The Forever Gate Ultimate Edition

by Isaac Hooke

  Javiol squeezed his tentacles tightly together and then released them. He had another idea.

  If Hoodwink dies in human form, will he return here?

  He will, the Shell returned.

  That seemed at odds with what Ari had told him. Something about, if she died as a gol she would die in the real world. Yet... that probably didn't apply in the current situation, not to the fish technology.

  Are you certain? he asked the AI.

  I am. The fail-safes will protect him. He will awaken as Graol.

  That settled it, then. Javiol would simply have to hunt down Hoodwink in human form.

  That might actually prove to be a lot of fun.

  When he awakens, Javiol told the AI. I want you to escort him to a holding cell. I want him to live out the rest of his days in the body of that fish, the fate he intended for me.

  It will be done.

  Now give me a human body, he ordered the Shell.

  The satoroids led him three rows down to an empty mooring. He took his place and allowed the fleshy cords to connect to his torso.

  He instructed the Shell to lie to the Hivemind about his execution: the AI was to inform them that Javiol had died and his remains had been disposed of. Then he told the Shell to guard him, giving it strict orders to wake him if any of the other sea creatures should somehow discover his ruse and come to retrieve him. He also commanded the Shell to rouse him the moment Hoodwink—Graol—woke up.

  The consciousness transfer initiated and the underwater world faded.

  Jeremy opened his eyes. He looked at his hands, touched his face. He lay on a bed.

  He sat up slowly, his mind working overtime to recall the mental pathways necessary to move a human body. He regarded his surroundings. He seemed to be in a bedroom.

  He was connected to some sort of intravenous drip. He pulled the needle from the crook of his arm and flinched at the pain. He wrapped the resulting wound with the bandage provided on the nightstand.

  He spotted a mirror. He hauled himself to his feet and realized there were more tubes outrageously shoved into his body. In disgust, he reached for the tube that dangled from his penis. But before he touched it a tinny voice erupted from the thing, startling him.

  "Press the button to deflate the small balloon inside your bladder before removing the catheter," the voice said.

  He hesitated.

  "Press the button before removing the catheter," the voice repeated.

  He spotted a flashing green button on the tube. Beneath it, printed in big bold letters were the words: Press Me. Annoyed, Jeremy wrapped his thumb and forefinger around the tube to steady it, and then pressed the button.

  He heard a hiss as air vacated the tube via an opening. The sound abruptly ended.

  "You may now remove the catheter," the tube said.

  Jeremy did so. He felt a stinging sensation as the tip traveled down his urethra. When it emerged, he tossed the whole thing aside in revulsion.

  He followed a similar process to withdraw the second tube from his sphincter.

  When that was done, he forced himself to walk. He felt violated. Debased. His nether orifices pulsed with minor pain.

  He slowly made his way toward the mirror. He stumbled, catching himself on a bed post. He wondered how long the body had been unconscious. Somehow he knew that it didn't really matter, because surrogates didn't suffer the usual symptoms of prolonged coma—no pressure sores, limb contractures, respiratory problems, or atrophied muscles.

  He reached the reflective surface and a feeling of unbridled joy ran through him. Until that point, he hadn't entirely believed that he was human once more. But as he stared at himself in the mirror, he knew it without a doubt. His face had changed, true, but it didn't matter. He was human.

  There was a packet of food on the nightstand. He picked it up, tore open the package, and slowly ate the contents, relishing all the gustatory sensations.

  When he was done, he sighed pleasurably.

  Human.

  As he stared at himself in the mirror, his expression abruptly darkened.

  It was time to find Hoodwink.

  He picked up the pair of glasses on the nightstand. Somehow he knew those glasses were a device called an aReal. He put them on.

  "Shell, are you there?" he asked the empty room.

  Two words overlaid his vision, painted by the aReal so that they seemed to be written on the mirror in white text.

  I am.

  "Where is Hoodwink?"

  A top-down map immediately appeared in the upper right corner of his vision. It zoomed out until a flashing red dot was indicated several neighborhoods away.

  Jeremy smiled widely.

  20

  Hoodwink occupied himself with Sarella, and the two went everywhere together. He explored all the nearby places that hadn't been destroyed in the nuclear devastation. The Sierra Nevada with its giant sequoias. Lake Tahoe with its crystal blue waters. Yosemite Valley with its high granite summits. While those places were beautiful, Hoodwink never saw any animals. No birds. No squirrels. Not even insects. It was altogether eerie, and likely the result of some sort of engineered virus the Satori had released into the atmosphere while following their species extermination protocol—doing their part to ensure when a Satori died, it had a greater chance of reincarnating as a Satori and nothing else.

  On Hoodwink's insistence, they often left their aReals behind during such excursions: he was worried about the Shell constantly tracking them. Sarella told him they could simply remove and replace the batteries at will, but Hoodwink usually opted to leave the devices behind altogether.

  It was good to get away from the claustrophobic city with its giant robots. But even in the wilderness, he might be hiking alone with Sarella, joking and laughing away, only to round a corner to find himself standing face to face with a hovering quadcopter. That, or one of those giant robot soldiers just sitting there, pretending to guard the trail. Whenever he encountered a machine like that, even if it was one of the smaller ones, he couldn't help but feel a fright. If the Shell ever ordered those robots to turn on him, that would be the end of his human body. There was no way to fight back against something like that.

  Indeed, Hoodwink soon realized that those machines were not so much meant to protect the populace, but rather to subdue them, ensuring that the humans and even the surrogates remained docile. Yes, the omnipresent machines, constant reminders of the repressive world they lived in, one ruled by alien masters. Those robots guaranteed that the tiny human population would never forget they existed only because the Shell and the Satori allowed it, and that if any one of them should ever stray from what was expected of them, they would die. And even if they did not stray, they might perish anyway—as decreed by the whims of their Satori masters.

  There were other, less immediate threats to the delicate human bodies. For example, Hoodwink sometimes wondered about the radiation that must still linger from all the nuclear weapons the humans had detonated during the war with the Satori, but Sarella assured him the aliens had cleaned up all of that. Sometimes, in the various wooded areas, he also discovered unexploded ordinance.

  Once, during a particularly long wilderness excursion, he and Sarella encountered the skeletal remains of a platoon the clean-up robots had missed; he and Sarella collected the weapons and hid them inside a fallen trunk, and then memorized the spot. They planned to return to the cache and retrieve those weapons if the need ever arose, because in the city there was nowhere to procure such arms.

  The only sign of any resistance he saw the whole time was graffiti spray-painted in an alleyway beside a boarded-up shop. The words read:

  Resist the dark web of Irotas.

  Irotas was the word "Satori" reversed, as if the underground artist was too frightened even to spell the real name of the oppressors. The graffiti was conveniently painted-over the next time Hoodwink passed that way.

  The weeks went by. Hoodwink and Sarella fell into a routine when they weren'
t traveling outside the city. They would visit the empty gym in the mornings to exercise, travel to the market to pick up fresh produce from the robot farmers, and then eat it at the roadside spot on the pavement where Hoodwink and Sarella had met. They would stay there for some hours, simply talking, or relaxing in each other's presence, until they were hungry again, at which point they would visit a grocery store and eat their fill as they toured the robotized aisles. They would go for a drive, exploring a new park or some other area of the city, and after a few hours they would return to their neighborhood to visit one of the robot-manned restaurants for supper. They often chose restaurants that were popular with other Satori surrogates, and as such had to avoid the usual sexual advances. When finished eating their meals, they would return home and make love. Afterward, Hoodwink would read one of the great works of human literature on his aReal, or a history book, and Sarella meanwhile would paint, also with her aReal, the device recording her brush strokes as digital patterns of light. They would make love once more before bed, and then sleep, only to begin the process anew the next morning.

  Hoodwink grew restless. At night he was haunted by his memories of the Inside. There was a particular recurring nightmare that repeated every few days. In it, Ari fled from a shadowy figure who reminded Hoodwink of One. He knew deep down that if the shadow reached her, she would die. She weaved between the bones of the barren desert outside the walls of some city's Forever Gate, trying to lose her pursuer, but the figure closed. Hoodwink sprinted through the sand toward her but struck the barrier of glass that demarcated the internal boundaries of the system: he was on the other side of it, and couldn't help her.

  One time, when he awakened from a particularly bad version of that dream, he found Sarella wiping his forehead with a cloth.

  "It's all right," Sarella said soothingly, the side of her face limned like a crescent moon by the light from the table lamp she had turned on beside the bed. "It's over now. It was only a dream."

  Hoodwink allowed his breathing to slow.

  "Was it the dream again?" Sarella asked.

  He nodded. "I don't know if I can do this anymore. Live my life this way. The emptiness..." He looked at her and cupped the crescent-lit side of her face in his palm. "I thought, being with you, I would be complete. I thought it would be enough. I was wrong. I need my daughter. I need the rest of humanity. And I need them unchained. The Satori can't do this. We have to—"

  "Shh," Sarella said. "We forgot them, tonight." She nodded toward the two aReal spectacles they had left on the nightstand. She released Hoodwink and he felt suddenly cold without her pressed against his side.

  She got out of bed, removed the batteries from the aReals, and carried them from the room. She returned a moment later to rejoin Hoodwink, her welcome warmth suffusing his side.

  She smiled slightly. "You were saying?"

  He inhaled deeply and sighed. "I need to leave Earth. I have to get back to Ganymede."

  "You can't leave," Sarella said. "You know the Hivemind will never let you. Or the Shell."

  But Hoodwink continued as if he hadn't heard her. "I could take a flyer into orbit and then make my way to Ganymede. I'd have to load my human body of course. That'll be tricky. I'll probably need to get my hands on a spacesuit of some kind. One with enough oxygen to make the journey."

  "As I said, you'll never make it out of orbit. Not without the permission of the Hivemind. The Shell will shoot you out of the sky."

  Hoodwink paused for a long moment. Then he looked at her. She sensed his gaze and turned to meet it.

  Hoodwink spoke his mind: "What if I eliminated them both?"

  "What? The Hivemind? And the Shell?" She stared at him. "You're crazy. It's impossible."

  "No. It is possible. Trust me. I know. I have intimate knowledge of the system. A well placed bomb, and kaboom, they're out of the picture."

  "Would you dare place a bomb?" Sarella said. "You would seriously hurt your race." After a moment, she added as an afterthought: "Our race."

  "I would set them back a few hundred years, yes," Hoodwink said. "Mind, most of the members of our society would still survive in the oceans. And it would be better for them, too. They'd be living as Satori again, rather than through the various surrogates and virtual worlds they thrust upon themselves. They'd be forced to share the Earth with humanity: the Satori dwelling in the oceans, and humankind on land."

  "It might be better, as you say, but most of the Satori won't like it," Sarella said. "They'll fight to restore the status quo. Their religion demands it."

  "Well," Hoodwink said. "They'll have a hard time subduing humanity without all of their machines. With the Shell gone, they're little more than sentient fish."

  "You're forgetting about the newly constructed mothership in orbit. It contains another Shell. Another Hivemind."

  "Ah yes," Hoodwink said. "I'm not quite sure what to do about that, not yet. Judging from what I heard during my short visit to the Hivemind, they'll be dispatching that ship to Ganymede shortly, if they haven't already. So we won't have to worry about them for a while."

  "But they will return," Sarella said.

  "If they do, it won't be for a long time," Hoodwink told her. "You're forgetting about the human beings left behind inside the crashed Hercules colony ship. When backed into a corner, with nowhere else to go, the trapped dog becomes a wolf. And the humans on Ganymede are very much wolves at this point. They will fight back."

  Sarella seemed to ponder everything he had told her. "You said you could destroy the Hivemind under the ocean with a well-placed bomb. How would you even get close enough to place such a weapon?"

  "I have a way."

  She smiled obligingly. "And where are we going to find this bomb?"

  "The resistance, dear girl," Hoodwink said immediately.

  "What resistance?" Sarella asked.

  "There is always a resistance. I've been reading the histories of humanity. Whenever an oppressive regime assumes power, human beings always rise up. It might take a while, decades, even hundreds of years, but eventually that regime is toppled. You see, it's the nature of humanity to resist trammels of any kind. Even the human being born into captivity will eventually want to break free. All it takes is one person to show the way. I'm completely convinced that a resistance movement exists out there."

  "I'm not," Sarella said flatly.

  "Do you remember the graffiti?" Hoodwink asked her.

  Sarella frowned in the dim light. "Just because you saw some random scribbling on a wall doesn't mean there is some mythical resistance out there. It could have been a little kid who happened to get his hand on a spray can. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in fact, judging from how messy the writing was. And if even a resistance existed, and it was based in this city, I somehow doubt they'd have the means to provide you with a bomb powerful enough to do what you need."

  "You might be surprised at the resourcefulness of humanity," Hoodwink said. "Especially when its freedom—its very existence—is at stake. I told you about the wolves on Ganymede, didn't I? On Earth, these wolves have become bears."

  Sarella sighed. "Can we stop with the animal metaphors?"

  Hoodwink smiled sheepishly. "Sorry."

  "So tell me, how do you expect to go about finding this so-called resistance?"

  "I haven't figured that part out yet," Hoodwink said. "Maybe I can leave my own graffiti on the wall, see if someone answers it."

  Sarella looked at him with what appeared disbelief, and then she laughed. "Where do you come up with these ideas?"

  "Do you have any better suggestions?" he asked.

  She didn't answer.

  "Thought so," he said.

  She lay her head back on her own pillow. Hoodwink did the same.

  She spoke again a moment later: "What happens if you're actually successful? What if you succeed in contacting the resistance, and destroying the Shell. What then?"

  "Then I go to Ganymede, like I said."

  "No," she
said slowly. "I meant... what about us?"

  "You could come with me," Hoodwink said.

  She was quiet for some time. "I can't, Hoodwink. If you're successful, I'd rather stay here and help humanity rebuild."

  He studied her silhouette in the dim light, then rubbed her hand with one palm. "Then I guess, at that point, we part ways."

  Hoodwink went with Sarella to the apartment she owned and retrieved the art supplies she had procured for herself when she first moved in. Together the pair went to the alleyway where he had seen the graffiti, and while she screened him from the view of the street beyond, he wrote a single word.

  How?

  The word stayed up for a whole day, and was promptly erased the morning after. Over the next week he passed the alleyway multiple times, waiting for a response. It never came.

  One night, too distracted to read the latest work of human literature he had downloaded into his aReal, he pondered the original graffiti.

  Resist the dark web of Irotas.

  He was sure he was missing something. But what?

  The dark web.

  Dark web.

  He had browsed it before. The dark web was a grandfathered overlay network that utilized the public Internet for the routing of anonymized traffic. It required a special legacy software packaged called Roq, which dispatched each request through several random relay hosts before reaching the destination. Roq was supposed to make it impossible to track down the IP address of the target website, and the IP of the person accessing it. In the not too distant past, the citizens of oppressed regimes had favored the use of Roq to anonymize their Internet access.

  If there was a resistance out there, it certainly made sense that it used the dark web. Because from what he knew about the Shell, even the AI wouldn't be able to decode the packets. Hoodwink should be safe connecting to it via his aReal: while the Shell might be able to listen in on the aReal's microphone, and the eye movements and gestures he made, in theory the actual data sent over the Roq network would be unreadable by the AI.

  Unfortunately, because the dark web was unindexed, there were no search engines. The Roq access software he had installed on his aReal contained a basic index, along with a dark web search engine, but most of the sites, including the search engine, were offline. The only site that did actually work was a fairly tame online forum called Trade Winds. The postings involved mostly humans looking to exchange various illegal items frowned upon by the Satori regime, such as firearms.