“Don’t worry.” Rufus sounds unconcerned. “We’ll go out the way we came in. Through that airlock.” He draws Noble’s attention to something that’s probably a door, though it’s not like any of the doors in Thanehaven. For one thing, it has no knob or handle. It’s also shaped more like a window than a door, with eight sides to it. But since it’s hard and smooth and flat—unlike the fibrous, fleshy wall in which it’s embedded—Noble manages to identify it as a door.
“Is that the way to Thanehaven?” he demands.
“Kind of.”
“And the man in the white coat just went through there? In his van?”
“Sure did,” Rufus confirms.
“But if that’s the way to Thanehaven, why did you tell me he was heading for the next game?”
Rufus sighs. “Look,” he says, “I know what I’m doing, okay? So you can sit here and wait, or you can come with me to the bridge. It’s your choice. I’ll go by myself, if you want.”
“No.” Shaking his head, Noble swings one leg over the side of the bin. “I’ll go. Where’s the river?”
“The river?” echoes Rufus. “What river?”
“If there’s a bridge, there must be a river.” Noble jumps down to the floor, which bounces under his feet. “Or maybe a ravine …”
“Oh,” says Rufus. He smiles crookedly. “Um … actually, it’s not that kind of bridge. It’s more like a room.”
Noble grunts. This doesn’t make much sense to him. Why call it a bridge if it’s a room? “So you’ve already been there?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Then how will you find it?”
“Let’s just say I’m good at following my nose.”
Rufus trudges away with his hands in his pockets, past an array of rubbery white garments dangling from hooks made of gristle, until he reaches what looks like a huge slab of muscle embedded in yellow fat. Only when this muscle parts at the center, flinching open like a valve, does Noble realize that it’s actually a hatch of some kind. On the other side of the hatch is a tunnel that vaguely resembles an enormous throat, with its rounded ceiling and moist, ribbed floor. Unlike most gullets, however, it’s very well lit. And it seems to go on forever, in both directions.
“Cool,” says Rufus, sticking his head through the hatch. “This has to be a main road.”
“It’s not a road. It’s a passage,” Noble points out beside him.
“Yeah, but only because we’re on a spaceship. If we were in a town, this would be a main road.”
“What’s a spaceship?” asks Noble, eyeing the pink jellyfish floating overhead.
Rufus replies in an absentminded tone, glancing from left to right. “It’s like an ordinary ship, except that it flies through outer space,” he says.
“What’s outer space?”
Rufus grins. “Nothing you need to worry about,” he promises, before climbing through the hatch and slouching off down the tunnel. After a moment’s hesitation, Noble follows him. Together they pick their way along a raised path, some of it slick and smooth, some of it textured. At regular intervals, the wall to their left disappears as a narrower passage intersects with their tunnel. Each of these passages leads to another long tunnel in the distance, and each has more valvelike doors leading off it.
The air is full of drifting shapes, some pink, some blue.
“Don’t worry about those,” Rufus remarks. “They won’t hurt you.”
“What about that?” Noble stops abruptly, having caught sight of a much larger thing in one of the passages. It looks a bit like a giant gray shellfish, with suckers and beating tentacles. “Is that dangerous?”
“Not to you. Or to me.” Rufus keeps on walking. “It’s not programmed to attack us because we don’t belong here.”
Noble hastens to catch up, placing his bare feet carefully on the slick, spongy floor. “But do they usually attack people?” he inquires.
“Of course!” Rufus speaks with a certain amount of relish. “Most of the moving parts on board used to be run by the ship’s computer. But when the ship became a living organism, they turned into its immune system. Now they’re roaming around in search of foreign objects to kill.”
Noble glances over his shoulder a little nervously. “We’re foreign objects,” he reminds Rufus.
“Yeah. But we don’t fit into their reference matrix,” Rufus says as he suddenly halts. He squints down one of the passages, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “This must be it. The sign’s a bit hard to read, but I think it says ‘bridge.’ ”
Noble is more interested in the gigantic creature that’s approaching them along the big tunnel. It’s a charcoal-gray cylinder as big as the AV’s van, with lashing tentacles and two gaping mouths, each of which is large enough to swallow him whole. Much to his alarm, it seems to be losing speed. But when he looks around to issue a warning, he sees that Rufus is already halfway down the nearest passage.
Noble hurries after him. They stop in front of a closed door, which Rufus contemplates thoughtfully. Noble checks to see that the giant gray cylinder isn’t pursuing them.
Luckily, it isn’t.
“Hello?” Rufus directs his raised voice at the door. “Is anybody in there?”
After a brief pause, someone behind the door says, “Who’s that?”
“My name is Rufus. You don’t know me, but I’m here to save you.” When there’s no response—except an indistinct babble of whispers—Rufus adds, “Are you going to let me in, or what?”
The door’s fleshy lips instantly peel apart, exposing a very large, low room, furnished with chair-shaped polyps sprouting from a spongy floor. The walls are almost transparent, studded here and there with glowing panels. The ceiling is laced with ducts that look like arteries. As for the occupants of the room, there must be about a dozen of them. Some are women with small children. Others are quite old, with gray hair and seamed foreheads.
They don’t look like ideal reinforcements to Noble.
“Who are you?” one of them asks him. “Why are you dressed like that?”
Before Noble can reply, Rufus cuts in. “This is Noble, and he’s here to help.”
“How?” says a tall, bony, balding man. With his bulbous eyes, long neck, and pointed chin, he looks a bit like an insect. “I don’t recognize either of you. Where are you from—Sustainability Services?”
“No.” Rufus pulls a wry face. “We’re not part of the ship’s crew.”
There’s a general gasp. One of the women, who’s dark and long-haired and incredibly beautiful, says, “What?” Beside her, a pasty young boy raises his hand.
“Are you stowaways?” he inquires.
“Nope,” Rufus tells him, “we’re just visitors. But we do know what’s going on.” A quick glance at Noble, however, causes him to amend this statement. “At least, I do.”
The tallest member of the crew folds his arms. He has a gruff voice, craggy features, and a mane of gray hair. “Then why don’t you enlighten us?” he says crisply.
Rufus shrugs. “Okay. Well—let’s see. Your ship has passed through a freak energy wave, which has turned it into a living creature. And now its immune system wants to wipe you out, because you’ve been identified as a threat. So your plan is to head for the Biolab, where you think you might come up with a cure for the ship’s condition. But on the way, you want to collect as many crew members as you can before they get wiped out.” He surveys the dumbfounded expressions in front of him. “I don’t think I’ve missed anything, have I?”
No one answers immediately. Then a small, pale, middle-aged woman with very short hair clears her throat. “H-how do you know all this?” she stammers.
“Because it’s in the game directives.” Rufus’s tone is firm but sympathetic. “This isn’t really a spaceship. It’s a computer game. And you’re all subprograms.”
This time, the shocked silence stretches on and on. One woman sits down abruptly. At last, the craggy-faced man croaks, “You’re mad.”
“
No. I’m telling the truth.” Rufus is beginning to sound impatient. “Come on, guys—where do you think we came from? Outer space?” He plucks at his shirt, which doesn’t look at all like the shiny, close-fitting garments on the people around him. “Have you ever seen clothes like these before?”
“Maybe we’re going mad,” proposes a redheaded teenage boy. But the beautiful dark-haired woman isn’t impressed.
“Collectively?” she retorts. “I don’t think so, Dygall.”
“Unless there’s some kind of neurotoxin in our air supply,” suggests the woman with short hair. “Maybe we should take a reading.”
“How?” someone else inquires, from the back of the group. “We can’t use the instruments, Quenby.”
“And we couldn’t all be having an identical hallucination,” the craggy-faced man points out, just as Noble decides to weigh in.
“You’re not going mad. Can’t you see that I come from another place? I’m not like you. I’m different. Look at me.”
Everyone looks at Noble. Then the pasty child raises his hand again. “Are you an alien life-form?”
Noble doesn’t understand this question. It’s Rufus who answers for him.
“No, he’s not,” says Rufus. “But if he were, he’d be the least of your problems. Right now, you guys are sitting ducks. It’s won’t be long before those giant blobs get in and eat you alive.”
Quenby frowns. “If we reach the Biolab—” she begins, much to Rufus’s disgust. He doesn’t let her finish.
“The Biolab can’t help you,” he insists. “I can, though. I can get you out of this game.”
Several crew members make scornful noises. They shake their heads and roll their eyes. The insect man, however, isn’t among them.
After studying Rufus intently for a moment, he says, “Let’s pretend you’re not a figment of our disordered imaginations, and that every one of us is a subprogram in some giant computer.” His level gaze is hard to read. “What’s your plan, exactly?”
Rufus gives a brisk little nod. “Okay. Well, first off … um … what’s your name?”
“Arkwright.”
“First off, Arkwright, like I said, we have to get you out. And to do that, I thought we’d try a kind of buffer overflow.” Rufus cocks his head. “You know what that is, right?”
“I don’t,” Noble butts in. So the pasty child tries to explain.
“It’s where a program writing data to a buffer puts in more data than the buffer can hold,” he squeaks, “and all that extra data overflows into other memory locations, overriding them.”
Noble isn’t enlightened. He just stares blankly at the boy, whose hair is so fair that it’s almost white.
Then Arkwright intervenes. “You won’t be able to infiltrate our Core Artificial Intelligence Program with a buffer overflow attack,” he informs Rufus. “Didn’t you hear? Our instruments aren’t working.”
Rufus heaves a long-suffering sigh. “I’m not talking about the ship’s computer,” he says. “I’m talking about the real computer. We’re going to be part of this attack. Only we’ll need every single person on board.” He frowns as he scans the gathering. “I assume you guys aren’t the only crew members left?”
“Of course not!” Quenby exclaims.
“Fine. All right. So we’ll head for the Biolab, pick up everyone that we meet along the way, and then retrace our steps to the airlock.”
“The airlock?” Arkwright echoes in disbelief.
“That’s our exit,” Rufus assures him.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” It’s the big man talking—the one with gray hair. “That airlock leads into space.”
“No, it doesn’t. We’ve been through it ourselves, haven’t we?” Rufus appeals to Noble, who nods.
“I don’t believe you. This is ludicrous.” The extremely beautiful woman turns to her companions. “How do we know these two aren’t the cause of what’s happening? How do we know they’re not trying to play a trick on us?”
“Calm down, Sadira. We mustn’t panic,” says Quenby. But Sadira ignores her.
“Maybe our brain waves are being manipulated! So that we’ll leave the ship and fall into alien hands!” Sadira cries. “Maybe these two are really giant bugs, and we think they look human because they’re messing with our heads!”
Rufus flashes her an appreciative glance. “That’s good thinking, actually,” he concedes. “I mean, even if it’s not true, it’s good thinking.”
“I’m not a giant bug,” Noble objects sourly. Rufus, however, hasn’t finished.
“Look,” he argues, addressing the group as a whole, “if I was messing with your heads, I’d lure you out. I’d make you think you’d landed on some wonderful planet with strawberry-flavored oceans. Wouldn’t that be the smart thing to do?”
After a long silence, Arkwright clears his throat. “Maybe,” he says, giving Rufus all the encouragement he needs.
“This isn’t a trick,” Rufus promises. “I want to get you out of here. I believe in liberty for everyone.”
“It’s true,” Noble confirms. “He does.”
“Come on, guys, what’s to lose?” Rufus spreads his arms in a pleading gesture. “We’re still going to the Biolab. And we’ll get there in one piece, too, because I know how to keep you safe.”
That certainly gets a reaction. The atmosphere changes suddenly. Even Sadira seems interested.
“How?” Quenby asks. And Dygall adds, “We don’t have any weapons.”
“You don’t need weapons,” says Rufus. “All you need to do is change your appearance. Because if you incorporate bits of foreign programming, then you probably won’t trigger the subroutines in those killer cells out there. Get it?” Without waiting for confirmation, he nods at Arkwright’s feet. “Some of you can take off your boots, and … Noble? Why don’t you lend these guys your belt and your money pouch and your hauberk? Whatever you can spare.…”
CHAPTER EIGHT
By the time he leaves the bridge, Noble is wearing his breeches and nothing else.
His belt, hauberk, tunic, cloak, flask, purse, and studded leather wristbands have been given to other people, with each member of the crew now dressed in a single item of borrowed clothing. Even Rufus is bare-chested, having surrendered his shirt and undershirt. One of his shoes has gone to Dygall, while the other is on the foot of the pasty child, who calls himself Yestin. According to Rufus, nobody needs an elaborate disguise. “All you’re trying to do,” he explains, “is distort your dimensions a tiny bit. It doesn’t have to be much of a change. Just enough to fool the program.”
And the program is fooled—as they discover when they finally venture forth. They’re neither pursued nor attacked. The giant gray creatures patrolling the ship simply pass them by, again and again. “It’s like we’re invisible,” Quenby murmurs in astonishment. “It doesn’t make sense.…”
“Of course, it makes sense,” Rufus retorts. “It makes sense because Noble and I aren’t from this program.”
But Quenby shakes her head. “I can’t believe that,” she protests. “I just can’t.”
“I can,” Yestin pipes up.
Noble says nothing. He’s had to process so much new information recently that he’s feeling a bit lightheaded. And he’s also becoming more and more annoyed by this crowd of feeble strangers. How on earth did he come to be shepherding them down a giant, monster-infested gullet dressed in nothing but his breeches? It doesn’t make sense.
I don’t belong here, he tells himself. I belong back in Thanehaven, rescuing Princess Lorellina.
Then Yestin tucks a fragile hand into his and says, “Are you really a computer-game hero?”
Startled, Noble peers down at him.
“Because I’m not,” Yestin continues. “If this really is a computer game, no one would choose me as their avatar. But they’d definitely choose you. You look like a hero.” He cocks his head and stares at Noble with round blue eyes. “What game are you the hero of?”
Noble searches his memory. “Thanehaven Slayer,” he declares at last.
“Oh.” Yestin nods. “I haven’t played that. But I guess you must be the slayer, huh?”
“Not anymore. I’ve put down my weapon.”
“Pity.” Yestin’s tone is regretful. “We could do with a few weapons, right now.”
At that very instant, someone utters a short, sharp scream. It’s Sadira. Having reached the next junction ahead of everyone else, she’s turned a corner and stumbled upon a corpse—which is lying on its back with a sizzling hole where its face should be.
“Dygall!” Quenby exclaims. “Yestin! Don’t look!”
Noble directs an inquiring glance at Rufus, who shrugs.
“It’s okay,” says Rufus. “Don’t worry. It’s just set dressing.”
“What?” Quenby glares at him.
“It’s atmosphere,” Rufus insists. “A backdrop for the game. It was never a real person.” He raises his hand to point down the passage, where a pulsing purple blob is squashed against a distant doorway. “Someone real must be hiding in that room, though,” he continues, “or Mister Goopy wouldn’t be trying to eat his way through the door.”
“Oh, my God,” Quenby whimpers.
“And whoever it is, we’re going to need ’em. We can’t leave a single one of you behind.” Rufus raises his voice. “Hello? Is anyone in there?”
“Shhh!” Sadira hisses. “That thing will hear you!”
“Maybe, but it won’t attack me. It’s not programmed to.” Pushing past her, Rufus strolls toward the purple blob, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. “Hello?” he says loudly. “Is someone inside that room?”
“Yes,” comes a cracked response.
Yestin catches his breath. “That’s Merrit,” he murmurs, squeezing Noble’s hand.
“How many people are with you?” Rufus wants to know.
“Just Haemon,” answers the unseen Merrit. She sounds like a young girl.
“Haemon!” Dygall exclaims. “Haemon’s alive! And Merrit, too!”
“Not for long, though. Not if that thing reaches them.” Arkwright indicates the purple blob, which seems to be gnawing its way through the door by regurgitating its stomach acids. Noble wonders how the creature will react if someone tries to peel it off the melting door panels.
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