by Jim C. Hines
Silence stretched between us. ‹If I do, you’ll wish I hadn’t.›
‹If you were trying to make me trust you, you missed badly.›
Another pause. ‹You’re not Isaac Vainio.›
I felt like she’d tossed me off the Mackinac Bridge. ‹I don’t understand.›
‹The first thing Kiyoko did when she spliced your brain into her network was to make a backup.›
‹I’m . . . a backup?›
‹One of three, and taking up an obscene amount of server space. From what I’ve been able to map out, there’s the original you, unconscious in your physical body. Then there’s a dev and QA environment, along with a clean backup.›
‹That can’t be right. I’m me. I mean, I’m not just memories. I’m conscious.› Wasn’t I? Life wasn’t limited to the flesh. Libriomancy had proved that a thousand times over. ‹Which one am I?›
‹You’re the clean copy. Development is where Kiyoko messes with your head, poking and prodding to see what happens. If she breaks you, she can make a new copy. QA is where she pushes things through to a simulation for Russell Potts or Babs Palmer or whoever else to interact with.›
‹I don’t suppose you can cut and paste me onto your laptop or something?› She could probably sense the fear behind those words, but I didn’t care. There was always a way out.
‹I’m sorry, Isaac. My laptop couldn’t hold a single day of your life. According to this, six Kiyoko clones are stacked up in cold sleep in the New Millennium server room, doing nothing but hosting your backups. When you add in all the software and security protocols, it takes two human brains to maintain a single mind. Though I’m sure I could improve that ratio with the right compression algorithms, especially if we prioritized—›
‹Talulah.›
Sorrow broke through our connection and washed over me. ‹I can’t get you out, and we can’t let Kiyoko keep a copy of your mind.›
‹You’re planning to kill me.› She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. ‹There has to be another way. What about Kiyoko’s physical body? If you woke me up in her body, I could cause all sorts of mischief here. Imagine four Isaacs running around. We’d have this mess sorted in a half-hour, tops.›
‹It’s not a simple matter of severing the control protocols. Your mind is striped across two physical brains, similar to a RAID 6 server array, with error-checking bits worked into—›
‹And in English, that means?›
‹Your backup minds are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in two separate boxes. I can’t put you back together. The one time I attempted it, your mind died instantly. I managed to make it look like a software failure, but it was a close thing.›
‹Oh. That . . . that sucks.›
‹I know.›
I wanted to stall. To joke and argue and squeeze every second of life out of this mess. From what Talulah was telling me, I’d existed for only two days, and I’d spent most of that time in stasis.
But was this existence worth it? Trapped in the emptiness with nothing but Talulah’s voice and the random misfiring of my simulated visual neurons for company? I was alone. No matter how long I dragged things out, I’d never see Lena again. I’d never touch another human being. I’d never get the chance to punch Russell Potts in his damn face. I’d never get a rematch with Kiyoko to show her what happened to people who shot my friends. I’d never do magic.
No . . . everything else might be lost to me, but Talulah thought there was a way I could touch magic one last time. ‹Tell me what you need from me. And . . . do me one favor?›
‹Of course. What is it?›
‹Take the bastards down. All of them.›
The world was a kind of technicolor static, spheres of yellow and red floating across an infinite canvas the color of a flooded river back home. It was a bit like the afterimages you get when you rub your eyes after staring at a bright light, but when I tried to blink to clear my vision, nothing happened.
‹Isaac?›
I could have been dreaming. Or possibly dead, though that seemed improbable. There was a familiarity to all of this, reminiscent of having my mind ripped from my body. It was annoying how many times that had happened to me. Separating mind from flesh was surprisingly easy, though reuniting the two could be a bit of a trick.
‹It’s Talulah. Lena’s with us. She’s alive. So is Smudge. You’re a prisoner at New Millennium. I’m hacking your brain, and I need you to remain calm. We’re only going to get one shot at this.›
‹Slow down. What do you mean, hacking my brain?›
‹Kiyoko hooked you into her network. You’ve been there for two days. In a nutshell, they’re reviewing your memories and trying to reverse engineer you and your magic.›
‹Oh.›
‹Once we start breaking you out, I think I can keep Kiyoko in the dark for about ninety seconds. After that, I have no idea what she’ll do to you.›
‹How do I know—›
‹That this isn’t a trick? You don’t. But if I wanted to make you do something—›
‹You could just trigger the pleasure center of my brain. Or the pain center. That makes sense. I suppose there’s not much I can do either way, eh?›
The pause that followed stretched long enough to make me think something had gone wrong. ‹How . . . why did you say that, about the pleasure center of your brain?›
‹I don’t know. It just made sense. Why? I can feel bits of your emotion, and they’re freaking me out.›
I caught the edge of her thoughts. Something about psychic echoes and mental resonance, tied to tremendous guilt and sadness. ‹I’ll explain later. We’re going to create a distraction, but in order for you to get away, they’ll need to think you’re dead. Do you remember reading Debt of Bones when you were in college?›
‹Terry Goodkind, yah. How did you—right, you’re in my brain.› I tried not to think about the implications and how much of my life had become a book for Talulah, Kiyoko, and anyone else to peruse. ‹The death spell?›
‹Exactly. Think back to that book. I’m going to try to amplify the memory from here, and you’re going to cast the spell.›
‹How?›
‹I’ll explain as we go. Where were you when you read it?›
I concentrated on the memory and found myself in my old dorm room at Michigan State University, camped out in the lower bunk of the metal-framed beds. A green carpet remnant covered most of the tile floor. The air smelled like the beef-flavored Ramen noodles I’d cooked the night before on the hot plate we weren’t supposed to have.
I looked down at the book in my hands. I could feel the roughness of the paper, the faint wrinkles in the worn spine. ‹This is just a memory. Without the physical book to tap into—›
A new voice intruded. ‹So this is what old man brain looks like.›
‹Jeneta?›
‹She’s here with us,› said Talulah. ‹I’m looping her into the conversation. Call it a telepathic group chat.›
I laughed. ‹How did you find her?›
‹I’ve lost some cred since word got out I could do magic, but I’ve still got close to a million subscribers on YouTube, along with six figures on Twitter and Instagram and so on. I put the word out that I needed to talk to Jeneta, and asked my followers to pass it along.›
‹It made the front page of Reddit,› Jeneta added. ‹Hold on, I’m downloading a copy of your book.›
For an instant, I saw through Jeneta’s eyes. She was in an unfinished basement. Talulah sat on a Papasan chair beside her, working over a pile of computer hardware I couldn’t begin to identify or sort out. Lena rested on the floor, Smudge perched awkwardly on her hip. From this angle, you could barely see his missing leg.
‹Can you see the book?› asked Jeneta.
I was back in my dorm room. ‹I see it.›
‹Talulah, we’re ready. Hold on, Isaac. We’re going to create a distraction.›
Darkness flickered across my vision like an eyeblink, but in that fraction o
f a second, everything shifted. Talulah was suddenly turned away, her shoulders hunched like she was in pain. Jeneta’s e-reader had moved as well, and Lena was sitting up. ‹What was that?›
‹Seventy-four seconds before Kiyoko catches on,› Talulah said flatly.
‹Remember the book,› said Jeneta. ‹See it in your mind.›
I focused on the pages. This particular book was one I’d read not for magic, but for pure escapism. I’d gotten brutally dumped a few days earlier. Relationships were hard enough at that age without me constantly having to sneak off-campus for secret magic lessons.
I saw Jeneta reaching into the screen of her e-reader. I did the same with my book, touching the scene that described the death spell.
Nothing happened. I couldn’t feel the belief, the power of the story. This was nothing but a memory, with no physical resonance—
‹Relax,› said Jeneta. ‹It worked before. It’ll work again.›
Before I could ask what that meant, Talulah announced that we were down to fifty-five seconds.
‹I’m doing the best I can here.›
‹Hold on.› Talulah reached out to touch Jeneta’s forehead, and the connection between the three of us strengthened. I felt the magic of her e-reader and the story beneath that too-smooth screen. I clung to that scene, to a spell designed to make onlookers believe you had died. I siphoned the magic into my thoughts.
‹The damage is spreading faster than I expected,› said Talulah. ‹We’re about to lose contact. You’ve got guards coming your way, Isaac. I’m going to fry your connection to the network and wake you up. Cast the spell and get the hell out of there.›
They vanished. The memories of my dorm room faded a moment later, though I could still feel the pages of the book, still see its magic crawling through my limbs. My eyes cracked open, dry and crusty. I was in a too-bright cubicle made of thick glass partitions, like an oversized museum display. Electrodes and needles porcupined my body. My limbs and torso were strapped to a chair that reminded me of the one in my dentist’s office. I seemed to be naked save for a hospital gown.
I smelled smoke. Sparks and blue flame jumped from an electrical outlet in the wall. Smoke curled out of a handful of tall, heavy-doored cabinets that resembled slender white refrigerators.
Goosebumps tightened my skin. I wiggled and tugged, trying to slide my arm free. I lost a layer of skin and torqued my shoulder, but managed to pull my right hand loose. I yanked the needles from my veins, then tugged the electrodes off my scalp.
My hair was gone. The stubble on my head felt like sandpaper. On the other hand, someone had healed the bullet wound in my chest. I suppose my hair was a fair trade for not dying.
Beyond the glass walls of my own personal containment unit, flames spread to a bank of computer equipment. Alarms blared from beyond the door, and I heard voices arguing outside. The metal door rattled in its frame. Talulah must have done something to lock it.
I unfastened the other straps, climbed from the chair, and immediately collapsed into the glass wall. After two days, my limbs were weak as softened wax. I braced myself against the chair and stumbled to the rubber-sealed door of my isolation cubicle.
As I forced the door open and stepped free, the outer door shook like it had been hit by a runaway Buick. Whatever was trying to get in here, they weren’t human. Another hammer-blow dented the door inward. Gray mist flowed through the crack below. I squinted, trying to read the magic as it filled the room. This particular vampire appeared to be Sanguinarius Machalus.
The bastardized Latinization of D. J. MacHale’s name made me wince to this day, but I pushed my linguistic annoyances aside and concentrated on the death spell. I could still feel the book in my hands, its magic in my blood, waiting to be triggered. I couldn’t hold it for much longer, but I needed this to be believable.
The vampire reformed into a young man in a turquoise New Millennium shirt. He pulled a JG-367 and pointed it toward me. “Don’t move!”
I studied the particular passages that had allowed him to transform into mist and back, and pulled those strings of text around myself.
He punched the keypad by the doorway. The door started to slide open, but jammed after three inches. All that pounding must have dented or damaged the track. Thick fingers wrapped around the edge of the door and pulled.
Metal squealed. I moved my attention to the weapon.
The door ripped free and slammed across the hallway, tearing chunks of plaster and drywall along with it. It was like someone had fired a cannon through the building. The floor shook, and the glass walls behind me shivered.
In that moment, I activated the death spell, dissolved my body into mist, and triggered the JG-367.
The gun shot fire and electricity through me. Even in gaseous form, it felt like I’d gone walking on hot coals after bathing in lighter fluid.
The second vampire stared from the doorway. He’d gotten through just in time to see me disintegrate in a blast of flame. “Holy shit, Darren. What the hell did you do?”
“I didn’t—I was only trying to stun him.” Darren stared at the JG-367 like it had twisted around and bitten his balls off. “The dude was trying to get free, and then you started smashing everything and the damn gun just went off.”
A third figure appeared in the doorway. This one appeared human, though it was hard to be sure. My senses were rather dulled at the moment. I wasn’t sure how a cloud of mist could see or hear at all, for that matter.
“What happened?” she shouted, standing a few paces back from the vampires. “Where’d he go?”
I flowed toward the doorway, blending in with the smoke pouring from the walls.
“Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit,” whimpered Darren. “It was an accident.”
If he hadn’t been working for the folks who’d shot me and tried to turn my brain into their own personal playground, I’d have felt sorry for him. As it was, I simply drifted out the door and left him to his fate. Passing the woman was like getting too close to a furnace. I shied away from the magic-dampener she was wearing before it could force me back into my normal form.
“Check the backups,” she shouted.
“Everything’s fried!” called the second vampire. “The backups are dead. Looks like the fire started in here.”
Grief struck me with those words, though I wasn’t sure why. If Talulah had found a way to fry the backup servers, so much the better.
“Why aren’t the fucking sprinklers working?”
Presumably because Talulah had disabled those as well, to help cover my escape and destroy whatever information they’d gotten from my head.
“Dr. Palmer’s gonna kill me,” moaned Darren.
My movement seemed to be a matter of focusing my awareness on a particular part of the mist. The rest shifted to gather around that center point. I felt like a gaseous inchworm scooting down the hall.
I gradually learned to smooth out my motion. I slipped beneath a door and into the stairwell, where I allowed gravity to drag me to the ground floor. I’d been seven or eight stories up, but where? Had they kept me in Admin where Babs could keep an eye on me? Medical, in case something went wrong?
I thinned myself over the floor, striving for invisibility. I extended a tendril of mist through the main doors and looked around outside. The light of the setting sun might as well have been the flame from an acetylene torch. I pulled back, but I’d seen enough to recognize the Franklin Research Tower. They’d locked me up in my own damn building!
I’d only meant to take Darren’s ability to shapeshift into mist. How had I ended up with his vulnerability to sunlight, too? I filed that question away with a hundred others, all waiting their turn on my research whiteboard.
If I was stuck here until sundown, I might as well take advantage of the time. I wondered if Babs and Kiyoko had cleaned out my office yet . . .
UNITED STATES WILL ALLOW U.N. INSPECTIONS OF
NEW MILLENNIUM FACILITY
WASHINGTON—Following a co
ntentious debate, the U.S. government has agreed to allow a United Nations team to inspect New Millennium in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Members of the U.N. Security Council have pushed for inspections since New Millennium was first opened, but until recently, all resolutions were vetoed by the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
That changed earlier this week, following revelations that a high-ranking researcher at New Millennium had been involved in terrorist attacks. The new resolution passed ten to five in favor.
Kristen DeCaro, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke at a press conference following the vote. “The United States recognizes that the potential dangers of magic, as well as the potential benefits, are not limited to any one nation. Let this serve as a model of openness and transparency for the world, in the hope that we can come together to regulate the use of magic and protect the lives and freedom of all people.”
A bipartisan group of eighteen U.S. senators immediately published a letter of protest in the New York Times, demanding the removal of DeCaro.
U.N. inspectors are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.
“How do you keep this kind of power out of the wrong hands?”
“That’s the wrong question, Isaac. I managed to do it by suppressing magic altogether. But you can’t go back to the way things were, even if you wanted to.”
“Fine. How do you share magic with the world without risking—”
“You can’t.”
“There has to be a way to prevent the most dangerous—”
“There’s not.”
“You’re even more annoying dead than you were alive. At least then you were doing things.”
“Would you like to trade places?”
“I helped reveal magic to the world. People are dying because of what I did.”
“Other people will live because of your choice.”
“What am I supposed to do, add up both columns to decide whether or not I made the right choice?”
“There is no right choice. You chose. Your job now is to make the most of that choice.”
BABS AND THE REST would be suspicious as hell. A lone guard accidentally disintegrates their pet libriomancer, while a convenient fire wipes the servers? The death spell should help convince everyone I’d truly gone up in smoke, but no spell was foolproof, and too many folks were walking around with those damn magic-sucking pearls. If they were smart—and dammit, whatever else I might think of these people, they clearly were—they’d be searching for me, just in case.