Cryptikon Far Freedom Part 2

by Warren Merkey

the experience?" Iggy asked.

  "They were upset by it," Phuti answered. "Even Direk."

  "I'm warning you again. It's a great shock. Go ahead. Make it work."

  Phuti jumped when the cryptikon produced its interface and he almost threw the egg into the nearby lettuce plot. The cryptikon drifted back to him in the moist air of the farmland, to just within his reach.

  "Oh, my!" was all that Phuti could utter for several moments.

  Iggy gazed at the impossible view of color and curvature and worlds down rabbit holes. He was relieved that it didn't upset him as much this time. It still broke all the laws of human science and forced him into a universe that was far stranger than the one he thought he knew.

  "I've been trying to find the courage to use the cryptikon I have in my pocket," Iggy said. "I know everyone is anxious to believe it's real and to use it to find our lost friends. Perhaps together you and I will have the courage to do that."

  "What do I do?" Phuti finally asked. "I feel the urge to point at what interests me."

  "Try it," Iggy urged.

  Phuti pointed a finger. The sunlit fields of crops and orchards dimmed from view, replaced by a small round room filled with soft light and a large number of people.

  "Oh, my!" Phuti exclaimed.

  Persons turned to glance at him, turned away, then turned back in startlement. In a few seconds everyone in the room was looking at Phuti and Iggy, and looking beyond them and in front of them. Iggy turned to see what was so interesting and saw only the bulkhead and doorway of the access landing to the Freedom's farmland. Phuti's cryptikon floated just in front of them.

  "I believe this is the Essiin Museum of Science and Technology," Iggy said. He pointed to the obelisk that rose above the crowd in the center of the room. Within the transparent apex of the gray obelisk a brilliant egg-shaped artifact floated. The obelisk resided within a nearly invisible security enclosure. "That is the cryptikon that's on display. It's allowing this visit by us."

  "They see us!" Phuti said of the crowd of Essiin museum patrons, as all of their pale eyes were aimed at him and at Iggy and at the parts of the Freedom they could see.

  "Do you want to converse with them?" Iggy asked. "I used to speak Deshoii."

  "Let's do it!" Phuti addressed the small crowd. "Will someone tell me where we are?"

  Two or three Essiin called out the name of the museum.

  "What is the date in Union Standard Time?" Iggy inquired.

  A woman in a service uniform came through the crowd and approached the floating cryptikon. She looked from it to the cryptikon on display in the center of the room. She reached out to touch Phuti's cryptikon and her hand passed through it. She looked at the parts of the ship visible to her and scuffed her feet where the deck of the ship met the floor of the museum.

  "What kind of information projection are you?" the woman asked.

  "I don't know," Iggy replied. "What kind are you? Will you tell us the Union Standard Time?"

  The Essiin woman checked her data implant and answered.

  Iggy checked his and said, "Damn! That's what I have!"

  Iggy now had to accept that the cryptikons were capable of real-time communication across the vastness of intergalactic space.

  "You are the Dr. Mende image," the museum worker said to Phuti. "You aren't supposed to be here!"

  "What does she mean?" Phuti asked Iggy.

  "She thinks we are images being projected in this room by mistake. Your image is supposed to be in another part of the museum."

  "My image? Why would my image be in the Essiin Museum?"

  "I don't think anyone has ever done what you did, Phuti! The Essiin consider your solution to the Five Worlds Civil War to be perhaps the deepest and most esthetic use of Applied Anthropology in human history. And they don't even know how much you helped Aylis! You're a part of Union history!"

  Several museum guards entered the chamber to join the museum worker and confront Iggy and Phuti.

  "They are only images," the woman in the museum uniform said to the guards. "Somehow their data was routed to the projectors in this room."

  "The Cryptikon Room is a secured area and that is itself a security violation," a guard said.

  "They look real to me," another guard remarked. "But there is also this background which must be images. I can pass my hand through this floating cryptikon."

  "He is too young to be Doctor Mende, if he is real," the first worker commented. "Logic fails here. Lock the Cryptikon Room. We need more data."

  "Perhaps we should leave," Phuti said. "We are upsetting them." He reached forward to retrieve his cryptikon. One of the guards was trying to grasp the cryptikon at the same time and their hands touched.

  "He is real!" the guard declared, drawing a nonlethal weapon.

  "His ID transponder says he is Admiral Igor Khalanov," the first guard reported, pointing to Iggy. "One of the crew of the Freedom."

  "The other one corresponds, in every physical parameter for which we have records, to Dr. Phuti Mende," the woman museum worker said.

  "This is impossible!" the first guard declared. "The real Doctor Mende - his body - was taken from the Five Worlds. It and the real Admiral Khalanov are both aboard the Freedom."

  "Why are you here?" the woman worker asked Phuti and Iggy.

  "Why did you hijack the Freedom?" the guard asked.

  "We are not here," Iggy replied. "We hijacked the Freedom in order to save ourselves."

  "If you are not here," the guard said, reaching out to touch Phuti, "then why can we touch you?"

  "I can't explain it to you!" Phuti answered.

  Iggy reached into a pocket and pulled out his cryptikon, causing the armed guard to activate his weapon to stop Iggy. Iggy was unaware of the attack and was unaffected by it, causing him to wonder at the guard's frustration with his weapon.

  "It's only another cryptikon," Iggy said, giving the guard a disapproving stare. "I just wanted to try an experiment."

  The audience of trapped patrons and museum employees were puzzled by Iggy's gestures in front of a control interface they could not see, which caused a new reality to appear around them. It was as though he was a wizard doing incantations to transport them all to another world.

  The farmland deck of the Freedom now seemed to surround the interior of the museum Cryptikon Room. A kilometer away a cloud was raining precisely on a field of wheat. Various orchards grew in a checkerboard pattern in the shallow valley of the farm deck. Several of the Freedom's crew could be seen in the distance as they worked in the orchards and vegetable plots.

  "They have transmatted us to their ship!" a guard declared.

  While some Essiin citizens huddled closer together, others attempted to walk out into the farmland and they ran into invisible walls. A subdued but real atmosphere of panic began to be felt by everyone. Iggy and Phuti glanced at each other with agreement.

  "We apologize for disturbing you," Phuti said to anyone who would listen to him. "You are not really aboard the Freedom and we are not really here in the museum. Please stay calm until we end the connection."

  Iggy performed the commands to stop the cryptikons. The Essiin Museum disappeared from view, leaving him and Phuti staring at the peaceful farms beyond the two floating cryptikons.

  "Fascinating," Iggy said with controlled calmness. "It's well beyond fascination, of course!"

  Phuti shook himself and said: "We need to see Patrick, also."

  "You are handling this much better than I did, Phuti!" Iggy made the commands to connect with Patrick's cryptikon. They soon stood in the too-real image of the small starship stateroom and saw the old man in the bed. They also smelled him.

  "How can the molecules of this reality interact with our sense of smell?" Phuti wondered, wrinkling his nose. "And how can we turn it off?"

  "Wake up!" Iggy shouted at Patrick.

  "This doesn't look good," Phuti said, leaning over to inspect Patrick for signs of life.

  Iggy touched Pa
trick and nudged him gently. The old man opened his eyes. He squinted, rubbed his eyes, and looked up from his bed. He reached out a trembling hand. Phuti took it. Patrick frowned at Phuti and turned to Iggy.

  "You again," Patrick said to Iggy. "No women this time?"

  "Only Phuti and me."

  "Phuti who? Do you have anything to drink? I've been out of Scotch for about a hundred years."

  "No, we're not here yet."

  "Well, where the hell are you? I know! I'm just dreaming!"

  "Be calm," Phuti said. "We are real. We hope you are real. You must stay alive until we can come to you."

  "We need you to move your cryptikon to the bridge," Iggy said, "so we can discover where you are."

  "I can't move, lads. Take it yourselves. It's in the desk."

  "I don't know if we can."

  "If you can't try, then leave my dreams!"

  They opened the drawer of the small desk to find a metallic pouch. Phuti opened the pouch but found no cryptikon. Iggy tapped his shoulder and pointed for him to look upward. The cryptikon was floating above them.

  "How did that get out?" Pat wondered. "I haven't seen it for ages!"

  "Why can I pick up its container but I can't touch the naked cryptikon?" Phuti wondered, passing his hand through the floating cryptikon. "Why can I see it and not touch it?"

  "Let's try to push it with the sack it was in," Iggy said. "Which way to the bridge, Pat?"

  "What bridge?"

  "You don't have a bridge? Then where is a point of connection to your ship's data?"

  "It's all in our heads," Patrick replied. "Shiplinks. But mine doesn't work. How are you lads standing so solid on the deck? Except for one little gravity plate under my bed, there's no spin and no gravity