distraught. “But who did this?”
“Who could do this?” Eddie Eight smirks. “You think about that.”
“Where was MOM?”
“Two little test pilots, sit‐ting on a wall,” Eddie Eight sings in a grating falsetto.
“Then one more pi‐lot takes a lit‐tle fall.”
Lars King and Dee Zu are dead. That leaves Cisco. One little test pilot.
Joy is flashing colors. “They got right into her apartment.”
“Yeah,” Eddie Eight says. “That's supposed to be impossible.”
“They killed her.”
Eddie Eight screws his face up and flaps his hands, his Joy impersonation. “And CMNN said it couldn't be done.”
Cisco is looking out his window, looking for billboards. For something new.
Anything. He feels removed from the chatter in the tank. Oppressed. Reluctant to look inwards, towards the rawness he manages to keep at arm's length. The malaise is something else, not just the annoying tickle in his chest where medibots repair bone damage.
“Wow! A big wet encounter for Dee Zu,” says Eddie Eight, with a happy sneer. “Face2face. 'Was it good for you too, Dee Zu?' What do you say, Mr Stabili‐té?”
•
Cisco's whole apartment is restive. Things are growing out of surfaces all the time, now. Everything from old‐fashioned dynamite bombs to tiny slowjoes. The tank has taken to turning itself on and off at odd moments, and it's infested with graffiti.
Here's another one now:
Mondoland is a failed World
It's more than the graffiti and majigs. He has this feelin
g that inside is opening up to whatever forces are driving Outside. The PlagueBot pushes the perimeters farther all the time. The slowjoes are approaching so close that, even with only three‐times resolution, you can see their shifting, ill‐formed features. And the billboards. Those are something new. And all kinds of funny things are happening inside the mall, now. You could almost believe MOM is losing control. But that doesn't bear thinking about.
Cisco looks out his window. He watches a new, especially gigantic gray billboard rise from the dust. It begins to flash inchoate characters; they form and reform, always just short of intelligibility. Just as he thinks he has almost got the message, the billboard collapses back into the PlagueBot substratum.
“Did you see that?” he asks Sissie.
“What?”
“Forget it.”
“Tell me.”
“Out the window. Did you see that?”
“No.”
And that's all. No further questions. Outside, black clouds begin to roil like a time‐lapse storm in the Four Seasons holo. Or maybe it's all in Cisco's head. He's so tired. To make things worse, Eddie Eight has popped up into the tank.
“Think about it,” he says. “Maybe all we're seeing is the holo behind the holo. Hollow men looking at a holo world. Did you ever think about that? Maybe MOM wants to keep us in here. That's why we see what we see.”
Cisco turns to Eddie Eight, wondering why he bothers, and replies: “MOM's a machine.”
Eddie Eight isn't listening; he's on a roll. “I'll bet it's all meadows and flowers out there. Fucking lambs gamboling.”
Cisco turns back to his window as a dust storm blows up, a real gray‐out. He's left staring into a dimensionless void. He turns back to spot a brand‐new graffito bobbing away in the tank:
The Proteant Enigmass is coming to get you
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