The Myth of the Maker

by Bruce R Cordell

  “I’m real. I think. Anyway, I came over to see you, found your house tossed, and you like this.”

  “Yeah.” Bradley sighed, and gingerly touched his head. He said, “You know, last time I woke up feeling like this, I eventually found out you were responsible.”

  He was talking about the red toolbox to the head. “Uh. About that–”

  “The only good thing about being knocked unconscious in the VR lab was that I didn’t have to see the bodies. I woke up in a hospital.”

  The floor seemed to drop beneath me. “Oh, Jesus, Bradley. I had to stop the…” What I wanted to say sounded insane.

  “I know, Carter. You explained it.”

  That made no fucking sense. “Bradley, I don’t remember that. I don’t remember talking to you. My last memory is of returning to Ardeyn.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t remember?” New anxiety colored his voice.

  “I don’t remember anything after that day in the lab. Last thing I remember is trying to connect to a version of Ardyen I’d installed over the starting grid. The next thing I remember is waking up about an hour or so ago, lying on a garage floor.”

  It was Bradley’s turn to look confused. More confused, anyway. He said, “How come you’re not all dressed up in your, um, superhero costume?”

  The question came so completely out of left field that I just stared at him with my mouth open.

  “You know,” he continued, gesturing vaguely with one hand, “When you showed up last time, a few months after you bashed me on the head. Wearing that black armor made out of… magic runes? It was all freaky and shit. You said something about an inapposite gate being required to throw Ardeyn out of temporal synch with the dimension of normal matter, whatever that means… No?”

  “’Inapposite’? I don’t even know what that means. I think your concussion is talking,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “But if not, then I need to tell you a few things.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Though I gotta warn you, you’re not going to like the ending.”

  “I already don’t like the beginning.”

  He chuckled, then coughed. I gave him some water.

  “Hey,” he said. “Think you can get me a cup of coffee? A pot’s already brewed.”

  Finding a clean cup was harder than locating the coffee maker, but I finally brought him what he wanted, my anxiety mounting all the while. Had I found Jason, Mel, and the others on the other side after all? If so, why couldn’t I remember any of it?

  Bradley sipped gratefully, then said, “You were one of the bodies. In the lab. You were good and dead. I attended your funeral.”

  Why weren’t there two bodies, I suddenly wondered? The original me I’d killed, and then the body of the newly printed me that reconnected back. Something must have changed after I’d downloaded Ardeyn into the primordial network. But Bradley was still talking, so I put it out of my head.

  He continued, “Then you had the nerve to show up alive and kicking a few months later. Fuck if I didn’t think I’d thrown a gasket. After I shat myself, you explained things. You said that you were the one that nearly staved my head in, and explained about the alien network that swallows worlds.”

  I furrowed my brow, trying to recall any of it, but couldn’t. “I said that?”

  “You really don’t remember? You said that, and a whole lot more. About how you’d discovered why there was no evidence of other intelligent life in the universe, and how everyone else on Earth almost learned why, too.”

  I shuddered. “I don’t remember telling you. But it’s true, about dark energy – it’s a trap. Use computers long enough to hit on the right superposition of qbits, and bam!” I smacked my palm.

  “So I gathered.”

  “But I still don’t remember anything else.

  He eyed me carefully. “You look like a regular person again. Normal. Last time I saw you, it was more than just the clothes that were different. You were different. Fresh-faced, bigger-than-life, and you sort of came across like… I don’t know how to describe it. Like you’d just stepped out of a movie, complete with make-up and special effects. It convinced me you’d really come back from the other side.”

  “Yeah…”

  The memory of “printing” to Earth after the initial fiasco was more like a memory of a dream then something that’d actually happened. I hadn’t been able to specify clothing, or even oxygen. I’d just asked the limitless processing power of the network to copy and translate “me” back to atomic scale, without understanding a billionth of what was actually happening. Thankfully, it was as if the entire network was designed to do exactly that. Sufficiently advanced technology, blah blah blah: magic. Yeah.

  “So, what else did bigger-than-life me tell you?” I asked.

  “That our game had installed on a dark energy, um, partition, with nearly-infinite fidelity. By doing so, it created a buffer of specified rules, capable of protecting the Earth from arbitrary attack by things that lived in that network. You called them planetovores. You were so fucking convincing. You made me believe. Of course, when a corpse shows up with a story of alternate realities and portal jumping, it lends credibility to the narrative.”

  “I remember uploading Ardeyn, mostly. I didn’t know if it would work. Did I say how everyone else was?”

  “You said the others weren’t dead. That they were alive down in the network; Jason, Mel, Alice, and Sanders.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Relief and astonishment made my hands shake. How that could be true, I could hardly imagine, but I desperately hoped Bradley was right.

  He took another gulp of coffee, then, “All of you had assumed the roles of avatars in Ardeyn, you explained. Something from our old game, before we came to work with Sanders. Four of you merged with the four of the seven Incarnations. Jason was War, Alice was Silence, Mel was Death, and Sanders was Lore. You reserved the Maker, the creator, for yourself.”

  “Jesus on a stick,” I muttered.

  “Sort of. Except the Maker has no son, remember? When we made up Ardeyn’s cosmology, we didn’t want to replicate Christian theology, except for the especially interesting bits.” He laughed, weakly.

  I shook my head.

  Neither of us said anything for a while. What was there to say?

  Except… ”Why am I here now, with no memory of being the Maker, or any of this shit?”

  “You’re asking me?” said Bradley.

  “Of the two of us, you’re apparently the only one who remembers the last three years.”

  “Yeah,” he said, though he didn’t sound so sure. “Maker-you told me to keep tabs on quantum computer research, VR, and look for anything that might lead to a repeat of what we did. Including experiments with particle colliders that reached energies of a specified level. If I saw anything like that, I was to interfere.”

  “Uh huh,” I said doubtfully. “Am I here because you interfered with something?”

  “Maybe so. I’ve been investigating a place called Banks Digital Realty.”

  “They were looking into quantum computing?” I asked. What was surprising was that more companies weren’t doing the same, actually.

  “Probably. But I must’ve somehow shown my hand. Three guys came by yesterday and beat the hell out of me. They wrecked my house for good measure. Probably thought they’d killed me. They didn’t realize my skull is practiced in taking hard knocks.” He gave me a significant look. Yeah, subtle.

  “Who is this Banks?”

  Bradley set his coffee down, picked it up again and sipped. “Liza Banks. A reformed con artist turned tech entrepreneur. For the last few months, I’ve been digging up everything I can about her. I must’ve slipped up, and she found out about me.”

  An image of the starting grid made me swallow. My voice tight, I said, “If Banks is messing around with the wrong kind of qbit, we need to–”

  “I hired a private investigator to check out the server farm where she’s tweaki
ng her hardware. The PI might’ve found something.”

  “You told someone else this story, and he didn’t have you committed?”

  A smile, then, “She didn’t have me committed. No, I didn’t explain why I really put her on retainer. She thinks she’s looking for exploits.”

  I chuckled. “Smart. All right, who’s this investigator? We need to talk.”

  9: Consultation

  Katherine Manners

  Kate’s phone rang. Not recognizing the number, she sent the call to voice mail. If it was important, they’d leave a message.

  She glanced at Raul. He was still hunched over his laptop, headphones clapped over his ears and eyes glued to his screen. He hadn’t moved since he plugged in the drive three hours ago. She’d offered him a couple of suggestions, one of which he actually took, miracle of miracles.

  So she waited, drinking coffee and surfing sites where security professionals discussed the latest hacks, exploits, and vulnerabilities. Unsurprisingly, sys admins were having the same issues they always had: stupidity and human culpability. As entertaining as that was, none of the forum threads had anything to do with spontaneously melting men. She sighed and closed her browser.

  Maybe she should contact her client. Despite what she’d told Raul, she hadn’t called Michael Bradley after the incident. She’d assumed that Jason and his strange USB stick had nothing to do with what her client wanted. But she’d been bitten by making assumptions before. Maybe Bradley knew something that might lead to a clue about Jason.

  Her phone rang again. This time, the name on the display was Michael Bradley. The hair on her arms prickled.

  She swallowed, accepted the call, and said, “Hello? Weirdly enough, I was just thinking about you. I have questions about the case.”

  A few seconds of silence met her greeting, then an unfamiliar voice said, “I doubt you were thinking about me, because I’m not Bradley. I’m a friend of his. Is this Katherine Manners?”

  “This is Kate. Who’re you? And where’s Bradley?”

  “Michael hit his head. He’s under the weather. I’m calling on his behalf. I’m Carter Morrison. Call me Carter.”

  Kate’s what-the-fuck radar buzzed, but she decided to see where the conversation went. “Heya, Mr Morrison. Nice to meet you. What can I help you with? I see you’re using Bradley’s phone to make this call.”

  The man chuckled. “You didn’t answer when I called you on my phone, so I tried this one. I’m actually working with Bradley. How’re things going with your Banks Digital Realty investigation?”

  Having just faked her way into BDR, Kate was sensitive to anything that smelled like the same ploy. And this joker stank of it.

  She said, “As I’m sure you appreciate, Mr Morrison, I can’t discuss cases with every stranger who claims to be a friend of a client, even when that self-proclaimed friend dials in from a client’s number.”

  “That makes sense,” Carter said. The sound of muffled voices came over the connection. Then someone else spoke.

  “Kate? This is Michael Bradley. Sorry, I should’ve told you before. Carter’s working with me. In fact, he’s the one who first identified the, uh, issues at BDR. Carter asked me to help out, and I hired you.”

  She imagined this Carter guy holding a gun on Bradley.

  “Are you all right?”

  Bradley replied, “Well enough. I have a whopper of a headache though, and bright light hurts my eyes. I hit my head.”

  He didn’t sound scared, just tired. She trusted her instinct to tell the difference, even over the phone. She said, “You hit your head?”

  “Stupid household accident. I need to stay off my feet for a couple of days, in case I managed to concuss myself.”

  “Ouch,” she helpfully offered.

  Bradley said, “Anyhow, how’s the investigation going? Did you find anything suspicious at BDR?”

  Kate chewed her lip. What should she say? “Yeah, I found something. But it wasn’t an exploit or an unpatched SQL database.”

  “What was it? Wait, Carter wants to talk.”

  “Ms Manners?” came Carter’s voice again. “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and glanced at Raul. His posture was terrible, but he’d come by it through years of similar sitting. With his headphones cranking Chuck Wild, he hadn’t even realized she was talking to someone on the phone.

  “Bradley says you found something?”

  “Yeah,” she repeated, wondering how much to reveal. If she told the whole story, Carter would decide she was batshit crazy and hang up.

  “What?” prompted Carter.

  Kate said, “Nothing to do with servers. In fact, what I saw was a bit… Twilight Zone-ish.”

  She heard Carter draw breath, then, “Try me.”

  “Well, here’s the thing. I met a man who wasn’t there.”

  Silence, then, “Um, what?”

  “OK, listen up, Mr Morrison – Carter. In BDR’s server room, I saw someone appear out of nowhere. A man with no clothing. He was sick, said a bunch of stuff that made no sense, then he just… melted. What do you have to say about that?”

  Excited voices tripping over each other crackled from her handset. Apparently Carter had put her on speaker. Finally Carter shushed Bradley and said, “This… the man… We should meet. There’s no time, if people are printing across the boundary. Jesus. I need to get back into BDR, where you found this man. And–”

  “Just tell me what the fuck is going on, Morrison.”

  “Liza Banks got a courier from the other side.”

  “Other side of what?”

  Carter fell silent.

  “Before he melted,” Kate offered, “Jason said something about giving Liza a ring. Does that have anything to do with–”

  “Jason? His name was Jason?” yelled Carter.

  “Yeah, that was his name. But–”

  Carter said, “Ms Manners, meet me at BDR. Bradley and I will double your pay. Something catastrophic is happening. It’s gotta be stopped.”

  Her palms felt sweaty, but she resisted the urge to rub them on her jeans. “What, specifically, is happening? You’re not making any sense.”

  “No time to explain over the phone. But if Banks got what she wanted from her visitor, her servers are more dangerous than nuclear warheads.”

  Kate’s eyes fastened on the USB ring still protruding from Raul’s laptop. “Banks didn’t get the information Jason carried. I think I intercepted it.”

  A man wearing a dark pea coat loitered in the parking structure where Carter said he’d be, even though she was running late. Sometimes a woman needs a bathroom break. Kate parked five cars down.

  He was alone. So was she. Raul remained at the coffee shop. Kate had departed so abruptly he’d become suspicious, especially after she reclaimed the flash drive ring. Raul’s probably hadn’t believed her lame story about having to walk her dog. She didn’t have a dog. He probably knew that. She didn’t enjoy lying to one of her few friends, but she didn’t want to pull him in any more than she already had.

  Besides, it was possible, despite Carter’s assurance to the contrary, that she really had gone mad. Maybe Bradley had infected her, and Carter had infected Bradley… She didn’t want to pass on the crazy to her friend, who was already a bit of an odd duck.

  Kate grabbed her pack, left her vehicle, and walked across the garage to the man in the pea coat.

  “Katherine Manners?” he said.

  She extended a hand. “And you must be Carter Morrison. Call me Kate.”

  He gave her a quick smile and squeezed her hand. He said, “Do you have Jason’s flash drive?”

  He obviously wasn’t one for small talk. Fine. She said, “Yes. It’s yours, after you tell me what you meant by servers becoming nuclear bombs.”

  Carter frowned. “It’s complicated.”

  “Then let’s talk as we go.” She motioned him to walk with her.

  “I still haven’t figured out the best way to explain what�
��s happened. It defies regular understanding.”

  “Remember,” Kate said, “I’m the one who saw a man turn into jelly. I’ve got an open mind when it comes to this topic.”

  Carter walked beside her across the parking structure, hands in his coat pockets, eyes down as if searching the cracked cement for somewhere to start.

  “So, this Jason guy is your friend?” she offered as they ascended the stairs to level three.

  The man winced. But he said, “Yeah. He and I, Bradley, and a few others were doing computer research at the university… three years ago, I suppose. I haven’t seen him since. There was an accident.”

  “Three years? Damn, what kind of accident? Was he irradiated or something, and I saw the result?”

  “Not exactly. Actually, I thought he was dead. If you saw Jason walking around, then a whole lot’s happened that I don’t know anything about.”

  Kate hoped Carter wasn’t playing her. For someone who’d claimed to have all the answers on the phone, he was remarkably out of touch. On the other hand, he was the best thing going when it came to figuring what’d happened in the server room.

  They reached level five of the structure, the one Kate was looking for. Before them, an expanse of empty parking spots fronted a blank wall and its single door bearing the BDR logo. A security camera perched above the entrance. A card reader flanked it.

  But she didn’t advance. She just waited.

  “What’s wrong?” said Carter.

  “Listen, I need to know a lot more than ‘yeah, an accident, I’m out of the loop’ if you want my help.”

  Carter pursed his lips, but nodded.

  “And,” she said, “I need to prepare my kit. I posed as an office plant care specialist to get in last time, but that won’t work on the weekend. You talk, I’ll get plan B ready.”

  She set her pack down and rummaged for her card-spoofing shim. She and Raul had cobbled it together a year earlier. She’d been curious if a security reader could be bypassed by manipulating a reader’s magnetic field to mimic a legitimate card. She’d about given up, but brought in Raul to see what he thought, and he’d managed to make it work. Raul had a way with electronics that sometimes seemed otherworldly.