Table of Contents
By the Same Author
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1: Recursion
2: Disconnection
3: Investigation
4: Duplication
5: Resurrection
6: Paranoia
7: Sovereign
8: Reconciliation
9: Consultation
10: Abrogation
11: Aspiration
12: Confrontation
13: Possession
14: Emigration
15: Suspicion
16: Deception
17: Namer
18: Revelation
19: Ringmaster
20: Regent
21: Nightstar
22: Computation
23: Expedition
24. Exploration
25: Translation
26: Reflection
27: Homecoming
28: Desire
29: Emancipation
30: Commitment
31: Haunting
32: Short Cut
33: Reunion
34: Dissolution
35: Acclamation
36: Fervor
37: Exaltation
38: Recognition
39: Evaluation
40: Celebration
Acknowledgments
About the Author
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Oath of Nerull
Lady of Poison: The Priests
Darkvision
Stardeep
Plague of Spells
City of Torment
Key of Stars
Sword of the Gods
Spinner of Lies
BRUCE R CORDELL
Myth of the Maker
A NOVEL OF THE STRANGE
For Torah Cottrill, without whose encouragement and inspiration there would be no Strange. And for JD Sparks, who still puts up his defenses in a recursion seeded by the joys and exploits of all the Hong Kong Cavaliers.
“The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations […]. Hence Fermi’s question, ‘Where is everybody?’”
– definition of FERMI PARADOX, Wikipedia.org
“Fermi’s question, ‘Where is everybody?’ shows how amazingly stupid humans are. Who are we, to imagine we have even the faintest chance of understanding where everybody is?”
– TORAH COTTRILL
“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
– JBS HALDANE
1: Recursion
Carter Morrison
The disaster that nearly wiped out the planet began in our VR lab on Tuesday morning. Earth survived, if you’re reading this. But if someone else gets too clever with math like the six of us did, the same thing could happen all over again. And there’s almost nothing anyone can do to stop it.
I’m really sorry about that, by the way.
Retrofitted computers loomed on tables along one wall of the lab. Screen-savers coiled jagged fractal designs across the monitors. Cable bundles held down with duct tape connected the whirring machines to the five lounge chairs we called our “VR rigs.” I was wearing my favorite purple hoodie with the University of Washington logo stenciled on the front. It wasn’t too warm because we kept the lab cool on account of all the computer equipment. Losing that hoodie still makes me sad.
Early for once, Jason Cole walked in with a couple of pizza boxes. Jason’s confident posture managed to convey the physicality of someone much older than his actual age of twenty-seven. His black hair was thinning a bit at the crown, and his brown eyes looked out over an impressive beard that he was inordinately proud of.
The delicious smell of roasted peperoni and baked cheese had me salivating even before Jason flipped the first box open. A familiar red hut symbol was printed on the grease-stained cardboard lid.
“What, no Pagliacci’s?” I asked, reaching for a slice.
Jason laughed. “They don’t deliver. You’ll eat this and like it.” Jason and I went way back. We met as roommates in our sophomore year of college, and got each other through computer science degrees, then our Masters, and even pursued doctorates in the field until we quit academia to found our own indie game studio. Three years after that, our game company went bust.
“At least you remembered the red pepper,” I conceded. The white packet tore open and I scattered hot flakes over my slice, folded it Brooklyn-style, and gulped it down. It was warm, but not so hot I burned my mouth. In other words, it was perfect.
“So. What do you think; is today the day?” asked Jason, reaching for more.
“Could be. Everyone’s got to catch a break sooner or later.” Our experiments had been beset with problems. Problems that we’d solved one by one, of course. Because that’s what you do, unless you decide just not to get out of bed in the morning.
“Hey, Carter, leave some for us!” called a woman with red hair worn in a long braid down her back. She hurried over, followed by a man in loose chinos and a white polo perpetually stained with coffee. She was Melissa – Mel, as everyone called her – Perkins; and he, Michael Bradley.
“Did you get any with pineapple?” Mel asked.
Jason guffawed. “Why would I ruin a perfectly good pizza with fruit?”
“Variety is the spice of life, Jason,” she replied with a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Have you ever even tried it?”
“As if. What about you, Bradley. You like pineapple?”
Bradley only shrugged and chewed. His mind was obviously still on the power issue he’d been tasked to solve.
Like Jason and me, Mel and Bradley were fellow survivors of my failed game studio. We’d gone down in flames after Ardeyn, Land of the Curse – our online roleplaying game – failed to move out of beta. My coding skills, which were impressive, if I do say so myself, hadn’t been enough to get us the wider attention we needed for a successful crowdfunding campaign. Frankly, the whole episode had been a fucking disaster.
Dead in the water, we’d had no funds, no jobs, and no prospects. Made all the worse by the fact we’d done it to ourselves. As a group, Jason, Mel, Bradley, and I had left the promise of academic research, however poorly paid, to follow our dreams of making games. Dreams that’d led nowhere. Ardeyn, Land of the Curse had turned out to be a curse in truth. Thinking about it still made my stomach hurt.
Then a hero rode in. Our old academic adviser Peter Sanders got in touch, wondering if we could help him out. He asked us to return to research at the university, even if only for a few months.
We’re not idiots. We said yes.
Sanders put the whole undergraduate team back together using grant money he’d somehow pried from the University of Washington science committee. Our job was to figure out how to exploit the astonishing results in Sanders’ latest paper, “Infinite Processing Through Quantum Recursion.” With his breakthrough as our blueprint, we fashioned the superposition chip. We thought we’d discovered free, unlimited processing power.
We were wrong.
Jason and I moved aside from the pizza so Mel and Bradley could graze from the open boxes.
“How’s the power integration coming?” Jason asked Bradley.
Bradley’s mouth was full of pizza so he just nodded. Besides electronics,
Bradley’s claim to fame was prodigious coffee consumption. If anyone drank more coffee in a single day than him, well, they’d probably be dead.
“It’s done,” Mel answered for Bradley. “We’re ready for a simultaneous connection in the enhan
ced environment.” She wiped her hands on a napkin, and then went for another piece. Mel had been a graphics modeler in the game studio. She fulfilled the same role here, helping to put together the starting grid and other enhanced environments.
“This is going to be radical,” Jason said, looking at the VR rigs. “All of us, connecting at once.”
We all knew he was lying, just a little. Jason had a touch of claustrophobia, which he pretended didn’t exist. He was both excited and nervous about putting on the goggles again. To hide his trepidation, he usually resorted to impatience. He said, “I can’t believe it’s taken us four months just to get to this point. You’re sure we’ve solved the power spike issue?”
It was Mel’s turn to shrug. She looked at Bradley.
Bradley assumed the pained expression of someone wrongfully accused and said, “Hey!”
Our last attempt to coordinate a multi-POV session in the starting grid resulted in a couple of burnt-out motherboards. All the extra uninterruptible power supplies under the monitors were Bradley’s solution.
“I’d be more worried about whether Carter came through on de-bugging the code,” called Alice Lee, who was fiddling with a chip-set on an empty table she called her workbench. Alice’s brown skin was shiny with sweat, and she wore her black hair pulled back under a kerchief decorated with pink unicorns. Alice hadn’t been part of the game studio, but I didn’t hold that against her. She’d been working with Sanders as a graduate student, before his grant money materialized and he expanded the team with the rest of us.
“Don’t worry,” I told Alice and everyone with exaggerated bravado. “I’ve got you covered.” The number of hours I’d spent tweaking the code utilizing the superposition chip had been exhausting, but everyone knew it. I didn’t have to toot my own horn… too much.
“Right,” said Alice, but she smiled. She was probably a better coder than I was, but Sanders had her working on hardware, and me on software, because she was definitely better at circuit design than anyone on this continent.
“No pizza for you?” Jason asked Alice.
Alice shook her head and went back to fiddling.
Neither she nor Sanders liked pizza. That didn’t stop Jason from buying it whenever it was his turn to get food for the group. Jason was a lot of things, many of them good, but sometimes he came off as a bit of a jerk. Especially when it came to pizza. He couldn’t understand how anyone could say no to pepperoni.
Peter Sanders, the sixth member of the team and our fearless leader, appeared in the doorway, briefcase in hand and white hair managing to look messy despite its shortness. When he saw the pizza boxes, the corners of his mouth turned down a tiny bit. Most people wouldn’t notice, but I’ve known Sanders for many years.
“Jason,” I muttered, “next time you draw lunch duty, just tell me and I’ll get food for everyone.”
“Suits me,” he said without the least trace of shame. “You can be the hero next time and get sushi.”
Yeah, sometimes Jason could really work your last nerve.
On the other hand, he’d been the one who’d helped me put together the game studio, then stood by longest when everything went south. He was loyal, just not especially empathetic.
Sanders set his briefcase aside and loosened his tie. “I got your message,” he said to Mel. “Are we still a go?”
Mel gave him the thumbs up. “We’re ready to rock and roll, Peter.”
He nodded, and then looked at the floor without meeting anyone’s eyes directly. We didn’t take it personally.
Only someone as brilliant as Sanders could’ve written his quantum recursion paper. I mean, I’m pretty smart, don’t get me wrong. Everyone says so. But next to Sanders, I’m like a drooling child. Already, single-POV immersions in the starting grid were startling in their clarity and response time. To create an artificial experience for five people at once would require a hundred times the processing power. The superposition chip promised to give us that. All because of him.
When the pizza was gone and everyone who had to go returned from the toilet, we took our places in the VR rigs. It took a few minutes to buckle in and put on the equipment. Bradley started music playing over the lab speakers, which had become something of a tradition when we tested. This time, the Beatles serenaded us about strawberry fields and how nothing was real.
“Ready?” said Sanders when the buckling and muttering subsided. His voice was muffled.
Everyone but Bradley was strapped in. I glanced around, as far as I could in the rig’s embrace. The belt around my waist pulled a little too tight, so I loosened it with my gloved hand. The rig included a seat-belt added for safety, and a foot plate for haptic transfer. Jason, Sanders, and Alice had their goggles down. Mel and I were the only remaining hold-outs. I gave her a wink. “Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?” I asked, modulating my voice to sound artificial, like a computer’s.
Mel laughed. “You’re such a nerd.”
“That’s why you love me, Mel.”
“You wish.”
“What?” said Jason, his voice smothered by his rig. “Are you two-timing me, Carter? You told me that I was the one you dreamed about at night!” The forced lightness in his voice was hardly noticeable. He was dealing with his issue with enclosed spaces pretty well this time.
“You’re both delusional,” Mel said. “No one loves Carter more than Carter. Everyone knows that!”
We all laughed, because it was probably true. Except for the times when imposter syndrome intruded and made me wonder what the hell I was doing.
“Hey,” interrupted Bradley from behind the monitors, “Give it a break. Time for hardware check.”
“Mr Bradley is correct,” said Sanders. “I’ve got a seminar in three hours.”
Alice said, her voice similarly muted, “You guys can clown around in the VR. Unless we crash the starting grid again.”
“Sorry, Alice,” I said. “I know you can’t wait to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Her goggles prevented me from seeing her eyes roll at the old joke, but Mel laughed, which was almost as good.
Bradley appeared in my field of view and pantomimed lowering goggles. “C’mon, Carter. Stop delaying. If this doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world. We’ll try something else.”
He knew me too well. If this didn’t work, we’d have little to show the science committee when it came time to ask for a grant renewal to continue developing the superposition chip. My ego couldn’t take another failure.
Pulling the box-shaped device down over my eyes wasn’t easy because I was already wearing the haptic gloves. The hardware was partly scavenged from early-adopter VR sets that had recently hit the market, and partly of Alice’s design. We weren’t testing gloves and goggles today, though; we wanted to see how the recursive VR chip handled more than a single point of view simultaneously. What seemed unbelievably realistic to just one person might prove a grainy, jerky, nausea-inducing obviously artificial environment when two, three, or as we’d decided to test today, five sightseers entered the same virtual starting grid.
The goggles showed an expanse of blank LED gray, bright, but not enough to blind me. When the simulation went live, the goggles would display the same scene to each of my eyes, slightly offset to give the illusion of depth. The superposition chip’s ability to “find” extra processing power never failed to impress. What would’ve otherwise been a pixelated tutorial region swiped from a popular resource mining game would instead be rendered with life-like clarity. Trees, grass, water, and the sky above would look real.
Even the blocky crafting table would be sleek and elegant, because I’d tweaked the code to turn the blank slab into a terminal resembling the navigation console from the second Star Trek movie. It granted control over the simulation from “inside” the starting grid.
“Begin check,” Sanders said. We verbally ran through several tests to make sure all the equipment was working. Haptic gloves and boots, the hydraulic l
ifts in the chairs, the audio, and the all-important goggles. After dealing with a tiny glitch with Mel’s headphones, Bradley announced it was time.
“Ready!” I said, amidst a hail of assents from the others.
Boiling fog flooded my field of view. It unaccountably smelled like the sea.
“What the hell?” I muttered. Damn it. My goggles were borked. I should’ve been seeing the starting grid, the VR environment we’d programed. Not all this… static.
Through the mist, indistinct forms lumbered. I stepped forward–
And fell into an abyss with sides as sheer as scissor blades. A phantom weight jerked me down. An equation cut a labyrinthine pattern across my skin, drawing blood. Before I could recognize it or cry out, it transformed, becoming an infinite series, spiraling away from me like a burned-out galaxy. Beneath the spirals, the bottom of the abyss resolved as the surface of a frozen ocean instants before I smashed through its crystalline face. Ice water embraced me, swallowing my screams in a zero-degree sea, holding me in a cocoon of cold–
And stepped into the starting grid, right next to the terminal.
Peter Sanders appeared. Then Jason, Mel, and finally Alice.
Alice scrubbed at her eyes. Sanders toppled, hit his head on the edge of the terminal as he went down, and began to twitch. Jason yelled, “Bradley, shut the fucking simulation down! Something’s wrong!”
Mel only pointed.
Mind still frozen, I looked in the direction she indicated, past the faux-brick wall that enclosed the starting grid.
Beyond it was Chaos.
Did I scream? Cry? I don’t know for sure. The endless, shuddering expanse was deeper than any real sky, and it absorbed my gaze. Within its infinite wheeling eternity, a hunger stirred. My heart raced and my breath was coming in short gasps. Everything I knew was wrong.
Voice trembling, Jason said, “I can’t get my goggles off.”
“What?” I ripped my gaze from the strangeness, and saw Jason patting at his face.
“I can’t even feel my goggles. The immersion was never this good, even after we upgraded the haptics.”
Our VR rigs were designed to make users forget they were actually sitting in a lab, but Jason was right. Normally the sensation of the goggles snugged to my face was ever present. Pushing them off my head to see the lab, even with my hands swaddled in force-feedback gloves, should’ve been as simple as thinking about it. But I couldn’t. It was as if I wasn’t in the lab at all anymore.
The Myth of the Maker Page 1