Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  Since the power levels were lower, they didn’t need the monster realm connection rig, which was back home anyway. The experiment could be conducted using standard commercial phones.

  Finally, he would be there with her the entire time. No standing back or observing as a hologram. He would use more of Helen’s probe constructs to directly interact with her while she was in the realm. If she made it all the way into the transit dimension, he’d follow her the way he did in China.

  They dragged the dining room table along with two chairs into the master bedroom and set them up opposite the bed to give Tonya and Emily an improvised observation post. Kim seemed to be bonding with Emily. She’d certainly been confident helping him reset the house’s realmspace. Overall, she seemed to be fitting in well everyone.

  “Rent goes a long way around here,” Kim said. Mike nodded at her. The bedroom was as big as their living room back home.

  “It wasn’t that cheap,” Emily replied. “I could only afford three months. We were going to have to downsize soon…” she choked to a stop.

  Tonya took her hand. “We’re going to get him back. Safe and sound.” Emily still teared up and threw her arms around Tonya.

  “I’m sorry,” Emily said as she sniffled. “I have to stop this. I’m slowing everything down.”

  “It’s okay,” Tonya said as she steered Emily to their chairs. Screens turned on in the house’s shared vision channel. “I’ve got a job for you. Since Mike’s going in there with her, I need you to manage some controls.”

  Mike briefed Kim on the details of the experiment. When he got to the part about Helen’s probes, she asked, “I have to work with your tentacles?”

  He’d never thought of them that way, but the comparison was vaguely appropriate. “I guess you could call them that. Is that okay?”

  “It’s fine.” Her eyes flashed. “I got pretty good with those back in my Pink Butterfly days.”

  Kim’s adult-oriented contests had taken place in that realm. It was the subject of their first, worst fight, but time had caused that memory to fade.

  From behind them, Tonya made a disgusted noise. “Don’t remind me.”

  “That sounds like a story,” Emily said.

  Tonya rolled her eyes. “My bestie over there loves realm contests, and some of them were definitely not G rated. She talked me into coming along to one of them back in the day. It took me a week before I could look at spaghetti without gagging.”

  Kim laughed at them, and then turned back to Mike. He understood. She was joking because she was scared. She said, “Stay with me this time, okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The bed was a king size. There was at least three feet of space between them after they climbed onto it. Kim wouldn’t need a fence of pillows like they used back home. Mike didn’t care for the space all that much. Contact separated by thick bags of foam was still contact. On this bed, it felt like she was in another zip code. At least lying down they could dive as deeply as possible. No need to worry about staying upright or even in a seat.

  “Where do we start?” Kim asked.

  “I was thinking of our forest.” It was where he first held her, sort of, after what Watchtell had done to her. Mike had built it long ago as an experiment in high-res realm modeling, never dreaming it could be used for trauma therapy. He’d since built out three more for medical studies.

  But this one would always be theirs.

  Her eyes went glassy for a moment, and she blinked. The realm never failed to move her. “Sure.”

  Mike returned his main perception to his threads while Kim transitioned to the realm, leaving Tonya and Emily to observe in realspace. He needed to keep the number of variables small, so they wouldn’t be coming inside with him and Kim.

  Realspace had become his new normal, but it was an addition, not a substitution. His threads and his datastores were the core of his being, and he couldn’t imagine living without them, being alive without them. Realmspace was his home, and it always would be.

  “Everything looks nominal,” Tonya said.

  Kim manifested next to an enormous fallen log, wearing slacks and a sweater. Her casual elegance always caught his eye. It was late spring here, so the sun had burned most of the mist away. The remainder was hidden in shadows under the trees and around the still lake nearby. A simple Buddhist temple sat on the shore, a place for meditation that reminded him of Taranathi’s porch in China. The entire realm was a tone poem on peace.

  He manifested his hologram beside her. “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t need the sling in here, but I still feel constrained. At least it doesn’t hurt.”

  “That makes sense. We’re trying to establish a baseline before we move on.”

  She looked around. “Well, where are they?”

  “They?”

  Kim waved her good arm back and forth like a snake. “Your shokushu. I want to see them.”

  He guessed what she was talking about more from the gesture than the word. “Oh yeah. Right.”

  Helen called them probes, but he thought of them more like remote threads. It allowed him to interact with a realm without worrying about destroying it. Manipulating them didn’t come naturally, though. The closest he could come to describing it was flying twentieth-century radio-controlled models around in the days before VR and drone automation. It even used a controller, transmitting the motion of his threads to the ones in the realm. The different point of view meant that orientation, motion, and control were hard to manage. Helen could use thousands of them at once, but Mike wasn’t that practiced. The best he could manage right now was about a hundred. Mike went with a third of that to make things as easy as possible.

  They manifested in a fernlike pattern, about as tall as he was in realspace but maybe twice that wide at the base. Where an actual squid tentacle would be wet and covered in suckers, the probes were a glossy white with thin, dark bands around them where the segments articulated against each other. As long as he concentrated, he could control them.

  Kim took a step back. “Wow.”

  “They are a little bit out of place here.”

  “It’s not that.” She cocked her head. “Is this close to what you really look like?”

  He hadn’t considered it before. Mike perceived his threads very differently, never seeing them at all. But he had to admit that if he ever could manage to manifest them without blowing everything to bits, this was close to what they’d look like.

  It was about as far from human as you could get, and that made him nervous. She’d never seen him this way. If it wasn’t for this emergency, Mike wasn’t sure she ever would. It was so alien. “I’m a lot bigger than this in real life.”

  Kim walked slowly up to them. Mike tried to keep them still but only managed to make them sway lightly. It made the construct look even worse, like it was out of a horror movie.

  She touched one. “They’re beautiful.”

  He would never have called them that. His true self was the most alien thing about him, the dividing line that kept him from calling himself human. To this day, he worried that if Kim ever saw him this way, she’d run screaming for the hills.

  And she thought it was beautiful.

  “Can you feel this?” she asked.

  He was still processing that she though his true self could be beautiful, so it took a minute before he could say anything. “No.”

  Kim put her head against the probe she was holding. “We never get a break.”

  Touching Will had changed her. Kim now had a desire he’d never seen before. He’d have to ask Tonya to be sure, but Kim seemed to get closer to everyone now, including Emily. There hadn’t been time for him to know if this would be a good change or a bad one. Kim didn’t handle frustration very well. That said, she usually found a way to get what she wanted. Now that she knew touching people without pain was possible, Mike wouldn’t put it past her to figure out what had happened and turn it into a cure.

  Which was anoth
er reason they needed to get Will back. And for that to happen, he needed Kim at her best. “Are you read to start?”

  She let the probe go. “Sure. What do I need to do?”

  “Follow me.” Moving the probes together proved Mike would never be any good as a centipede. It was all he could do to keep them from falling over. Mike checked to see if the rippling motion he was using to move them had changed Kim’s mind, but she still hadn’t lost her fascinated smile. Maybe this would end up being an alternative to a hologram.

  He straightened the probes and stilled them as best he could when they got to the edge of the lake. “We’re going to try using Fee’s construct to create a controlled opening to the dimension.”

  She closed her eyes, and then a hammer-blow rang through him. When Kim did her thing picking locks, he felt a twisting snap, but this was orders of magnitude stronger. He could still handle it. She was using higher dimensions to manipulate quantum fabrics like the one that underpinned realmspace.

  “Will it be easier than using my fist?” she asked.

  He stumbled in his control of the probes. Her human avatar had transformed into a mobile obsidian statue crazed with coral lightning. While she retained her normal shape, there was no way you’d mistake her for human. She moved too smoothly, and her eyes were all wrong, glass in front of distant, raw energy. Even covered in ribbons—she’d figured out clothing—he found it magnetic.

  “Are you seeing this, Tonya?” he asked.

  “Kim,” she said over the comms. “How long have you known how to do that on purpose?”

  “Now that I’ve done it a few times, it’s a little hard to stop. Do I look any different out there in realspace?”

  Emily came on the line. “I’m not sure. Hang on a second.” After a pause, she swore. “Tonya, can you see that from where you’re sitting?”

  “My God.”

  “Guys,” Kim said. “What’s going on?”

  Tonya replied, “Emily had to close all the curtains for us to be sure. Kim, you’re glowing.”

  “What, like a neon sign?”

  “No. If it was that strong I would’ve noticed it in China. We had to black out the room to see it at all.”

  Mike split off some threads and accessed the home network. “The house feeds don’t show anything special.”

  “Hang on,” Emily said, and then a new window opened onto the realm. She moved her phone so close to Kim they could only see the curve of her jaw. “Now do you see it?”

  He did. There were the faintest traces of pink lightning dancing under her skin.

  “Well that’s different,” she said.

  Her nonchalance brought him up short. “Different?”

  “What do you want me to say? I’ve been a freak all my life. That?” She waved her arms at the window, “that’s a relief. At least now people can see it. Emily, what does my arm look like?”

  “Your sleeve is covering it.”

  “Pull it up. I can’t feel anything out there right now.”

  Emily rolled up Kim’s sleeve. From just above her wrist to just below the elbow, the faint lightning stopped.

  “What does your arm feel like in here?” he asked.

  She tested it. “Vibrating. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s weird.”

  “Can you change back to normal?” he asked.

  “Probably, but I might get sick. That’s what happened last time. Was changing to this the wrong thing to do?”

  “No,” he replied. “It makes things simpler.” He used the probes to open a door on the side of a tree and pushed a button underneath. The construct he based on Fee’s research rumbled out of the lake, streaming water as it surfaced, not all of which flowed through directions that existed in realspace.

  “That’s impressive,” Kim said.

  “Fee was nuts,” he replied, “but she wasn’t always wrong.”

  Kim walked to the edge of the lake. “So how does it work?”

  His probes were in constant contact with her hands, making it look like she walked through a bizarre wheat field. There were definite harmonics in her left arm. “Touch here,” he made a corner of the construct flash, “and here,” a different corner flashed, “as soon as you’re ready. It should easily absorb the vibrations.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’re on the road.”

  She grabbed the first corner.

  “Readings are nominal,” Tonya said. “Well within predicted variances.”

  Kim shook her head. “Here goes nothing.” She grabbed the other corner. A resonance shook the realm. “Oh my God. It hurt so much and now—”

  The rest of what she said was lost as the other end opened, which was not supposed to happen. The construct was predicted to absorb her resonance and dissipate it harmlessly. Readings showed that it wasn’t the transit dimension on the other end; it was somewhere else.

  “Mike?” Kim shouted. “Mike!”

  The probes flicked one by one into the maw of the construct. As strong as she was transformed, Kim couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t disengage from the controls fast enough to keep his threads from falling through with them.

  “MIKE!”

  He didn’t have time to panic. All he had was a fleeting sense of falling down a giant tube into darkness, Kim’s scream echoing over his head.

  Mike was in a vast emptiness, alone. He could feel his real self, but it was far away. Faint buzzing trickled through to wherever he was now.

  “Kim?” he asked, “Is that you? Tonya?”

  The buzzing got less frantic but no closer. And he couldn’t understand it.

  “I think I’m okay,” he said, hoping it made its way outside.

  Antachna? Es nach tehnakra?

  The voice was everywhere and nowhere. Mike repeated what it said, trying to understand.

  Ech var. Ech var nai akana.

  A realm very slowly built itself into being around his probes.

  Vich nacah tos.

  After repeating the phrase he said, “I don’t understand.”

  Vich nacah tos.

  Mike repeated it again, and a voice from realspace answered. It might’ve been Kim. He hoped it was. The impression that came back was welcome.

  The realm was damp, gray, and filled with mist. He couldn’t see very far. The mud squelched under his probes as they moved. Things that looked like tree trunks crushed to dust when he tried to examine them.

  Vich nacah tos.

  Chapter 35

  June

  They made their next random turn. Even though June had helped build the plant, she was now thoroughly lost.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Edmund fucked their shit up is my guess.”

  “But he exited into the crystal. I saw the readouts.”

  “It wasn’t him, it was New Kim. God, it sucks I had to do that. She was so fucking cool.”

  June stopped. “The smaller one was destroyed?” When she thought it was Edmund, the loss was only painful. Losing the one called New Kim was a tragedy. June recognized Edmund’s readings. They were off the scale, but at least there was a scale. The scanners didn’t know what to make of New Kim. It was such an opportunity, now gone.

  “Yeah, and it gave Edmund the time he needed to give us a distraction.” After a few fumbles, Spencer found her hand again. “We can’t waste it.”

  “We need to find a place with power and a live terminal,” she said. Security had taken both their phones as soon as Anna had entered the room, so June had no way to communicate with her allies. Assuming Anna hadn’t locked Inkanyamba and Yumbo up as well.

  “Lady, I’m running, I got no destination.” He slapped a wall. “We wouldn’t be able to see a map even if we could find one.”

  Edmund had managed to shut down the battery-powered backups in addition to the main power. She could not overstate the profound darkness of a blacked out underground facility. Her brain had begun to rebel against the total lack of visual stimulation, providing halluc
inations of faint, gray walls that only had a general connection with the reality of the plant. If he managed to shut the entire grid down, they may never get out of here.

  “At least slow down, Spencer. For it to be this dark, Edmund had to have shut down the bot systems. It’s a wonder we haven’t stumbled over some already. And we need to trace opposite walls. There are emergency closets at the intersection of most hallways. They’ll at least have flashlights and a map.”

  “Shit. Is that what those were? I think we’ve already passed two.”

  “Which is why we need to slow down.”

  They found what they needed a few hundred meters further up the corridor.

  “Where’s the goddamned door knob?” Spencer asked.

  “They’re usually controlled by electronics, either a phone check or a fingerprint. But I think there’s a manual release somewhere.” There had to be. These were for emergencies, and lack of power was definitely an emergency. “You search the bottom part, I’ll check the top.”

  June found it at the top center of the door, a big solid button that was hard to press. When she managed it, there was a loud clack, and the door swung open on its own. An emergency light flicked on, making them both blink at the brightness.

  “Jackpot,” Spencer said.

  She found the flashlights quickly, but the closet held much more than that. Among the small stack of boxes was water, a first aid kit, some energy bars, and a few other things she didn’t recognize.

  Spencer grabbed a small black box. When he opened it, a multitool fell out. “Finally, a fucking break.” He pulled out a water bottle and emptied the contents on the floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We don’t need that much water, but we do need help with the lights.”

  “Why?”

  He unfolded the knife blade from the multitool and cut two pieces out of the center of the bottle. “I’m glad you guys like expensive supplies. Most water bottles are clear, but these blue ones are perfect.”

  Now was not the time to be obscure. “Perfect for what?”

  After a little work with some duct tape, he handed her back her light, which now had a jury-rigged blue lens over the front of it. “They’ll work fine like this, but we’ll see people coming long before they see us. Just because Vonda McBlowUpTheWorld is stuck in the dark doesn’t mean she hasn’t plastered our faces all over whatever passes for a most wanted list around here.”