by Mark Teppo
Santa smiled. “He’s still in there, isn’t he?” He toggled his earpiece, and then touched it again. His smile dissolved. “Comm link is dead.”
“What did you expect?” Rudolph said. “We’re probably not within satellite range any more.” He shifted towards the front door. “I’ll get the others.”
There wasn’t an obvious printer in the café and I wasn’t about to ask Mike if there was somewhere I could print out a screen grab, so I just double-checked the alphanumeric sequence listed under David Anderson’s name, committing his location to memory.
Santa laid a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks, Bernie. I know I’ve put you in a bad position and I promise I’ll make everything right with the NPC when we get back. I’ll tell them that you were coerced, that you strenuously argued against this course of action. Just relax here. Get yourself a cinnamon roll or something.” He nodded towards the white door. “The reindeer and I are going through that door.” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “We’re, you know, going to bring him back.”
Like I hadn’t been paying attention. I hit a key and wiped the screen. “And how you propose to do that?” I said. “Do you know where he is?” Another couple of keystrokes unloaded all the code I had just used.
Santa’s eyes went from my fingers to the screen. “What are you doing?”
“It’s time to go home, Santa. This is has gone on long enough,” I said. “I’ve let this charade run as long as I can, but it is time to head back to the North Pole. We’ve got to get ready for Zero Hour.”
Santa looked at me closely, studying my eyes. I tried not to blink. “Bernie. Why did you wipe the screen? I need to know where he is.”
I shook my head. “Not on my watch.”
“I could just get that information back.”
“Not without my help.” I was pretty sure that Santa wasn’t going to budge on his decision to cross over and there had been a sneaking suspicion—now validated—that my presence at this party only extended to being the guy who did the computer work. Santa and the reindeer were planning on making the raid without me and, while I certainly applauded that idea on one hand, on the other, I wasn’t about to remove the only voice of sanity from this operation. “I’m going with you.”
Santa shook his head. “That’s not part of the plan, Bernie. We can’t have anyone who isn’t committed.”
“I will be committed when I get back. They’ll stamp my chart: ‘certifiable.’ But until then, you’ve got a passenger.” I tapped my head. “You could hack in yourself, but it would take you and the reindeer, what? a couple of hours? I don’t think you have that kind of time. Right now, I’ve got that information in my head, and the only way I’m going to share it is if you take me along.”
Rudolph clattered up, a leather satchel slung across his withers. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the hold-up? It’s going to get a little crowded in here. The natives are getting curious.”
Santa turned his head. “Bernie’s playing his hand.”
I nodded. “That’s right. I’m playing.”
Rudolph rolled his eyes. “Great. So the lightweight here wants to throw his weight around. Can’t we just clock him on the head again?”
“I’ve got the code in my head.”
Rudolph shook his head. “You didn’t write it down?” he accused Santa.
“There wasn’t time. I didn’t think he’d pull this stunt,” Santa said.
“I warned you, didn’t I? You never listen to me.” Rudolph jerked his head towards the white door where the other reindeer were quietly filing through. They were covered in white sheets, looking like lumpy ghosts with horns. “We’re going. There isn’t time to stand around and yak like a couple of cows.” He nodded at me. “Get the information from him or bring him along. Those are your choices. Quit talking about it.”
“He won’t tell me,” Santa said. “What do you want me to do, torture him?”
“Worked for the Inquisition.”
“I can’t torture an elf, Rudolph.”
“You’re soft, Fat Boy,” Rudolph snapped, using the NPC designation for Santa with more than a little sarcasm. “We should leave you behind too. Are you going to be a liability in there?”
Santa shook his head. “But what about Bernie? He’s baggage, and we’re traveling light. We don’t need him.”
“Sounds like we do.” Rudolph stamped his right hoof. “Get on, Bernie. You’re with me.”
I gulped and pushed the chair away from the desk. Using the chair as a step ladder, I clambered onto Rudolph’s broad back. His skin was warm and moist to the touch. I wrapped my hands in the satchel’s leather strap. My mouth was dry.
“This is a bad idea,” Santa warned.
Rudolph snorted. “Not the first one we’ve had tonight.” He clattered towards the white door and got his mouth around the handle. With deft placement of a hoof, he swept the door open and looked back at Santa. “Come on. Clock’s ticking.”
Santa shook his head one final time before passing through the doorway. Behind us, I could hear the soft voice of the greeter, Mike. “Ah, excuse me? Excuse me?” The rest of his words were shut out by the solid shape of the door as it shut behind Rudolph. “Don’t be a pain in the ass,” Rudolph said to me. “I’m not interested. Be useful or I’ll leave you here. Okay?”
I swallowed. “Okay.”
The room beyond the café was white. Not as white as the atmosphere that we had flown through, just white enough that your head hurt as you tried to imagine the work involved in keeping the space in such pristine shape. Of course, the angelic host probably had on hand a fleet of ascended housekeepers who actually enjoyed their work and I was willing to bet the solvents in Heaven were a little stronger than the kind you could get at the local drug store.
The reindeer shrugged out of their draped sheets, and I stared, slack-jawed, at what I saw. Each animal sported a strange array of machinery and wires arrayed throughout their horns, culminating in a series of pods attached across their backs. Vixen turned his head towards me and I caught the glare of a laser rangefinder from one of his horns. With a tiny whine, an translucent orange panel slid in place over his right eye. He looked at me and one of the nozzles on the pod across his back pointed in my direction. “Check,” he said.
The rest of the reindeer signaled that their weaponry was functional as well. “Right,” Santa said. “Let’s go.” Rudolph, with me hanging on, took point, trotting down the single hallway that led away from the entry room.
I was looking back at the array of machine guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, and other unidentifiable weaponry that the reindeer were packing and didn’t catch Rudolph’s question. “What?” I asked.
“You going to tell me where we’re going?” he asked.
“That’s a lot of guns,” I said.
Rudolph shrugged, a slight bump in his gait. “Be prepared. That’s our motto.”
“That’s the Boy Scout motto.”
“Who do you think gave it to them?”
“Who are you going to shoot?”
He turned his head enough to give me the eye.
“Never mind,” I said. “5.CXLIII.XLVIII.2.LXXVIII.XXI.”
“You know what it means?” he asked.
“Location code, I assume.”
We passed into a large chamber, an octagonal shape with high ceilings. Diffuse light dripped from the porous stone overhead. The radial arms off this room all looked the same.
Santa was bringing up the rear and, when he reached the chamber and saw the seamless similarity to all the passages, he dug out a stick of the camouflage grease paint and made a mark on the wall next to the passageway back to the café. “Which way?” he asked.
“Bernie?” Rudolph asked.
I had been distracted by the sight of Santa in a dark BDU with green and black camouflage paint standing out against the white background. The only part of him that blended in at all was his hair and beard. Rudolph sighed, guessing what I was stari
ng at. “I know. He’s like this at the Mall too; can’t blend in for shit.”
But what I was looking at was over Santa’s head. Above the lintel of that portal was a recessed number, and as I looked around the room, I saw that each door had a number and they ran from zero to eight. I thought about the sequence attached to David Anderson and applied Ockham rule. Keep it simple. I pointed to the ‘5.’ “That one.”
Rudolph whistled to the rest of the team and he jumped for portal number five. There was something strangely non-Euclidean about the hallway. It was about the same width as the previous passage—just about two reindeer wide—and appeared to run straight forever, but my stomach made strange motions like it was being pulled in different directions as the team jogged along. Illumination seemed to increase just ahead of us and, looking back, I could see about ten meters behind Santa, who—I noted—had already fallen a bit behind Dasher, the last reindeer in the pack.
Rudolph stood sniffing the air as we waited in the next octagonal room for the others to catch up. Santa trotted in a good ten seconds after Dasher and, unlike the reindeer, he looked like he was getting a good workout. I watched him lean against the wall a little longer than necessary when he made his mark on the wall.
Blitzen wandered up, the open muzzle of his mini-gun brushing against my leg. “I don’t think Fat Boy’s ready for the New York Marathon,” he pointed out, leveling his gaze at me.
“It’s not part of his regimen,” I said. “It’s all strength training. Not that much cardio.”
“He’s going to keep falling behind,” Blitzen said. “And if we have to sprint . . . ”
“You want to carry him?” Rudolph asked.
“Just making an observation. I’m not volunteering.” Blitzen nodded at Donner. “That’s his job.” Donner was larger than Rudolph and it was all muscle. He looked like he was carrying a pair of Hellfire air-to-surface missiles. Donner saw us looking at him and, after a quick glance back at Santa, rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“We keep this quiet, no one will have to worry about breaking any land speed or dead lift records. Okay?” Rudolph said.
Blitzen offered a surly nod as I scanned the chamber for the number sequences over the doors. A watery aquamarine light fell into the center of the room, a thin rain that hovered just off-center of the room. It was right above Comet’s head and he jerked away from it, the twin muzzles of his guns whining as they targeted the glow. The light remained innocuous, hanging in space, filling and emptying like a recycling waterfall. It took a bit of imagination, but there were two numbers flowing through the blue, one bleeding into the other as an hourglass chamber empties and fills again when you invert the glass. One number was just a ‘V’ and the other was ‘CCXXV.’
The blue light seemed to fill the room, much like water cascading into a glass. It wasn’t a gas or a mist, but rather a sensation of change that seeped into the room. As the room filled, turning everyone a slight shade of blue, a sharply delineated series of floating cubes became visible—their edges touched and gilded with a dark indigo tint. This cube of cubes floated in the center of the chamber and the reindeer moved back unconsciously from the floating grid, especially after Dasher brushed one and its center turned a vibrant orange. The other cubes in the block faded momentarily, their emphasis fading in supplication to the bright block.
“Okay, smart guy,” Rudolph said. “You’re the expert.”
“Me?” I wondered. “How did I get to be the expert?”
“Virtue of having a number in your head. You were the one yammering about having geek knowledge. Time to share.”
I took stock of the rest of the chamber. There were only six doors along the eight walls and, as my gaze traveled about the chamber, I catalogued the numbers, reading the Roman and Westernizing them in my head: 0, 218, 219, 226, 232, and 233. There were also numbers set in the ceiling and floor—176 and 274—and I realized they corresponded to nearly invisible portals set in the top and bottom of the room. These doors weren’t open portals like the others, but rather slightly wavering rectangles of heat stroked air.
Rudolph and the rest were all looking at me, waiting for some response, with the exception of Cupid who was sniffing at the floating grid structure, the cubes glowing and fading as his nose moved back and forth between individual points on the outer edge of the shape. I realized it was a seven by seven by seven grid and made a mental leap based on the first room we had entered. “It’s seven cubed,” I said. “Seven to the third power.”
“Seven is the number of religion,” Blitzen said, “The relationship of Man—his spirit and soul—to the universe is represented through the cube—a seven-sided figure.”
“There are only six sides to a cube,” Cupid counted.
“There are seven points, seven facets: the outer sides and a inner center point. They have several correspondents depending on your religious inclination,” Blitzen said. “They can be reduced to a rather archaic axiom: the center is the father of the directions, the dimensions, and the distances.”
Cupid bobbed his head. “The only thing more annoying than a reindeer with a library card is a reindeer with Internet access.”
“The seventh point is the center,” I said. “What do you put in the center? What do you put in a box?”
“A soul?” Santa offered.
I nodded at him. “That’s it. These numbers are like IP addresses for computer systems. Each individual, each cell, has a specific address that is unique to his or her location. The series of numbers tells you exactly where that person is within the larger structure.” I pointed to the flickering numbers. “We must be in the 225th chamber of that grid and from here we can get to other points in the structure. Each layer contains forty-nine chambers and there are seven layers.” I did a little bit of math in my head. “Which puts us on the fifth layer down. Right on the outer edge.”
Cupid was pretty good with the new math too and he figured out which cube I was talking about and approached it carefully, lighting it up. “From here,” I said, “we can move along this same plane.” I pointed at one of the doors. “Which is why there are only six doors, five directions from here—North, Northeast, East, Southeast, and South—and one door back the way we came. If we wanted to move up in the grid to the fourth layer, we’d go through the ceiling.”
Santa nodded. “And if we wanted to reach the sixth layer, we’d use the floor.” He continued to bob his head. “Think in three, lads.” He was getting the hang of it and I wasn’t surprised. Santa had to have a keen sense of navigation in order to find his way through some of the more modern urban landscapes. “So where are we going, Bernie?”
“One forty-three,” I said.
Cupid extrapolated on the grid. “Up two levels and into the SE corner.” He skirted the wavering rectangle in the floor to nose at a higher block on the outer edge of the other side of the floating cube. “This one here.”
Direction and destination. Our course was set.
VIII.
“Does it bother you that we haven’t seen anyone?” Blitzen asked as he jogged alongside Rudolph. We had just left 5.CXLII, on our way to 5.XCLIII.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” Rudolph answered.
“Why would we?” I asked. I had done some math based on what the theories we had postulated about location addresses. “If there are seven grids and each one contains up to 343 chambers, we’re talking about more than 2400 chambers. And the location address has six values, so if the same ordering system persists, you’re talking a very large number of single points.” The math had gotten hard and I had started dropping numbers. Not enough fingers. “Billions, I suppose.”
“Like, a one-to-one ratio for every soul that ever lived,” Blizten pointed out.
Rudolph skidded into the large chamber and nodded towards the glittering water droplet that formed in the air. “Looks like we’re here. Now what?”
I must have been looking a little blank because Rudolph twitched his shoulder, ca
using me to grab a handful of his warm skin or be tossed off his back. “You’re looking like you’ve got a ‘For Rent’ sign on your forehead,” he said, “Come on back.”
“A one-to-one ratio,” I said. “You know how immense this place must be?”
He favored me with a glance. “You must have been one of those kids who tried to imagine how big a house you would had to have if you owned a million marbles.”
I bristled. “Yeah, maybe. So?”
“You could only hold fifteen in your hands at any one time, so what it matter how many you could pile in the corners?” He snorted. “Focus, Bernie. We only want one guy. Not the entire historical population of China.”
“Right, right.” I tried to get away from the all-encompassing hugeness of the structure. I had an address. I knew where the guy was and the ordering system was obviously fabricated for ease of access. There was no way to craft a linear system to store all this information, a three-dimensional shape was required. But even that was too limiting, too finite, when you got right down to the math.
The rest of the team was watching me as I slid down from Rudolph’s back and approached the center of the chamber. The grid of cubes was glowing in the faint light, the indigo edges of the shapes flickering and turning in the light. “Five. One forty-three.” That’s where we were, but the numbering system continued; there were still four levels to go.
“Forty-eight,” I said, pitching my voice across the room. The cube of cubes shivered and spun suddenly, turning on its horizontal access and pitching itself towards me. It rotated sharply, the top line peeling open and when it reached a ninety degree rotation, it stopped. The top plane was leaning toward me, and a single cube on its surface was glowing orange. It was within reach, and like a child who has never been burned before, I touched it.
The orange glow increased as the rest of the structure around it began to fade. The indigo edges separated and sprang outward in geometrically predetermined paths. I stepped back as the orange glow filled the now two-dimensional shape. There was a click that I felt in the bones of my jaw, and then the orange light vanished. All that remained was a door—a one-sided door, but a door nonetheless. “Forty-eight,” I said, pointing at the faint notation carved into the door at the top. “Halfway there, is my guess.”