by Paul Anlee
As Darak considered his options, another question pushed its way into his consciousness. Could he save Darian?
His memories are here, his mind, his thoughts and ideas. Everything that was important to him. Could I reconstruct him from all this? Should I? Would he want me to?
He felt partially responsible for Larry’s state at the time. He and Kathy had prodded Larry which, no doubt, had contributed to their colleague’s sense of resentment and led him directly, almost inevitably, to taking Darian’s life. We should have been more sensitive or, at least, more aware.
He could feel the part of him that was Darian, yearning for life. It didn’t help being inside the Eater. The reflections of Darian’s life and innermost thoughts tugged at Darak. He wasn’t sure if anyone else, besides him and possibly Alum, could contemplate pulling off such a resurrection.
The echoing transmissions clouded Darak’s mind. He couldn’t think straight.
Now that I know the Eater’s true nature, I can figure out how to deactivate it. I just need a few minutes of clear thought.
He shifted back outside to his own universe.
* * *
“So…what’ll it be, son? Eggs or pancakes?”
“Wha…?” Darak/Darian was back in his father’s kitchen.
“What’ll it be? Eggs or pancakes?”
Without answering, he again tried to shift outside again.
Still here! How’s that possible? I’ve been outside the known universe, in the Chaos, and made my way back. No place has ever been able to hold me if I wanted to leave.
He needed some perspective, perspective that was difficult to get while he was immersed in the matter and memories of this place.
He altered his own structure, so it barely overlapped with the odd stuff of this microverse inside the Eater. The demands of Darian’s memories diminished.
That’s better. Now, I can take a closer look at the nature of this place.
Using his own RAF generator, he sent a few probing fields into the Eater microverse. The answer came back in seconds.
It’s a hologram! An actual holographic universe. Have I been wrong all along?
Eons ago, when Darak was still the young Greg Mahajani, he’d argued with a handful of physicists who’d hypothesized the universe was nothing more than a holographic projection of all matter onto the inside surface of a black hole. Furthermore, reflecting such a projection back into space reconstructed the entirety of the three-dimensional matter of the universe.
He’d scoffed at their ideas, told them their hypothesis amounted to a simplistic mind game. It couldn’t be correct because, in the first place, holographs only portrayed the surface features of matter; they captured nothing of the insides of objects.
And yet, here I am, definitely in a holographic microverse.
Also like a hologram, any part of the Eater contained the entirety. But the bigger the part that was accessed, the more detailed the final resolution. This hologram was so big that it reflected Darian’s mind in stunning detail. Each concept, memory, and thought was represented in a hugely redundant way and extensively cross-linked to every other fragment of Darian’s persona.
Now he understood what held him so strongly. Darian was everywhere inside the Eater. His thoughts and memories were the basic components of this microverse. The man’s will to survive had made this place, and whatever little of his will remained wasn’t about to give up a moment of his existence so easily.
Deactivating the fields that sustained the Eater would bring Darian’s final death. It didn’t seem fair.
Darak moved through the universe, delicately sampling the other man’s memories the way a textile shopper might walk through a marketplace running his hands gently over bolts of cloth.
Practically everything’s here—he thought. Everything that made Darian who he was. Far more than Kathy or I ever received in his final transmission, but it’s all fragmented and jumbled, not assembled into a working concepta and persona.
An idea swelled within him. I can save Darian. He contributed so much to humanity, and his extraordinary mind still has lots more to offer. Imagine! After so much time, after being trapped in this eternal purgatory for ages, Darian could live again!
He could do it. He would. He’d save Darian and stop the Eater.
Darak bowed his head and transmitted wave after wave of his promise into the Eater microverse. Darian, I vow to bring you back into the real universe again. You’ll be able to see where your ideas and inventions led. You’ll know the future. You’ll be with us again.
He opened his eyes and repeated the promise, once, to himself. Then he shifted outside.
25
the heavy cell door flew open, and crashed against the stone wall, tearing Mary from her intense meditation.
“What did she tell you?” Trillian yelled from across the room.
By the time she opened her eyes and looked up, he was already halfway across the darkened room. Even in the dim light she could see the chords in his neck straining and spittle flying as he yelled.
“I said, what did she tell you? Answer me!”
Mary jumped to her feet and backed away from the enraged Shard. The calm achieved through hours of focusing on code and conceptual structures dispersed like thin fog in a wind tunnel. Virtual adrenaline streamed through her body.
“What. Did. She. Tell. You?” Trillian screamed. His contorted face, only inches away, had gone scarlet and his eyes bulged with fury.
“What did who tell me?” Mary cried. “Darya? You saw her for yourself. She didn’t say anything to me. Just, ‘I’m sorry.’ Nothing else.” She wiped the spit off her cheek with the back of her hand.
“Liar!” Trillian clasped her throat with one hand and slammed her into the wall.
Gasping for air, Mary struggled against him and tried to loosen his grip. Her efforts had no more effect than a mouse struggling to open a bear trap.
Why doesn’t he just kill me?—she wondered. Why this show?
Oh! The answer came to her and she laughed. Or tried to. She choked on the revelation, broke into a cough, and a wheeze that she could barely squeeze out around his clawing fingers.
Sensing a shift but not able to guess the reason, Trillian threw her to the ground and stood over her. He leaned lower and stared directly into her eyes as she sucked in air.
“Mary, what did she tell you?” he said in a soft, deadly voice.
Mary coughed and, in spite of the pain it caused, laughed. “I had no inkling that she’d told me anything until now,” she said, brushing her hair back off her face. “Thanks for that.”
Trillian backhanded her across the face. He could’ve taken off her head but he restrained himself. She remained conscious.
Mary massaged her jaw and spit out some blood. “I can only assume that the burst of light before Darya and Timothy left contained a message of some sort. I was a little busy being tortured at the time, if you’ll recall. I didn’t have a chance to pick it up at the time, but I promise to look into it soon as I have time. At the moment, I have no idea.”
“Then, how about we review it together?” Trillian suggested through clenched teeth.
“If that’ll make you happy,” Mary said. She loaded her recording of the event into her working memory and Trillian did the same. The flash of light registered as a brief blip in her recollection. Now that she knew it contained a compressed message, she filtered it through a high-speed playback algorithm.
Darya stood on the other side of a campfire in a clearing in the forest near her Keep in Lysrandia. The soft glow of dwindling flames threw dancing shadows across her face. The sound of soft music and conversation drifted in from somewhere nearby. No one else was visible in the projection.
“Mary, I’m so sorry we had to leave you. Timothy and I found a specific function to get outside and safely away. Please know that we are working hard to provide a second function to release you from your virtual prison. Trillian appears to have trapped your trueself in
the recharging station. I’m certain you’ll be able to turn the inworld tables on him and escape back outworld in a second. Once you are out, you know where to find me. Keep fighting. Remember to maintain a positive spin on everything. That will help you immensely. See you soon.”
The message stopped there, with Darya smiling reassuringly as if she could transmit her hope to Mary through sheer willpower.
Trillian lifted Mary off the floor and dropped her roughly onto a high-backed wooden chair that had a helmet hinged to the top-back of the chair. He flipped the helmet over her head and tightened the screws.
She cried out as they bit into her scalp.
“You will tell me what it means,” he demanded. “What is the message hidden within the message?”
He gave one of the screws a full turn. It pressed into her forehead, drawing blood and a whimper.
“You saw it,” Mary protested. “It was a meaningless bunch of platitudes. We’re working hard to help you. Keep up your positive attitude. We’ll get you out. What a crock!”
“I don’t believe you. Where did that scene take place? Did you recognize the spot?”
“Yes; it was in the Lysrandia inworld, outside of Darya’s Keep. She took our group there into the forest for a meeting once. But that tells me nothing; it’s just some random place from a better time. She must’ve meant it to comfort me.”
“There must have been some clues, some bit of shared information. Darya said you’d know where to find her. You will tell me or I’ll wring it out of you.”
Mary thought quickly. Something plausible.
“Second,” she said. “Darya said it twice; that was meaningful. She has a second route out of here besides that old service shed.”
“You’re lying. There’s no way she was able to program two secret ways to exit Vacationland.”
“Ha! You don’t even know her designation. You have no idea of her capabilities.”
“Hmm, we’ll talk about that little piece of information later. Eventually, you will tell me everything I want to know.” Trillian waved a hand and they were in Cloud 49 again. Mary exhaled in relief at the release of pressure on her cranium.
The Shard raised his eyebrows at her. “Do you think I am anything but your God inside this inworld?”
“You’d better be careful. How would Alum feel about you expressing such ambitions?” Mary asked with a wry smile.
“Alum’s feelings are none of your concern. I control your fate here. I control what you perceive, what you feel.”
“But not what I think. I believe we’ve already demonstrated that.”
“In time, I’ll break your defenses and your mind will be laid bare for me to read.”
“Unless I turn the tables on you, first.”
“As Darya said, I not only control your inworld experience but your outworld freedom.”
Mary couldn’t help but frown. “Darya will find a way to help me.”
“I thought she offered only meaningless platitudes. Your words, not mine.”
When Mary didn’t reply, Trillian continued, “Darya wouldn’t tell you about a second exit without specifying its location. The message must have told you where it is.”
Mary snorted. “You’re sitting on it.”
“What?”
“Look around. Remember, ‘Turn the tables’? I’m supposed to figure out a special way to move the tables here at the café to open the exit. Darya likes to encode these things with unlikely arrangements or motions.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Mary stood up. “Because it’s useless information, Trillian. She didn’t have time to tell me the details. You got there too fast. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do and no way to figure it out on my own.”
She took a step to the banister and stared at the sandy beach seventy meters below. From this distance, the sand below would be hard as cement on impact.
“There will be no escape for me. No rescue. No reunion with Darya.”
Trillian remained seated at the table. He showed no sign of concern.
She pressed on. “Darya’s real message is that there is nothing she can do, that it’s all up to me. I can choose my own solution.”
Mary took a step back. “And this is what I choose.”
She launched herself backward over the rail.
Trillian rushed to the rail and watched her fall, his face expressionless. A second before her body hit the beach below, he blinked once.
* * *
Mary opened her eyes. She was back in her prison cell, staring up at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and let it go. I knew he wouldn’t let me die. She closed her eyes and played Darya’s message again.
Darya, what did you leave for me?
There was nothing obvious but then there wouldn’t be, would there? The interpretation she gave Trillian had some merit. One could easily read Darya’s message as incomplete, an empty morale booster devoid of any meaningful content. A superficial analysis would easily support that conclusion. The problem was, as far as Mary could tell, deeper analysis didn’t reveal much else.
I hope I’m not just going on false hope.
Darya would’ve anticipated that Trillian would also receive her transmission and he’d suspect some encrypted content that would help Mary’s position. There are so many ways to hide information. How would Darya have done it so only the intended recipient could recognize and retrieve a specific message? That’s the question. At the same time, the transmission would have to be innocuous enough to convince Trillian it contained no useful content.
Mary measured the transmission frame by frame. The total number of bytes perfectly added up to the sum of all the video frames. Nothing hidden that way.
Whatever useful information it held had to be accessible by analyzing the content or maybe rearranging data. There’d have to be a key to reorganizing some part of a video frame into something else, and nothing added beyond that. Trillian wouldn’t be able to decrypt that. Clever, Darya!
Mary was sure there was something useful in the visual recording. But what? Darya never would’ve risked coming back inworld to her here if she didn’t have anything helpful to contribute. I hope. It wasn’t much to go on, but all she had was her faith in her friend.
The comment about “positive spin” stood out. Was Darya suggesting something about the quark-spin inworld processing machinery? Darya had to know what an advantage her friend would have over Trillian if she could just boost her CPPU power.
Maybe she sent me the code I need. There has to be a decryption key buried in the message itself. Nothing that depends on a clever analysis of the content; Trillian would have as much chance of figuring that out as I do.
Something unique to my experience, then. Something only I would know but not obviously so. I mean, Darya could have said “Remember the day we first met,” or, “Remember what you had for lunch at our last meeting,” but either of those would be something Trillian could extract from me. So, it has to be shared knowledge but less obvious.
She pulled up her detailed memories of the real fireside meeting in Lysrandia for comparison. She searched for something Trillian couldn’t possibly know, something subtle.
She filtered out the landscape. Trillian will have access to a complete detailed layout of our campsite. No, nothing there.
That left only Darya herself, the background noises of others in the group, and the campfire—the campfire!
Mary overlaid her original memories of that evening on Darya’s transmission. The campfire had moved. Not much. Maybe it could be explained by a slightly different perspective, from the point of view of the person that had sat to Mary’s left that evening. Surely, Darya would never make such a mistake. She knew exactly where I sat that night.
Mary measured the change in distance between her position in the transmission and the relocated fire. Okay, so the fire was moved exactly 21.10611405421 centimeters to the right. Interesting number. Tantalizingly close to the wavelength of light emi
tted by hydrogen in a vacuum, the so-called H-line. Coincidence? I doubt it.
A quick calculation showed the number was the product of two primes: 505709 and 4173569. Is it RSA encryption, Darya? With such small prime numbers? Maybe it wouldn’t matter if the person the message was being hidden from had no way to calculate the private and public keys.
So, if the H-line’s the modulus…. Mary calculated what her private key should be. Now which fire image to decrypt? There were a lot to chose from. At 30 frames per second in Darya’s 34-second video there were over a thousand individual images of flickering flames.
Pick a number between one and a thousand…but which number? First? Last? Or just go through them all?–Mary pondered.
There was an easy way to generate a number between one and a thousand, simply divide a smaller number by a bigger number to give you something between zero and one. Then multiply by 1,000 to normalize; it was guaranteed to work.
Could the answer be that simple? She divided the larger of the two primes into the smaller and multiplied by 1,000 to get 121 and some fraction. So, maybe…the 121st frame?
She pulled it up. What do we have here? It was exactly four seconds into the video, the single word, “function.” Potentially interesting but still meaningless.
What can I do with it? Darya’s pass codes often use repetition. Does the word “function” repeat elsewhere in the video?
Four seconds later, on frame 242, the word “function” again. More than a coincidence?
Mary called up the two frames and isolated the flames of the campfire. If she scrolled forward or backward, the flame patterns didn’t fit. Would Trillian notice that?
Mary ran the digital encoding of the flames through her algorithm using Darya’s normal public key and the private key she’d just worked out. It kicked out two long strings of digits. Two long, equally meaningless, strings of digits.
She converted them to hexadecimal, the ancient machine language of computers and then into assembler. The resultant “code” was a mess; it didn’t fit anywhere.
What did I do wrong?—she wondered. She went back over her logic. The primes came out of the changes in the video from her memory of the real event. The indicated video frames of the flames were special; they didn’t follow the flow of earlier frames. Everything hung together. That can’t be a coincidence; they have to contain the message. What am I missing?
