by George Tome
“Welcome to your portal,” a suave, feminine voice said directly in his head. “Your body-print is saved now, and you’ll return here whenever you are connected. Do you want to choose the face of your avatar?
“I want my real face. Can you see it in my memory?”
“Yes,” the voice confirmed as the hologram of his mug materialized in the air. “What changes do I make?”
“It’s fine.”
He turned around to leave the portal when the voice spoke again.
“And the architecture?”
Right away, the walls of the rooms started to morph into a multitude of shapes and compositions, some familiar, others downright bizarre, all of a beauty impossible to describe in words.
“I have no time for that. Leave it like it was,” he ordered the voice in his head. She complied, and the dome returned to its initial appearance.
He rushed outside to Sandara.
“Your real face. I like it,” she said, smiling playfully.
“How do you know my real face?” he asked, surprised.
“You forgot that Baila took care of that? Everyone knows how you look.”
“And how I scratch my tail…” He sighed, remembering the shameless transmission on the holofluxes.
“Exactly!” she burst into laughter, amused by his embarrassment.
There could be no doubt: a change had happened to her, which didn’t go unnoticed by Gill, just as she didn’t miss it, either. The battle for Acanthia brought her on his side; it gained him more than an ally of circumstance… Now that she knew that he was able to confront Ugo the way he did, that she saw his true face beyond the standard mug of the flour distributors, that she guessed a shred of his desperate fight against the temples, Sandara finally understood that fate had brought in front of her a remarkable Antyran she had to appreciate, despite the fact that she was clueless about his intentions.
Gill could read in her eyes that she began to like his presence—without guessing that she was attracted to him from the first moment she saw his hologram on the fluxes or that she searched his name in secret in the games registry…
“Are we going to the parhontes?” Gill asked her.
“Let’s go! Use your portal to jump to Landolin, gate 3.”
They exited their portals at the same time, and Gill found himself in the familiar landscape he had glimpsed from the prison meadow in Tormalin. They were in a meadow on a steep hill, surrounded by lofty mountains. Right ahead, along a cobblestone path, Gill could see the dome of fire—a blazing wall, sparkling with strange iridescences like those on the wings of the licants. Looking upward, he realized the dome covered a good chunk of the island.
“Come.” Sandara took him by his arm to show him the way.
They followed the path, supporting each other without caring that they were slipping on the unstable slope. The meadow descended to a small forest in the valley, flanked by a vertical wall on the right side, and a lower, flatter peak on its left; thin trees of an unidentified species surrounded the meadow. A bunch of trails sneaked among the scaly grass dotted with wild acajaa stems, thinner and whiter than the farmed variety.
Sandara followed the steep path on their left, bordered by a clay ravine.
Gill was somewhat puzzled that they had to travel a while on foot—it would have been more logical to use their portals to jump in near the fire dome. But he didn’t ask for explanations; he had more burning questions. He couldn’t afford the luxury of believing they had truly escaped Ugo’s intricate plans, whose depth he couldn’t hope to probe without the female’s help. “I have a little surprise for you,” Ugo had threatened them in Ricopa. Knowing the jure, that could only be another nasty ploy to make Gill’s life harder than it already was…
“What is the expansion?”
“What?” she asked, startled by his question.
“Ugo said, ‘after the expansion, this place will be redecorated.’”
Sandara remained silent, looking at him in a strange way.
“I shouldn’t talk about this to a stranger.”
“I thought you had more faith in me,” he reproached her.
The female was fighting an unseen battle, which she was trying, ashamed, to conceal from Gill’s piercing gaze. The secrets of the parhontes shouldn’t be shared with an alien, especially one who might be handed over to the temples in exchange for peace—because in this way, they would give them to the enemy. On the other tail, the Antyran found a way to evade the biggest trap ever imagined by the prophet, defeated Ugo in his playground, and could prove the jure’s treason in front of the council just by his very presence! Perhaps… betraying Gill would waste their chance, maybe their only chance, of escaping alive from the jaws of the terrible alternatives they had.
She had to find out by all means…
“Gill, why did you come here?” she asked, voicing the burning question that consumed her.
“I…” he began, about to tell her of the chase in Alixxor and his escape in the carrier, but he realized her question was much deeper than that. “I didn’t do it for me!” he exclaimed in an outburst of sincerity. “Only I can save a world from oblivion, a world that Baila wants forgotten in the darkness!”
“You want to save a world from oblivion!” she murmured, looking at him, transfixed.
Sandara realized that Gill had said exactly the words she wanted more than anything to hear, words that only the omniscient gods could have seeped into his mouth… and for the first time, she dared to feel a crumble of hope that the unequal battle wouldn’t be lost after all. She didn’t think of it rationally—there was no shred of logic in that outlandish hope—but her female instinct whispered that his words were a sign that she must not abandon him to the enemy, that she had to draw him to her side, by all means. It whispered that his appearance in the middle of the crisis was no mere coincidence but a proof that the real gods existed and that they finally turned their temples, moistened with the drops of resurrection, toward the Blue Crevice… For Uralia’s world needed now, more than ever, to be rescued from darkness…
“You’re right,” she said, sighing. “I should trust you. Anyway, if we fail, the secrets of Ropolis will be of no importance anymore.”
Trying to find the right words, she continued, “You know, Gill, Ugo… has changed. He changed a lot since he died.”
“What do you mean ‘since he died’?” he exclaimed, incredulous, convinced that his hearing holes were playing tricks on him.
“It happened seven years ago. He became obsessed with the crevice. He believed that he could explore it, that he could hide our city lower than anyone might have dreamed would be possible. Hundreds of miles deep, where the enemy probes couldn’t reach. He was caught by a tidal wave… No one knows where his body lies,” she said with a shiver.
The waters of reality muddied again, and he had no way of clearing them. Suddenly, he felt betrayed by the semantics of the words so familiar at the surface but so absurd beyond their superficial meaning. One of the few certainties he believed someone could have in a world captive in the madness of change was the inevitability of death, the certainty that if someone died, he or she would stay dead forever, that death is one of those primitive classifications that should never raise problems of understanding. But on Ropolis, even this certainty didn’t exist anymore, even death was complicated…
“Sandara, if Ugo’s dead, who’s the jure?”
“His avatar, an experimental kyi-print he saved while building Kaura—the land of eternity. It was the only copy of him we could recover, and we thought we were lucky—big mistake—that the world of darkness was ready to open its doors to the first Kaura-after-Life we could archive..”
The impossible had occurred… The immortality dreamed of by Antyrans since ancient times had been discovered in a crevice opened in the crust of a scorched planet. The Ropolitans had found a way to defeat death right under the Shindam’s and Baila’s tails, and nobody knew about their secret! Perhaps that explained t
he jure’s seemingly un-Antyran powers, the fact that he was never defeated. How can you defeat the one whose kyi’s not burning the mighty seed of life, the one hugged by the Shadow and called ‘my dearest son’? He remembered one of the incantations from the Book of Creation Inrumiral.87 The god of darkness wasn’t wholly alive either—so that was the hidden meaning of the words uttered by Sandara in Acanthia when she said that they allied with Arghail to live another day.
“You said that he changed. Do you think his death turned him into a monster?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea. After we brought him up on the islands, we realized he was different. He had a lust for power we didn’t know; he hid things from us… Could the avatars be imperfect? Has the world of shadows affected them somehow? We have no way of finding out, unless we wake other avatars to life.”
“It means… the kaura dead remain alive even after they die…” He finally understood the strange chat between Urdun and the jure in the dark forest.
“Have you seen the world below?” she asked him.
“The huge planet covered in brown clouds?”
“What do you think happens when a Ropolitan dies connected?”
“Well… I have no idea,” he admitted.
“His avatar falls down on Kaura, the world of shadows,” she said, pointing to the toxic smog of the giant planet underneath. “Actually, the same happens if we die disconnected, too. In the moment of death, the last kyi-print is saved by a chip implanted under the skull, which floods us with an endorphin thousands of times more potent than bixan, to scan each of our connections. It’s enough to take someone’s chip to archive the latest version of the avatar on Kaura.”
Gill made a grimace, trying to mask his surprise, realizing the enormity of what he just heard. The Ropolitans had conquered death itself! However, what a ridiculous way they found to live the afterlife…
“Nice place to spend eternity. Not for me, though, thank you very much. I gladly prefer Arghail’s cave,” he thought aloud, gazing at the silent wrath of the storm underneath.
“An avatar free from the slavery of his shell might do things you and I can’t fathom in our wildest dreams! We take their portals and freeze their memories so that they can’t make new connections until we decide what to do about them.”
The first impression he had about the jure—as crazy as it seemed at first glance—proved to be right. The Ropolitans were carelessly throwing gods in the toxic smog, more numerous with each dead Antyran, angered by the rules restricting their immortality, and on top of that, they found a good moment to wake one of them to a hideous life, hoping they could control him! And not just any god, but the malformed avatar of an architect—perhaps the brightest of them all…
In that moment, he thought he understood the most serious problem of the avatars. Not the possible imperfection that seemed the biggest error, although he suspected that he’d soon change his mind about that, but the fact that a kyi-print was not the same as the original… It was another creature altogether!
“Your immortality is a nice idea, but it is only an illusion.”
“Why do you believe that?” Sandara asked him.
“An avatar has as much in common with the real being as a hologram has with the Antyran represented by it. How am I supposed to feel happy that a print of my neurons ‘lives’ somewhere if I’m dead? You could unleash a thousand avatars of me to swarm Uralia—yet I remain myself, the ‘shell’ you despise so much. And if I die, I die forever, without a copy becoming myself. True immortality would be to save the flesh, not its dreams!”
“Do you still not understand?” Sandara asked, bursting into laughter, amused by his ignorance. “We erased the boundary of dreams! Here, we are what we dream. You’d be surprised to learn that the living kaura are in fact partly dead, some more dead than the others. And not only them. You, me, every bixanid, we die a little each day in the real world till the worn-out body cannot sustain life. Yet the ‘shells’ in the catacombs keep living, and kaura don’t feel the old age in Uralia.”
“The avatar keeps them young…”
“Exactly! The avatars save all the lost connections, replacing dead neurons with virtual ones. Together with the machines in the caves, they keep the organs alive. As long as you’re in Uralia, you’re your avatar, protected from the little death of your feeble cells, protected from oblivion.”
“Well, but this opens a gap between the real kyi and the one in Uralia! If you disconnect, you lose all the youth of the avatar.”
“Who do you think cares about this little detail once they win their right to be intubated, to never disconnect? In Uralia, kauras slowly turn into virtual beings, cell by cell, until one day, they slip unnoticed into the realm of dreams.”
“You’re saying your dead have no idea they died?” exclaimed Gill, shocked by the revelation.
“Of course they know—they’re notified by the archives registry. They have to hand over their portals and jump into the amnesic smog down there.”
“Hmm, somehow I doubt they’re happy with the prospect…”
“We have no choice. We don’t let them waste—or take over the world.”
“Except for Ugo,” Gill pointed out.
“We needed him. We knew that sooner or later Baila would attack us… We woke him up from the world of shadows and locked his code inside unbreakable chains of genetic algorithms to prevent him from looking at his essence. He’s the only dead kaura we woke back to life.”
“Why did you do it? Even you said it’s dangerous.”
“Firalia 9, the clone of Ropolis. Our soldiers use a derivative of etonin instead of bixan. What the avatars are doing on the island, the real bodies are doing in Ropolis… but the kyis are under Ugo’s control. Ugo sees everything their holophones scan, feels everything their bodies feel. An army with thousands of holophones and thousands of arms, the mirages, the licantoids, everything is integrated in Ugo’s kyi, and he is able to move on Firalia thousands of times faster than anyone alive. In battle, Ugo becomes the god of time, slowing things as he desires.”
“The temples had no chance.”
“You see why we needed a dead kaura—someone still alive couldn’t do all this. But our victory came with a huge risk. Ugo… Ugo uses his influence to obtain the expansion. To be able to remove his chains and analyze his own code, to change it at will!”
“But this is—”
“An abomination, yes. Ugo insists—and is believed by many—that it’s the only chance we have. If we let him change himself, he’ll turn into a super-intelligence.”
“I wonder who would rest the fate of Antyra on the spikes of a mad Antyran.”
“Only a few of his friends smelled his true face from afterlife. I mean former friends,” she said, correcting her words. “As for the others… anyway, the expansion is a singularity, a Zhan-like entity. The others think that the expanded Ugo won’t have anything to do with today’s Ugo, that he will transcend his Antyran condition, and that no matter how he is now, it will become irrelevant for his future self.”
“And you don’t believe this?”
“I… don’t know. All I know is that everything that is, won’t be anymore. The expansion will change not only Ropolis but the whole Antyra… Do you realize it?”
And not only Antyra, Gill thought, horrified by the prospect. He couldn’t see why a god would be appeased by the tiny Antyran world, now that the wall of fire was gone… Had the alien worlds reached the same dilemma? Why had no singularity come from the vastness of space to take over Antyra? Since the aliens still existed in flesh and bones, it could only mean they didn’t like the idea of a singularity, either…
“I think it is madness to assume such a risk!”
“Baila can’t defeat us in a fight, but what can we do against a nuclear assault? It’s the next logical step, and some think that if Ugo expands, he’ll put an end to the war. They don’t realize that whatever he may become, we’re going to be mere bacteria for him. I�
��m scared… I’m afraid we’re all going to die… that our time on Antyra will end.”
“We must stop him by any means!”
The fire broke out on the edge of the cliffs, an incandescent curtain almost impossible to look at, even from a distance. Step by step, the dome was growing in front of them, taking over the valley between the peaks, rising to dizzying heights—an impenetrable curtain that distorted the relief inside, hiding its details.
The wall wasn’t uniform; huge, blinding flames danced on it, seemingly racing in their mad rush to conquer the heights. They resembled the breath of a monstrous creature puffing out of the ground with a certain rhythmicity.
Soon, they stood in front of it.
“Gill, wait a minute,” Sandara said, pulling his arm to stop him.
He turned to her, puzzled.
“I betrayed our secrets so that the parhontes won’t be able to hand you over to Baila in exchange for peace. If they do it, they will reveal the heresy of Kaura-after-Life. Baila will not rest until he wipes out the last trace of the city.”
“You’re saving my life!” he realized, astounded. Her confidences had given him an easy way to block the parhontes!
Gill could see why his presence was so important here, in such a moment: he could expose Ugo’s treachery, but more than that, he was the only one who could prevent Baila from nuking the place to smithereens because the prophet risked vaporizing the precious Sigian artifact along with the caverns. Of course, someone had to tell Baila that Gill was in the city. Surely the parhontes would have done it in a tailbeat. But Sandara… Sandara gave him a weapon to force the council to defend him by all means in order to protect their secrets. He didn’t need clever deductions to anticipate the disappointment of the architects when they found out they couldn’t use him to negotiate with the prophet…
“What will happen to you for telling me about Kaura?” he asked her.
“The punishment for traitors is death… but my life doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll offer it joyfully to get your help,” she said with sadness.