Hard Mettle

by John Hook

  The room was a little larger than a single-person office might be. It was lined with shelves and, in the center of the room, there was a long worktable with odd-looking tools and parts. Izzy moved in closer and examined the contents of the worktable. Blaise had shut the door to give us some privacy. The lights stayed on. The light in the room emanated from strips that hummed and radiated a glow. We couldn’t tell what they were made out of, but each had a black bundle that had an irregular shape attached to it. The natural assumption was that it was a power source.

  “What is all this stuff?” I came up beside Izzy.

  “As far as I can tell, it’s a breadboarding room.”

  “A what?”

  “They build or repair stuff here.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Sorry, forgot you have trouble with technical terms. I don’t know what they’re making, but it’s definitely technology.”

  Blaise had also come over, curious.

  Izzy continued. “Look at this.”

  Izzy carefully picked up a small flat square of fleshy material. It was stiffer than you would expect skin to be but it was flexible.

  “Remember those consoles we saw in the pain towers. I think these are much smaller versions of that. Some kind of small screen.”

  “For a handheld device,” Blaise suggested.

  “That would be my guess. And look here.”

  Izzy showed us two small porcelain clips, on the edge of the skin-like patch. They were like staples, they were so small. Yet out of them wriggled the tiny biological filaments we had seen before.

  “These attach to people?” Blaise asked.

  “I think those biological tendrils have multiple purposes. I suspect they can form circuits. Look.”

  Izzy picked up larger porcelain shapes lying on the table. They looked much more like the collars we had seen, with rounded shapes. They all had hollowed out places along their edges with the biological filaments. Izzy showed us how two of the shapes seemed to fit together and when they did, the filaments began intertwining. He pulled them back apart before they became too knotted together.

  Izzy walked over and looked along the shelves. “All kinds of spare parts.”

  I looked at the odd shapes spread across the work table. “The only place we saw this sort of thing before was the pain farms and the collars used to control people in Antanaria.”

  “I don’t think this is where they’re making the collars, though they might repair them here.” Izzy looked around. “This feels more like a small shop for either on-the-spot maintenance or prototyping. I would guess it serves the needs of whatever is through the double doors at the end of the hall.”

  We were interrupted by a sound just outside the door. Blaise glided up behind the door looking like a cat that spotted a bug. Izzy and I stepped back a bit. In the same motion, Izzy had his bow off his shoulder, strung, and a shaft ready.

  We heard the latch and the door opened. A man in a jumpsuit appeared, whistling to himself. He stepped into the room, his head down, looking at something in his hand. With his head down like that, it was hard to tell much about his face. He took another couple of steps and, silently, Blaise wrapped his long arm around him, pinning his arms, and covered the man’s mouth with the other. The man looked up in shock, his eyes widening as he struggled uselessly against Blaise.

  I laughed.

  “Look here, Izzy, it’s our old buddy… Bela, wasn’t it?”

  “You know, I think he remembers us.” Izzy grinned and lowered his shaft.

  Blaise took his hand off the man’s mouth.

  “No. No. No. You can’t be here. You’ll ruin everything.”

  “Bela, Bela, Bela,” I intoned as I walked over to him and patted the side of his face affectionately. He was more scared than angry.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Bela said uselessly.

  “That’s my specialty.”

  “If you want to get killed that’s your business, but don’t involve me.”

  “Being a little melodramatic, aren’t we?” I gave Bela a chuck on the chin. It annoyed him. Probably why I did it. “You seem to have survived our last encounter.”

  “Barely. Hey, wait a minute.” Bela was squirming frantically, trying to look around the room, but Blaise held him firmly. To look at Blaise, it appeared to require no effort. Nothing Blaise did ever looked to take much effort. “You don’t have that crazy Oriental woman with you, do you?” He looked genuinely panicked.

  Blaise leaned in and said very quietly, “You might want to consider how you refer to my girlfriend very carefully.”

  Bela snapped his head around to look at Blaise.

  “I–I didn’t mean anything.”

  Blaise just smiled like a Cheshire cat.

  “She is here, Bela,” I continued. “And it’s true she’s not in a very good mood. But I think we can keep her away from you if you cooperate and help us out.”

  Blaise released him. He staggered awkwardly closer to me and then caught himself.

  “I’m just an engineer. I don’t know what I could do for you.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. What’s going on at the far end of the hall?”

  “Oh, nothing really. Just me and a couple of others with some machines. We read some data off every so often and do some occasional maintenance.”

  “And what do those machines do?’

  “How should I know?”

  Izzy drew back his arrow and aimed it at Bela’s throat. Bela’s eyes bulged.

  “He’s lying,” Izzy said, a serious look on his face.

  “How do you know?” I asked, playing along.

  Izzy’s face broke into a grin. “He said he’s an engineer and he doesn’t know what the machines do.”

  “Point taken.” I turned back to Bela. “Well?”

  “They’re monitoring the room upstairs.”

  “The room where Adaxa is?”

  “What?! How do you know about Adaxa? How do you always know so much stuff about what you’re not supposed to know?”

  “I’m Blue.” I smiled.

  Bela sighed. He was beginning to realize his only hope of getting free of us was to cooperate.

  “What are those machines monitoring?”

  “Adaxa controls the dreaming but they control her.”

  “How?”

  “The machines monitor her biometrics. If the connection is broken, she’ll die in agony, like the people in the pain towers.”

  “So if we could free her?”

  “You can’t do that. No one can get through the puzzle door.”

  “For the sake of argument, suppose we could?”

  “You can’t!”

  “I thought we were going to go with an assumption here.” I winked.

  “No, I mean you can’t. If the door is opened, she will also die painfully. The door triggers it.”

  “They would sacrifice the one they need to control the dreaming?”

  “They would if it meant it falling into someone else’s hands.”

  “Is there a way to deactivate the kill switch?”

  “Doesn’t matter because moving her will cause the same thing to happen. Anything that stops the biometric data will kill her.”

  “Unless we shut the machines down first,” Izzy suggested.

  “That would instantly alert… well, everyone.”

  Blaise put his hand on Bela’s shoulder. “What about a data loop?”

  “You mean like replay a sequence of data over and over?”

  “Exactly. We keep feeding in a repeating loop of data that the system thinks is coming from the room. That allows us to disconnect Adaxa.”

  “I–I don’t know if I know how to do that. And the other two aren’t just going to stand by and let me.”

  “You let us worry about the other two.” I patted Bela on the shoulder.” And you have Izzy and Blaise to work with.”

  We walked out with Bela and went to the double doors. Close up, you could see that they weren
’t latched. Blaise put his fingers to his lips again and said he’d be back in a minute. He slipped through the double doors. Without a watch it was hard to know how much time passed, but it seemed only a moment later that Blaise held the doors open for us.

  The room was large but mostly empty. In the middle of the room was a console, similar to the ones we had seen in the pain towers. It was hard to tell what the body of the console was made out of, but the fleshy substance was stretched across the top like a drum head. As before, various colored shapes that looked like tattoos appeared and animated over the surface. It always looked creepy.

  The two other engineers were over in a corner, unconscious. Blaise and Izzy dragged them out, I assumed down the hall to the other room we had been in. I figured they would find some way to secure them. They were back in a few minutes.

  “So, Bela, you know how to read these screens?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you said you took down readings.”

  “We use this.” Bela picked up a small handheld device that one of the others must have dropped. It was like the one we saw an engineer walk out with earlier.

  “How does it work?”

  “It uses some kind of wireless protocol. I press this on the console.” Bela reached over and pressed a magenta blush at the top of the skin that was the only pattern that stayed stationary and unchanging. It glowed brighter. Bela held out the handheld and a magenta blush appeared at the top of its screen. Bela pushed that one. The handheld vibrated slightly and suddenly the tattoo patterns animated and flashed by rapidly. It was amazing to watch Bela change from scared toady to competent engineer as he got into showing us the tech. Finally, the tattoos stopped rushing by and the magenta blush disappeared on both the handheld and the console.

  “So it played back the data stored by the console? Adaxa’s data?”

  “As I understand it, her ongoing biometrics, but also energy changes in the dreaming field she generates. They are monitoring both her state and whether she is doing the things they want her to do.”

  “So the device sends them—the Angels—the information?”

  “No, when the device memory is full, there is a transmission station that sends the data.”

  Unexpectedly, there was a loud commotion out in the hallway. Bela changed back into frightened and sniveling mode. Izzy had an arrow strung. In stormed Lazitar, Saripha right behind him.

  “What are you doing? I should never have trusted you to rescue Adaxa.”

  “Well, you better trust someone, because you’re going to get Adaxa killed.”

  He took a swing at me. He was large and powerful. He was also slow. I easily side-stepped. I stood my ground and made no attempt at a counterattack. I was hoping the swing was an outlet for frustration and not a planned attack. He locked eyes with me, but was waiting.

  “If we had gone directly up and opened the door, we would have killed Adaxa.”

  “How do I know you aren’t lying to me?”

  Bela interrupted. “He’s not going to hit me if I talk to him, is he?”

  “I can’t guarantee anything.”

  Bela turned to Lazitar. Lazitar nodded his permission.

  “I’m an engineer here and this blue guy is right. I’m trying to help figure out how we can get around that.”

  It was nice to see that when things counted, Bela could pull himself together. He might be a collaborator, but there was something human left in there.

  “So how about it? Is it okay if we get back to work?” I kept my eyes fixed on Lazitar. “Saripha is the one who should be angry. She has to wait the longest to free Kanarchan.”

  I saw conflicting emotions play in Lazitar’s eyes. Finally, he spoke. “I don’t care about your problems. I only care about freeing Adaxa. For now, continue, but I will watch. I will not be left out where I am not part of the decisions being made.”

  Izzy, Blaise and I returned our attention to Bela. Bela was still uneasy about Lazitar.

  “So, this handheld collects the data and you take it somewhere to send the data to the Angels,” I summarized.

  “The process isn’t automated?” Izzy asked.

  “I don’t think they’re really that good at this tech. Seems to be some workarounds they have created for our environment.”

  “Our environment? Where are the Angels?”

  “They have underground shelters that maintain the physics of their universe—what they want to do with ours. But they can’t spend much time in ours.”

  “Is there one of those shelters in the caves below Antanaria?”

  “Yes, but that’s a small one. They have a big one somewhere.”

  I wanted to chase this further, but we had a task to focus on.

  “So, this handheld saves a data stream.”

  “Right.” Bela nodded.

  “Does the console save the data for a period of time or does the data just flow and the handheld then captures a slice in time?” Izzy asked.

  “The console has a buffer. Holds probably slightly more than a handheld can capture. As new data comes into the buffer the old data is pushed out.”

  Izzy’s eyes lit up. “Can you identify the circuitry and storage registers for that buffer and the incoming data?”

  “I think so.”

  I let Bela and Izzy take the lead. They were in their element and I only half understood what they were talking about. Blaise, Saripha and I stayed with Lazitar.

  Izzy and Bela went around the back of the console. We couldn’t quite pick up what they were saying, but the next thing I knew Izzy had pried the back off the console.

  “Well, we won’t need Saripha and Blaise like we did for the pain towers.” Izzy looked up at us and grinned. “Much simpler logic. A data feed coming in from somewhere outside—presumably the room above. Data gets routed through what I assume are an array of signal processors to clean things up and then a set of storage registers.”

  “I appreciate the guided tour, Mr. Wizard, but is there something that will help us?”

  “That depends on Bela’s skills. I know conceptually what to do, but he knows the technology we’re dealing with here.”

  “What do you want?” Bela looked uneasy again.

  “We need to grab the data just before it goes into the signal processors and loop it back to the input circuit so that we can disconnect the real input.”

  “Before the signal processors so that it looks like raw data coming in?”

  “Exactly, Bela.”

  “Yeah, we can do that.”

  “What about the door?” I asked. “How do we defeat the kill switch?”

  “I’m going to get into such trouble.” Bela shook his head.

  “Bela, you do this and we’ll all be there to keep you out of trouble.”

  “They don’t trust us with the method of opening the door, but there is a maintenance code we can input to deactivate the kill switch so someone else can open the door for us.”

  Bela grabbed some tools. I came around the console just out of curiosity. Like the complex network in the pain towers, the circuitry exposed in the console looked like silvery while light threads. Unlike the pain tower networks, they were fairly simple designs, corroborating what Izzy had said. Even I could see where everything came from and what it connected to, although that wouldn’t have helped me know what to do with it. Izzy and Bela went in with the tools and began what looked like redirecting the tiny silver-while light trails and adding some new ones—the loop redirecting the data back. Finally, they disconnected a feed that was coming in that I presumed was an external data feed. They closed everything up.

  Bela came back around and touched around the edges of the screen. He watched changes in the tattoos on the screen.

  “Everything seems to be working. No alarms,” Bela informed us. “Now I’ll just enter the maintenance code and you’re good to go.”

  We watched him pull up a strange oval filled with symbols on the screen and key in a sequence. Then the screen
returned to normal.

  “You should be set now.”

  “I think you’d better come with us, Bela. Things may not be too good for you when the others finish their nap.”

  Bela paused. “I think it will be better if I stay. I can make sure they don’t discover what we did. I’ll say I was knocked out, too.”

  “Bela…”

  Bela waved me off. “I’m not a brave guy. That’s why I work for the bad guys. And I don’t really have much faith you can succeed against them. But if you do and I helped a little bit… well, maybe it will make up for something.”

  I smiled and nodded. “We’ll be back for you Bela.”

  “No offense, but if you haven’t succeeded, I’d just as soon be left alone.”

  We left quickly, although I saw Izzy shake Bela’s hand. When we emerged onto the landing, Anika was waiting in the shadows.

  “I heard a commotion and you folks were gone. Decided to wait and see if you came out.”

  “Little side trip that turned out to be very valuable.”

  “I saw someone go out earlier with some little device in his hand.”

  “He may be back. He was taking some data over to the main tower. All engineers on this floor. Watch them, but don’t impede them if they aren’t heading up to the fifth floor.”

  What if they head to the fifth floor?”

  I smiled widely. “Then we’re probably in trouble.”

  7.

  We climbed to the fifth floor and found the door. It was as impressive as it had been before. I had no idea what it was made of. It looked like a solid block of deep purple light except that it wasn’t translucent. There were block-like panels of brighter light that contained different textures and patterns that kept shifting. As before, symbols that might be letters of some unknown alphabet would show up in different locations.

  “Nice light show,” Blaise intoned.

  “That’s not the real show.”

  “I figured. This is just a repeating sequence and not all that complex.”

  “So how’s this going to work?” Izzy asked. “You’re the only one who can see the patterns when you merge your energy with the door.”