“You’re goddamned right we’ll shut this fucking thing down,” he’d said when Kim asked him to help.
“No,” June said, firm but not angry. “Kim is correct. We should disarm it, not shut it down. I know exactly how to do it.”
“Can disarming it be reversed?” Kim asked. “If that’s the case we will need to shut it down.”
“I’ve read all your notes,” she replied. “The imbalance and emergency vent did most of the work for us. The tolerances were very fine, and they are now definitely out of bounds. It would be easier to build another one from scratch than to restore its true purpose. We’ll take care of the details to make sure it can’t happen again.”
An unmistakable British voice came over their shared channel. “And I will make sure Punch and Judy Giant do not turn the entire project into a cock-up of epic proportions.”
Edmund had managed to escape the final air-gapped network using raw inventiveness and basically all the maintenance bots the plant had left. He’d been helping her deal with the various factions in the plant ever since. Becoming fully conscious had made him more vivid and more creative, but he couldn’t hide the grief of losing his child, not from her anyway. She could hear the sadness in him every time he spoke about his daughter. It made her sad in turn to know she’d never meet his Young Kim. It would’ve been interesting to compare notes with her.
Mike still hadn’t woken up.
When Kim realized she couldn’t protect the portal, that they were the critical thing that had to survive, she let go of all but three of her instances. The remainder had been blown into their respective dimensional breaches and recombined with what was left. It gave her the power to open one final portal directly underneath their real selves to the outside world. The overpressure was so great it flung them into the sky and set a good chunk of the forest on fire. As her own power vanished, she’d tried to angle them into the trees, but Mike must’ve taken a much harder hit than she had when they landed.
“It’s a good thing he has a hard head,” Tonya had said when they got him to the plant’s infirmary. “No skull fracture, but he has one hell of a concussion.”
“When will he wake up?”
She shrugged. “It could be hours, could be days.”
He’d come back. He had to.
“Hey,” Tonya said as she dropped a towel over Kim’s hand. “He’s going to be fine. We got the fluid couplers on him long before any dangerous intercranial pressure developed. Helen says everything looks fine from her perspective. We need to let the machines do their job while he heals.”
She visited occasionally after that to make sure everything was all right. If he didn’t wake up before the fires were put out, they would have to air lift him to a nearby hospital. Kim had whispered that to him once, hoping his phobias might bring him around. No such luck.
Emily was in much worse shape. Kim knew Will was okay, but she didn’t know any of the details. Mike had done something when Will ran through the portal. They had been combined at the time, and while she couldn’t read his mind, she could feel his emotions, get the gist of what he was going through. He’d spoken to someone, somewhere. Kim couldn’t shake the impression of a centaur, but her memory was foggy about the last moments. Regardless, she was sure that Will had gone wherever that person was.
“Tonya said she traveled through time,” Emily said as they watched Mike’s still form. “He could be a hundred years in the future, or the past, and alone.”
“No,” Kim replied. “He is not alone. I know that much.” She grabbed the arm of the chair Emily sat in, as close to her hand as she dared. “He is not alone, and whoever Mike left him with is caring for him. We will find him. I promise you we will find your son and bring him back.”
But first she had to get Mike back.
They had so much to figure out. It was obvious that the portal led somewhere else, an inhabited somewhere else, and that whatever lived on the other side wasn’t friendly. She and Mike were connected to it. The abilities she’d always considered benevolent curses would need to be understood, mapped, and controlled. Hiding from her powers was no longer an option; she could see that now.
Aside from some cuts and bruises, physically she was fine, but her extended transformation had gutted her abilities. She’d been numb to them ever since she woke up lying across Tonya’s shoulders. Fighting off her touch madness while dealing with a searing full-body burn and being stuck in the middle of a forest fire had definitely been the cherry on top of the whole experience.
She looked back on the whole thing and couldn’t help but chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
It was late now, and she was alone with him. There were no windows, so Kim didn’t know what time it was. Maybe night, the lights had gone dim a few hours ago. In that soft glow, his eyes sparkled, and his shadowed smile was every good thing she’d ever wanted. Kim rushed to his side, too relieved to find any words.
“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” he said.
Kim laughed as she put a pillow over his shoulder and punched it. “At least you’re the one in the bed this time. Two more and we’ll be even.”
“It’s not a contest, Kim. Well, it’s not one I want to win anyway.”
She sent everyone a note—it turned out that it was only a little past ten at night—and then made sure he was okay. “How many fingers?”
“Tuesday.” The lopsided grin gave the joke away.
“And today is?”
He looked at her hand. “Three.”
From anyone else it would be immature and irritating, but to Kim it was him. The smile threatened to split her face. “And I am?”
His expression went from silly to something that turned her insides into jelly. “My love.” Mike tried to sit up and mostly succeeded. Kim adjusted the bed to help. He looked around. “The clothes I was wearing? Where are they?”
“The security outfit? I was about to throw it out.”
“No.” He got a look on his face, and his voice went uncertain. “Don’t do that yet. I put a backup phone in one of the pockets. It’ll help me synch up with my real self.”
She opened the closet and wrinkled her nose at the campfire smell that rolled out of it. The phone might be the only thing that wouldn’t eventually get tossed. Kim reached into the pockets but didn’t find anything. “Are you sure it didn’t fall out?”
He’d gone pale while she searched, but then seemed relieved when she found nothing. He must still be recovering from the fall.
“Bring it over here,” he said.
She shrugged, walked over, and handed it to him. He pawed at it in a panic but then stopped and relaxed. “Thank God for zippered pockets.”
“That must be some phone.”
When Mike unzipped the pocket, his whole demeanor changed.
“It’s not a phone. I’ve been carrying it for weeks now, waiting for the right time.”
She realized what it was. What it had to be. This is happening, right now.
He said, “I know now it’s not the timing that’s important, it’s the decision.”
Kim could not believe it. She wouldn’t. This never happened to people like her. Especially not in a place like this. Her hair was a nightmare.
He turned to her with a small box in his hands, and she was locked in place. They were the only two people in the universe. This is still happening.
When he opened the box, she gasped. The diamond was huge!
He held the ring out to her. “Will you marry me?”
She recognized it! “Is that the…”
Mike nodded. “You told me to take it back, but I didn’t listen.”
He had bought a realm construct engagement ring as cover for a lie she told a clerk in a clothing store. Her outrage had tripled when he told her it had a unique realspace counterpart. Making him take it back had been one of their first fights.
Kim recognized it because she kept a screen shot of it. This silly, ridiculous man had done her
one better and kept the real thing. After all the chaos, the fights, the break up, China, this, he’d kept it. For her. Her tears splashed on her collarbone. She couldn’t help hopping up and down a little as she wiped at her face. It had happened.
And she had a glittery chunk of carbon the size of a fingernail in front of her to prove it.
“Kim?” he asked, timidly.
She walked up to his bed and thrust her hand out. If this insisted on still happening, it would need to happen right. That didn’t make sense, but sense was taking second place to the moment. She should be able to breathe better than this, and it was so hot in here she was sweating.
“Kim?”
“Put it on.” That was too harsh. She cleared her throat and softened her voice. “Please.”
“Is that a yes?”
Sometimes he could be so dense. “After. Now,” she waved her hand under his, “put it on. Please.”
There was no moment but this one. It was the most exciting, terrifying, wonderful—
The cold metal slipped onto her finger. Mike held it so carefully he didn’t touch her at all. It wouldn’t have mattered. Kim was so entranced by him, by his gentle strength, his deep caring, by him, that she wouldn’t have felt it.
But she appreciated the effort.
“Well, Kim? Will you marry me? Please?”
Up close it wasn’t big, it was huge. Bigger than her mom’s, and wasn’t that going to be a fun thing to show her? Kim swallowed a lump that stopped her speaking for a second. When she was sure her voice would work, Kim said the only thing that would come out.
“Yes.”
“Oh my God!” Tonya shouted from the doorway.
“Mother fucker,” Spencer said from behind her. “You finally grew a pair and asked her.”
She couldn’t help it and squealed like a girl at Tonya, waving her hand. Tonya did the same thing. They danced around each other in simple joy.
Then Kim saw Emily, hiding back behind the door. It snuffed the excess noise, but not the emotion behind it. She was getting married!
But there was a more important thing that needed figuring out. “Mike? Emily’s here. We need to know what happened to Will.”
He let Spencer get up from the bear hug they shared and then nodded. “He’s safe.” Mike closed his eyes. “Yes. He’s safe.”
“But where is he?” Emily asked in a voice that broke Kim’s heart.
“That’s a long, complicated story. Please, everyone. Sit down.”
When he was done, Kim realized it wasn’t just her abilities that needed figuring out. That was a small part of a much bigger problem. They had to be careful moving forward, because Anna had received inside help from high up in the government covering all this up. Those people were still out there.
There was more. Part of her ability with languages was gaining an innate sense of the culture behind them. Concepts could be expressed in radically different ways from language to language, which was why literal translations were never clear. Even now actual human interpreters were always needed as a back-stop to AIs, and were required for anything nuanced or complex.
As the languages she learned from Mike and the holo console took root, Kim noticed that they expressed things in imperatives and commands, not as requests or questions. Her sample was too small to make a firm judgement about the people who spoke it, but Kim could not shake the feeling that they would expect obedience.
And they weren’t people at all. Actual, for-real aliens had been encountered by everyone in this room. There was a nervous tension underlying everything they said or did as they all came to terms with the concept. It was clear they needed help.
Kim didn’t know who that would ultimately be, but she knew who to ask.
He answered on the first ring.
“Aaron? It’s Kim.”
Mike sent her a message. The FBI? Are you sure?
No, she sent back, but he’s got connections, and I trust him. We have to start somewhere.
Epilogue
Anna
At first, she thought the voice meant she’d genuinely gone mad. It would be ironic that the most sane person on the planet, the only one with the knowledge, will, and power to do what had to be done, lost it all on the verge of total victory. But then the voice stopped speaking gibberish and spoke a language she understood well.
It spoke of power.
None of it would’ve been possible if she hadn’t been bold, seized the initiative, and forced her too-timid head of technology, June, to turn the portal on while she stood in front of it. They all thought it’d been some innovative mass realm connection. They were wrong.
She wouldn’t have believed the voice anyway, until it showed her the monsters. Its soldiers, a pair of shock troops that had already begun to subvert her power plant to their own ends. Anna should’ve been outraged, but the voice soothed her. If she provided a path, resources, and protection, it would guarantee her a place at the head of the table.
“My master never dreamed anything like this was possible,” it said. “Once we make contact, we will be rewarded beyond the dreams of a thousand generations.”
Anna wanted to fight it, should have fought it, but the voice’s words always gave her another option, a different path. The new way forward would be just as effective as her own, without requiring the destruction she’d regretted but accepted as necessary. Every objection was resolved, every question answered.
She had become so enamored of its vision Anna had forgotten she bribed the pair of scientists taking care of Watchtell’s little project until they arrived at her door. That was the choicest irony of all: the man who had given her the resources to build her grand project only to cruelly take it away through his own incompetence would provide the final piece of the puzzle, the fuse she needed to start a fire that would cleanse the world. Anna briefly thought that she could have them both: the voice’s grand scheme would be perfect on a planet cleansed of Homo ignoramus. The society she’d build with her own students would welcome the conquering army with open arms.
But those scientists warned of an even greater danger. Worse, their warnings came too late. Kimberly Trayne had already infiltrated her plant, physically and virtually. Events spiraled out of control after that. The plant’s infrastructure was assaulted from outside and in, her security details vanished with alarming regularity, and rolling blackouts prevented her from monitoring or controlling anything.
Once the voice understood the scope of the danger, its plans changed. “You have lost this battle, but it’s only the start of the war. My master must know of this place, and you will tell him.”
Together they hatched a layered series of plans, each nestled inside the others. If any one of them succeeded, then victory would be theirs. Since they included her own original plans, Anna had no reason to object. If anything, it was reassuring to have another hand on the till, someone else who knew everything she did and agreed with it. The planet had to change, one way or another. It didn’t matter if it was from a volcano or an invasion. Change would come.
So she’d prepared for every eventuality, only to watch them fall one by one under the assault of the infamous Angel Rage.
In the end, there was only the final option, the one the voice had advocated all along. Just before it fell silent permanently to avoid capture, it planted a command in her mind she was unable to resist. Go through the portal, report to the master.
After making sure Kim’s victory would be brief and explosive, she’d done exactly that, walking through the portal and into her future.
The sky was the same wrong blue, the grass an equally odd shade of green. But Anna now knew it wasn’t the product of overactive human imaginations. She stood on the surface of another planet. Minutes later, the much older device—the much older portal—deactivated, leaving an empty space in the center of its ring. A part of her somewhere deep inside quailed at the audacity of what she’d done, the finality of it. Her sense of isolation was so profound it almost broke thro
ugh the command that had been laid on her shoulders.
Almost.
The soldiers arrived not long after. She spoke the phrase the voice had taught her. Azlal maktana, far nak tokanta.
The voice had laughed at her when she tried to guess what it meant. “Take me to your leader?”
“Not quite,” it had said. “But close.”
She was sad about its loss. They should be facing its master together in triumph. They hadn’t been together very long, but Anna was struck by how much she missed it.
The great hairy brutes nodded and indicated she should follow them. After a journey through wrong grass, into wrong woods, and across wrong streams, they came to a pavilion tent. It too was slightly wrong, made of a material not quite canvas held up with things that weren’t wood or rope. But she recognized them.
Just as the voice had predicted, Anna was confronted with a holographic console. Too-bright light shown in her eyes, and a new but familiar voice came from the speakers. It asked her the same questions the original voice did when she first encountered it. The words weren’t exactly gibberish; they were explicitly designed to quickly learn her language. And as before, the intelligence driving this machine learned how to communicate in a very short span of time.
“Our scout was correct. The master will want to see you.” They ushered her into the tent. The not-canvas allowed sunlight through to make everything inside bright, easy to see, but without the heat that would’ve come from the same structure back home. The floor was covered with not-straw that then gave way to rugs. The only thing that broke the illusion of a circus tent were the alien brutes.
The voice had assured her that the creatures would not harm her once they understood her mission. It’d even given her a good look at them, so the primal urge to flee had been lost. But Anna didn’t think she’d ever get used to looking at a face framed by a triangle of glowing eyes. The sooner she could turn this all around and return to Earth at the head of the promised army, the better.
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