The Reality Thief (Deplosion Book 1)

by Paul Anlee

  They followed the Cybrid into a room filled with incomprehensible scientific instruments that buzzed, blipped, and blinked. The Cybrid floated peacefully in front of the instruments, its tentacles tucked inside its spherical shell.

  Stralasi could discern no activity in the chamber and wondered what its purpose could be. “This is all very interesting, I’m sure, but the garden was much prettier.”

  “Ah. You do not see it as the Cybrid sees it. Just a moment, please. I’ll adjust the feed to your lattice.”

  “Wait! Don’t…,” started Stralasi and then he felt a short, sharp pain in his head. His hands shot up in reflex, and he opened his mouth to holler. But as fast as the pain had hit him, it was over. He dropped his hands back to his side and scowled at his traveling companion.

  “Well, you wouldn’t have been able to experience this properly if I hadn’t done that,” Darak explained. “Now, I’ll connect you to the Cybrid’s sensory overlay.”

  What Stralasi had perceived as a still and unexciting room was now bursting with color and activity. The monk was rendered speechless. Throughout the chamber, multi-hued data presentations blossomed above the mysterious instruments.

  The two-meter Cybrid now appeared translucent to him. Encapsulated within its ghostly sphere was the somewhat more solid image of a young woman in a flowing white lab robe. Her appearance and attire were identical to that of an Alumit technician in any of the Foundation ceraffices throughout Alum’s Realm.

  The woman was engrossed in a variety of data screens floating in front of her. The array of letters, numbers, and images were unrecognizable to Brother Stralasi. She deftly scanned, shuffled, rearranged, and transferred data between various screens, sometimes opening or closing views, shifting or magnifying the displays for closer examination.

  She turned to the two men. “May I help you?” she asked, with no hint of surprise that two strangers had wandered into her lab.

  Stralasi’s eyes filled with panic—We've been noticed!

  Darak, as usual, was unperturbed. The Shard/demon smiled politely and answered the apparition, “Yes, Dr. Weiss. Would you be so kind as to give us a beginner’s overview of the work you do here?”

  “Gladly. We are performing selected modifications on the glycolytic pathways of the standard bovine gut microbiome to improve the processing efficiency of Bacteroidetes compared to Firmicutes. I’m sure you are aware that a preponderance of Firmicute microbes has been shown to increase rumen energy harvesting and increase the lipid content of the resulting milk. Standard Bacteroidetes are particularly inefficient at processing the Gargus 718.5 plant wall cellulose-like material and so Firmicutes dominate the Standard Bovine microbiome.

  “In this panel, we are modeling predicted improvements in the cellulase, while here we represent a vector to seamlessly replace the endogenous encoding DNA.” She paused to allow the two men an opportunity for questions before she continued.

  Darak noticed the thoroughly befuddled Stralasi. “I’m sorry; that must have sounded like complete gibberish to you. I really should have stopped her sooner. My apologies. It has been so long since I’ve heard any real scientific talk. I admit I got caught up enjoying the sound of the words as they rolled off this young scientist’s tongue.”

  “Dr. Weiss, my humble apology,” he said and bowed deeply in the direction of her spectral image. “Would you mind repeating that a few tech levels lower so my friend can derive some inkling of the work you do?”

  She returned his bow with a smile and an accommodating nod. “Certainly.” She turned her attention to Brother Stralasi. “Basically, these bacteria in the gut of the cow digest grass. The grass of Gargus 718.5 is slightly different than Standard grass, so some of the microbes can’t digest it very well. That creates more fat in the cow’s milk than we’d normally like, so we’re working on adjusting the genome—”

  “—the, um… Life Force,” Darak suggested.

  “Yes, the Life Force,” Dr. Weiss allowed. “We are adjusting the basic Life Force of this microbe so it can better digest the grasses of Gargus 718.5 and produce healthier milk.”

  Brother Stralasi nodded, whether in understanding or approval was not entirely clear.

  “Thank you, Dr. Weiss.” Darak shifted his focus to a nearby display. “Would you mind telling us what we’re looking at here?”

  “This screen shows several proposed molecular modifications to the cellulase enzyme, the enzyme that digests the grass. We are modeling the overall efficiency of the enzyme to give us several single, double, or triple amino acid change possibilities.” She raised a lower screen to eye level. “These show the DNA—I mean Life Force—changes required and the resulting vector…” Dr. Weiss faltered and looked to Darak for help.

  “The Life Force modification method?” he suggested.

  “Yes, the Life Force modification method,” she concluded. “Next,” she waved a series of panels from her far right side into the forefront, “we have a series of mathematical models to figure out how a herd of cows with these Life Force modifications might fare with combinations of Standard and native grasses.”

  Stralasi saw nothing but rapidly changing rows and columns of numbers and wavering lines on a chart. He stifled a yawn that was not lost on Darak.

  “Thank you, Dr. Weiss,” Darak said. “Brother Stralasi and I must be going now, but we’ve enjoyed your tour immensely.”

  Dr. Weiss acknowledged Darak’s thanks and turned back to her screens, hands and fingers flying over the data. The screens and the young scientist disappeared, and the ghostly sphere returned to its more solid state.

  “I see you are getting tired,” Darak said to Stralasi. “Not surprising. It’s been a full day for you.”

  Stralasi nodded, reminded of the many wonders and adventures of the day. “That’s an understatement. We’ve faced down an Angel, flown through empty space, explored a Cybrid machine shop and, now, toured an integration lab.

  “I’ve learned that almost everything I believed about the workings of the Realm, about the relationship between the People and the Cybrids, has all been a lie. That it’s an intricate system contrived to match the needs of humans and machines. It relies on The Living God to hold it all together, but it’s also been amazingly successful, with a history of tens of millions of years of relative peace and stability. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, you want to see it destroyed. I can’t decide if you are mad, or truly a demon.”

  Darak absorbed the synopsis and critique without reacting. “I know what you need,” he said enthusiastically, “a little entertainment. I think there’s a recharge port right around the corner.” He pulled Stralasi into a smaller chamber with a Cybrid-sized hemispherical depression in one wall. “You’ll want these,” he said, indicating a pair of cushions on the floor along the wall. Still confused, an exhausted Stralasi plunked himself down on one of the cushions and leaned against the wall.

  “What now?”

  “Now, we go inworld,” replied Darak and the room around them dissolved.

  35

  IN THE NEXT INSTANT, Brother Stralasi found himself sitting on a bench facing some kind of playing field.

  “Oh, good! The game hasn’t started yet,” announced Darak. “I think you're familiar with the basics. It’s called football, or in some countries, soccer.” Stralasi looked blankly at the other man. “Players from two teams kick a ball with the intent of shooting it into a goal, which is protected by a netminder. Does that ring any bells?”

  “Oh, you mean footnets!”

  “Exactly, soccer,” responded Darak. “Well in the Cybrid inworld it’s played a little differently.”

  “What’s an inworld?” Stralasi interrupted the oncoming stream of information, trying to catch up.

  “Didn’t I explain that already?” answered Darak. “The work life of a Cybrid is mostly fulfilling, but even they need some recreation and entertainment, psychologically if not physically. Their inworld is like the entertainment you access via your latt
ice, but here it's carried to a much greater extreme.

  “Like your own lattice, this one projects words, images, and other information directly into the Cybrid mind. But this one is infinitely more interactive and detailed. It can place the Cybrids into virtual situations, like this ball game, for instance, and then convey totally convincing sensations such as related sights, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile experiences—all of the senses, really. Think of it like a waking dream. Everything that happens is very real to the participants, but it all takes place in the virtual electronic universe instead of in the real physical one.”

  “I see,” Stralasi said. He had experienced inSense entertainment before; it was common throughout the Realm. But that was strictly passive. There was no way to participate in the viewing.

  It doesn’t look like any footnets field I’ve ever played on—thought Stralasi. It was a half-kilometer long, for one thing, and he could count at least a dozen field segments floating at different elevations and spaced randomly over parts of the main field. Oddly, they didn’t cast any shadows below. Some trick of the lighting–he guessed.

  Even stranger, some of the field segments were upside down. The wall across from their seats was also covered with grass and marked with playing field lines. A vertical field of its own? His eyes followed the field upward. The entire complex was covered by an inverted field on the roof. He and Darak were separated from the main grassy areas by a greenish haze that rose all the way to the ceiling. Looking closer, he could see faint white markings. He could only surmise that it might be another playing field like the opposite wall, somehow made clear so they could watch the game.

  “What’s with all these painted vertical, upside down, and floating areas?” Brother wondered aloud.

  “The inworld allows for a certain amount of adjusting of natural laws. Every green surface you see is a part of the playing surface.”

  “You’re pulling my leg. That’s impossible,” he said.

  “More impossible than any of the other strange things you’ve seen today?”

  “Okay, so look up there,” Stralasi pointed to an inverted patch of grassy field hovering about fifty meters over mid-field. “I can see how someone might bounce a ball off that bit of grass up there, but there’s no way anyone could stand on that.”

  Darak shrugged. “Well, they do. Each of those bits of playing surface, including the walls and ceiling, has its own independent gravity field, making the green side ‘down’, no matter their apparent orientation. I told you the game was different here.”

  Answering Stralasi’s skeptical look, he continued, “All players can play on any green surface. It adds to the overall challenge of the game because attacks can come from any direction. Also, the trajectory of a kicked ball is altered in flight by the gravitational pulls of adjacent patches of grass. That makes it challenging to calculate, even for a Cybrid mind. Do you see those pylons placed randomly around the field?”

  He pointed out a series of floating yellow cone shapes. “Those emit an individual attractor, repulsor, or neutral field but with a much smaller range than the adjacent playing fields. Any ball that passes within five meters of one of those cones will be influenced by whatever randomly cycling gravitational field the pylon happens to be emitting.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I asked Dr. Weiss while she was explaining her work.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about footnets back there. I'm sure I would've remembered that.”

  “It was on a private channel,” said Darak.

  Stralasi was still baffled but withheld any further questions as the teams entered the centermost field. A crowd of spectators popped into existence beside him and Darak, filling the empty seats all around them. Loud cheering broke out. Stralasi almost jumped out of his seat in surprise; Darak muffled his amusement.

  The Good Brother watched the team members take their positions on the field. As they spread out, they morphed into impossible figures. Arms transformed into legs; necks elongated. A few members from each team took on a starfish-like appearance while others became strange, four-legged antelopes with a human head atop a long, supple neck.

  “There are two traditional player body configurations,” explained Darak. “In the more radical versions of the game, any form is permitted. However, the more popular traditional game that we'll see here only allows these two forms.”

  “But if the Cybrids like to pretend to be humans, why not just keep a human shape?”

  “Too boring, I guess. These forms are vastly better at the game than human forms could be. But even these have significant physical limitations. I suspect it’s more from tradition than anything else.”

  The opening pass was made and their attention was drawn to the play. The starfish-shaped players could run on any pair of their equally spaced legs and switch directions remarkably fast by shifting to a different pair with a cartwheel motion. Antelope-shaped players were swifter overall and could pass the ball among all four legs to fool an opponent.

  The antelope players had a height advantage when delivering headers but it was almost impossible for them to get around a stocky defending starfish. Both goalies preferred the starfish shape but maintained one pair of gloved hands.

  One team wore blue jerseys and the other, yellow. A blue player leaped some ten meters up and landed on one of the floating patches of grass. Another jumped even higher and flipped in mid-air to land upside down on a different field a hundred meters closer to the opposing net. Their teammate kicked the ball straight up, toward a floating pylon.

  The ball neared the pylon, curved sixty degrees, and landed within easy reach of the first player. He maneuvered it past a yellow player who’d dropped into place in front of him, attempting to block his advance.

  The blue player kicked the ball off to one side, where it bounced at right angles off another pylon and flew directly to his upside down teammate. With a fairly open shot at the net some seventy meters away, the player launched a blazing curve shot that bypassed the goalie in the far upper corner. The crowd, including Stralasi, cheered wildly.

  Less than two minutes into the game, the impossibly long, loud pronouncement of the first "Gooooooooooooooooooal!” was announced.

  “That was incredible,” Stralasi yelled over the din. Darak smiled and nodded happily. “They must be very high-scoring games if they’ve already got one goal.”

  “I don’t think these two teams are very evenly matched,” Darak replied. “It’s unfortunate that there isn’t something more exciting. It looks like the blue team is going to dominate the game fairly quickly.”

  “I’m not sure that exciting would do this justice,” answered Stralasi. “That last play was astonishing! Unbelievable!”

  “Oh, I hope you believe it,” said Darak, “even if it is only happening in a virtual space.”

  “It is utterly impossible, and yet I saw it with my own two eyes,” Stralasi responded.

  “Your own two simulated eyes,” Darak corrected. “Remember, what we perceive here as reality depends on some easily fooled ancient sensory mechanisms. None of this is real.”

  Stralasi sat back in his seat and crossed his arms. Why is he always trying to teach me something?–he brooded. He continued watching the game but without his previous enthusiasm. After a while, his fatigue began to catch up with him and he found himself stifling repeated yawns.

  “Maybe this has all been too much for one day.”

  “I’m sorry; I’m suddenly very tired,” replied Stralasi.

  “You must be hungry by now, as well.”

  “Starved,” admitted Stralasi. “What time is it?”

  “Locally, it’s early afternoon. Let’s get you back to more familiar surroundings and find some food. You’ve had more than your fill of excitement for one day, I’m sure. We’ll depart on our journey after you’ve had a good rest and your brain has had a chance to catch up with the day.”

  With that, they were suddenly seated at a table in Ro
se’s, back in Alumston. Stralasi was becoming accustomed to the instantaneous shifts in his environment and hardly blinked. He was, however, concerned that word of their return would spread rapidly and bring another Angel to the planet. He whispered to Darak, “Is it safe to be here?”

  “As far as everyone around us is concerned, we’re not really here,” replied Darak. “I am interfering with their short term memory processing so that our presence will be forgotten within milliseconds of seeing us. I’m also damping their attentiveness so they'll have a strong tendency to just ignore us. Except for the staff, of course. Shall we order?” A server appeared at the table, pad in hand.

  Stralasi picked up the menu and set it back down. He leaned in close to Darak, so the waitress wouldn’t hear him. “Wait a second, how come Ilena can see us and not be surprised?”

  “She is not seeing us, exactly,” replied Darak. “I’m exerting rather more control over her perceptions than the others. She thinks we're just some random customers she knows, but not very well. I would’ve thought, by now, that you'd trust me in this. We’re completely safe from intrusion while we’re here.”

  Stralasi sat back, thought about it for a second, and shrugged his acceptance. He picked up a menu and ordered his favorite pulled pork sandwich. Within minutes, the two were chowing down. After the meal, a satisfied Stralasi leaned back and gave way to a loud yawn.

  “Oh! I must apologize. My mind is so completely overloaded; I feel I could sleep for days,” he said.

  “Why don’t we walk back to the Alumita?” suggested Darak. “You can rest in your own room until tomorrow.”

  Well fed and exhausted from his adventures, Stralasi followed Darak through the streets of the town to the Alumita residence. They were greeted by no one along the way. Whomever they passed found their gazes politely averted or disinterested. Soon, Stralasi was sitting in the dark on the edge of his own comfy bed, in his own familiar room.