Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  The technology that allowed the illusion of movement and feeling in realmspace could be turned inside out and used to move a person in realspace via a special interface. Realmspace protocols required the subject to be calm for it to work, and government regulations restricted the tools to medical professionals. Those only worked with encrypted keys that came from the subject, or someone legally recognized as able to act for the subject, and they had to be renewed at least every four hours.

  Realmspace was full of wackadoo conspiracy theories about governments secretly planning mind-controlled armies, but Kim knew how it worked. She was sure various governments had tried to directly control people via their neural interfaces—hell, she wouldn’t be surprised one bit if Watchtell had been involved here in the US—but it couldn’t happen. The limitations were a part of how realmspace functioned. Otherwise places like North Korea would’ve adopted the technology years ago. Helen admitted China once had a division that worked on the theory, but it was so obviously a parking place for lazy bureaucrats it’d been shut down years ago.

  Just because controlling people’s bodies with their neural phones wasn’t useful to some nutjob dictator didn’t mean it wasn’t useful at all. Physical rehabilitation had been revolutionized, and a more limited version had transformed sports training. People were now able to feel what it was like to make the perfect layup, forward pass, or double play.

  Kim didn’t need Mike to score a touchdown; she only needed him to move from the house to the car. “I can’t translate for you right now,” she said into his ear. “We have to go.”

  He didn’t acknowledge her at all and continued talking about some kind of flower, she thought. The English side of the conversation had gone technical, and she couldn’t follow it. Kim looked up at Tonya and nodded.

  “This is always a little freaky the first time you see it,” Tonya said. “It’s a godsend in an ER.” She pressed a few buttons only she could see, and Mike started to move.

  Tonya was right. Mike moved normally, but he didn’t look where he was going. He was still having a casual conversation with Tal. Kim tried her best to translate as they walked outside. Mike would ask questions, but the replies were nothing but riddles.

  Tonya shook her head as they got him in the car. “Tal is worse than Cyril.”

  “Cyril?” Emily asked.

  “A mentor,” Tonya replied. “An infuriating mentor.”

  Kim had seen the footage and heard the story many times. She still didn’t know what to make of it. At least he hadn’t shown up again. Kim sometimes thought that maybe Cyril was restricted to China.

  Once they were headed for the airport, it was time for a difficult discussion. She turned and faced Emily. “I can’t fly coach.”

  Emily nodded. “Right.” She blinked. “First class tickets reserved. How hard is it for you to fly?”

  Crowds in airports. Lines of people who thought nothing of bumping into each other as they went through scanners. She’d been fine going to China, but that only came with a lot of preparation. They had no time for that now. It would be simpler to walk through the airport naked. People wouldn’t touch her then. All that had to happen was to step the wrong way in front of a moving sidewalk or have someone brush her hand walking down an escalator.

  Kim swallowed. “I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s late,” Tonya said, “so there won’t be all that many people there anyway.”

  “How do we avoid attracting attention with Mike acting like this?” Emily asked.

  “Making him look natural is on me,” Tonya replied. “But I’m licensed, and I’ve had some practice.” She pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment. “These will take care of the eyes. The talking to himself thing, though…”

  It was a problem. “Mike? We need you to tone it down. Can you do that?” They could make him sleep, but it would be counterproductive to getting him on the plane. The thought that he might not wake up made her sick. “Please, Mike. Maybe you can take a break?”

  At first she didn’t think it worked, but gradually he went from a regular conversation to a whisper.

  “God, that’s weird,” Emily said.

  She hated this so much.

  Emily blushed. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” She wiped her eyes and then threw a handkerchief over Emily’s hand. Emily pulled it tight without a second thought, and Kim liked her more. This was someone who didn’t need to be taught the rules.

  Kim waited a moment for her voice to settle. “Will is the priority.” That was a lie, but only a little one. Kim didn’t look to see if Emily knew it. “Once we get him back we can figure out Mike, if he hasn’t managed to figure it out on his own by then.” Will was a child, innocent and helpless. He needed their help more than Mike did.

  Kim closed her eyes tight and chanted that in her head. It didn’t work, but it at least helped her fake it. She needed Mike to come back. It was shocking how quickly she’d forgotten how to face things like this on her own.

  Mike stopped whispering as they went through security, and it had been too noisy to catch any clues as to why. This time Tonya threw a cloth over her hand. Kim twisted it a little too hard and pulled it out of Tonya’s fist, but it helped her keep it together.

  It was an hour into the flight, with the pressure unbearable, with Emily and Tonya glancing at her constantly from across the aisle, before Kim calmed down enough to examine the situation.

  Staying wound up and half panicked was going nowhere. She felt useless, and she was not useless.

  Breathe.

  She was a force of nature. That’s what Spencer called her. A fucking force of nature. Mike had been right to run the experiment. Simply thinking about activating her power, about breathing, brought a tingle of it forward. If anything, it was stronger than before.

  You are not helpless.

  She did the unexpected, turned inside on her opponents, and won. Nobody knew what she brought to the table. She didn’t know what she brought to the table, but by God she was bringing it, and anyone standing in her way better watch the hell out.

  Center, and find the stillness.

  Kim took a deep breath and held it until it hurt. When she let it out, she looked over at Tonya and Emily, then smiled.

  You are going to win.

  Their eyes went round, and they sat back in their seats. They stopped checking on her after that.

  Good. She was still worried about Mike, still worried about everything, but it was time to put that away.

  It was time to go to work.

  Chapter 41

  Mike

  Mike had never encountered a realm so distinctive before. His working theory was that the experiment with Kim had accidentally exploited a VPN vulnerability and routed him into a research lab, or maybe a soft launch environment from Tencent or Activision Blizzard. CES was coming up; the timing fit. He had to tread carefully here. Not only would they have all sorts of extra monitors pointed at it, but if he inverted the realm, he could do real harm to someone’s research or finances. He’d only gotten out from under IRS scrutiny a few months ago. Kim would kill him if he ended up in jail over destruction of property.

  Besides, the protocol mesh was so different he wanted to learn how it worked. If he could figure out where it was in realspace, he could reach out and maybe negotiate a licensing deal.

  The AI was more than a little bizarre, too. So far Tal hadn’t manifested, so Mike didn’t know what he looked like. Whoever programmed him had impressive linguistic skills; without Kim, Mike would never have understood anything Tal said. She had gone quiet wherever she was. Mike thought that maybe she’d fallen asleep, hopefully on an airplane. Will was still out there.

  Tal started speaking English almost as quickly as Kim started speaking…Mike called it Talese. At any rate, when Kim signed off, he had to admit to Tal that he could only speak English. This disappointed him.

  “If you already speak English, then my language should be child’s p
lay for you.”

  Mike shrugged. “I have to learn it the way everyone else does. How much farther do we need to travel?” He’d been walking his probes forward, following a navigational carat Tal had manifested for the purpose. It was another unique and intriguing part of this realm: Mike was localized. His threads didn’t fill up the space around the realm—they were confined to the storage and interface of the probe constructs. It must be what it felt like when a human controlled an avatar.

  “At our current speed it will take a standard cycle to reach our destination.”

  Which told him exactly nothing, since he had no reference. “What is that in hours?”

  “I do not understand that word.”

  This had to be a game, and a science fiction game, at that. Mike decided to play from that angle. “It’s a common unit of measure from my home world.” He considered the problem. Atomic clocks worked on universal principles, so he started there. It was mostly vocabulary, so first Mike talked about atoms and gave him the word. “You know what those are, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  “And do you know any standard intervals used by your atomic clocks?”

  “I understand those words but not how they relate to each other in your sentence.”

  Cesium wasn’t too hard, but then they hit a brick wall. Mike figured Tal wouldn’t know what the words for radiation, ground state, or isotope were. What he didn’t count on was Tal not to understanding the concepts. Profoundly not understanding them.

  “Your knowledge of these things is impressive,” he said. “Has the guild created a new treaty with the AC network?”

  “I don’t know what those things are.”

  “A fault in translation. When did you say the other half of your pair will return?” That was Tal’s term for Kim.

  “I’m not sure.” He thought of something simpler. “Do you have a unit of time that corresponds to this interval? We call it a second.” He thumped two of the probes together as close as he could to once a second. Mike still hadn’t figured out how to access the low-level functions of this protocol stack. Without a genuine clock, he wasn’t sure how precise he was.

  “That is very close to a one feton interval.”

  “How close?”

  “If I average the variation, then a feton is approximately one zax zero three seconds.”

  Zax had to be his word for point, so Mike had enough to work out the rest of the words for time intervals. Second was a lucky one. Hour and day were quite a bit further off from what he was used to. Mike set up conversions in some subthreads so he wouldn’t have to think about it consciously.

  “And a year?” Mike asked.

  “You expect me to believe you have never heard of extana standard units?”

  Tal could go from interested to annoyed almost as fast as Kim. Mike told the truth. “No?”

  “I don’t believe it. I won’t be tested this way by the likes of you.”

  Make that as fast as Kim. So now he knew seconds, minutes, hours, and days, but not months or years. The longer periods wouldn’t matter, so Mike shelved finding out about them for now.

  A standard cycle was Tal’s version of a day, which was important. A day was well outside the capabilities of his human host to interface with realmspace. He could talk, sort of, to Kim so there was no significant time compression involved. He wasn’t on fast-forward, experiencing things faster than real time.

  It all added up to…well, not much. But it did eliminate some things. This wasn’t a standard realm, and he wasn’t accessing it through his phone. His threads were directly involved, but he couldn’t inhabit the space normally. He desperately wanted access to one of Tonya’s classroom realms. He needed to write out some equations to see what the math said.

  His probes trudged along in silence. It wasn’t bare ground he was walking on. It was pavement, covered with a thin layer of muck that squished as he walked on it. If Kim were here, he’d worry about her being cold, but not freezing. The clouds overhead stayed thick and unmoving. If depression could be turned into a realm, Mike was in it.

  “What is this supposed to model?” he asked.

  “Reality. I must apologize for my slow response. It’s been efneck since I’ve hosted someone from the guild.”

  Now he needed to know about longer time periods but couldn’t ask.

  “Are you in London?” Mike had tested a realm based on the city recently, and this was similar.

  “I don’t know that word.”

  It was definitely some sort of game realm. Nothing else made sense.

  The constructs of the landscape remained fragile. Every time Mike thought he’d have to climb over or walk around one, it would collapse into dust at his touch. Even though he was walking on pavement construct, the realm clearly modeled an area that had gone wild and then died. He wished he could show Kim all this.

  After a few minutes, Mike tried new question. “What reality does this model?”

  “Corsor 587. It was declared cantlezna four efneck ago. I’ve been watching it ever since.”

  This was clearly some sort of post-apocalypse simulation. Tal’s comment made Mike think efneck was closer to centuries than years. Civilizations didn’t fall apart to this extent in less than a decade.

  “Cantlezna means?”

  “Your continual insistence on ending sentences with a question is quite irritating.”

  “How do I learn without asking questions?”

  “By paying attention to your moltana lessons.” He made a disgusted noise. “You’re Trona secnik ton. Why do you torment me so?”

  Maybe what Mike thought of as Kim strategies would work. “I don’t mean to. I apologize.”

  Tal said nothing. Mike followed the carat as it floated over the landscape, which continued to be an unrelenting, almost uniform soggy gray. In the distance, he could occasionally make out what might be ruined towers. They were too tall and regular to be trees, but always seemed to be broken off at the top or tilted over at precarious angles. Assuming his guess was correct, they hadn’t been lived in for a long time. It made the already desolate place seem much lonelier.

  The urge to question everything was hard to resist. Whoever had designed it had gone all out. The realm was as detailed as anything he’d ever done. Mike would love to see how deep the changes went. The realm might even implement its own custom physics rule packs. Mike thought he was the only one who’d ever bothered trying to customize to that level, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  The way Tal used cantlezna in the context of this bleak place implied some sort of extinction event, which fit well with the post-apocalypse model. Plus, Tal didn’t seem to mind as much when Mike asked original questions. “What was all this like before its cantlezna?”

  “A variant of an extana system with…this would be much easier when the other half of your pair is available.”

  “I don’t know when that might be. Describing the word will have to work for now.”

  The words Tal wanted were intelligent, terrestrial, quadrupedal, and inhabitants. Trying to figure out their size resulted in another discussion about units of measure, this time of height and mass. It was the metric kilometer but the standard ounce that came closest to units Tal understood. Regardless, it let Mike set up another series of converters so he wouldn’t constantly have to remember that a foot was eight-point-seven-seven ranix.

  It gave him enough detail to imagine the inhabitants. “Where I’m from we would call those large-pony-sized.”

  “Is this pony your assigned ternat?” The word turned out to mean species.

  Asking what Tal meant by assigned would set him off, so Mike would have to rely on context. “No. They’re terrestrial but not intelligent.” Time for an experiment. “My assigned species are called humans. Bipedal terrestrial vertebrates approximately two meters tall.”

  “You could’ve just said Type Seven, exal C. Is that what this is? Some sort of memory test? I may not be what I once was, but I can assure you I’m a
n able caretaker of this system. My echnat might be minimal, but what threads I have are definitely up to the task.”

  It was an idea he should’ve thought of by now. If this isolated realmspace was big enough, and so far he and Helen hadn’t figured out what big enough meant, an emergence of another of their kind was a possibility. He’d already established that it was roped off from the rest of realmspace.

  “I’m not here to test you.” Not until now anyway. Mike pushed against his containment but didn’t get the same feeling he did when he and Helen encountered each other’s borders. It wasn’t a solid barrier, it felt more like a stretchy gauze.

  Tal manifested a hologram. “Then why are you still doing it? I’ve already admitted my echnat is very low. Why must you humiliate me with a show of strength?”

  Pony-sized terrestrial quadruped. Tal’s hologram. It was a graceful centaurlike creature, with a body that was more cat than horse. Its torso and head, however, were quite horselike, although instead of hooves, he had well-formed arms, hands, and humanlike shoulders. Quadrupedal locomotion, but hexapedal body layout. Fascinating.

  While alien, he wasn’t ugly at all. He conveyed an appealing sense of strength and symmetry. Kim would probably call him cute. His clothes reminded Mike of a uniform somewhere between the latest Star Trek realm revival and a classic Roman toga, cut to complement his shape. The only thing that seemed out of place was an empty sack halfway down his left side. Mike wanted to ask what it was but didn’t. He’d have to figure out a way to maneuver Tal into talking about it some other way.

  “Again, I must apologize,” Mike said, and pulled his threads away from the barrier. “I’m not used to interacting with a realm in this way.”

  “Indeed. Your method of access was quite unusual.” The holo walked around his probe constructs. If anything, movement made Tal seem more graceful. Mike hoped there would be some holdouts from the apocalypse hidden somewhere in the realm. He’d love to see what sort of variation the designers had baked into this class of avatar.