The female zombie raised her rifle and fired a single shot. It hit Dodd in his mouth, taking out his entire lower jaw. We stared in shock for a moment. Arlene recovered faster than Yours Truly. She pumped the lever on her .45 rifle, firing six quick shots. Arlene killed all three zombies before the rest of us fired a shot. . . . She killed them before she even had an instant to think.
Then she dropped her gun and ran forward to Dodd, who was flopping disorientedly. She cradled the head and upper body of the rotting corpse in her lap, cooing to it softly. “I’m sorry,” she said. I don’t think she even realized the rest of us were there. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to shoot you—I had to! Oh, please forgive me, I’m so, so sorry. . . .”
I knew who she was really apologizing to—the real Dodd was dead and long past caring. But Arlene was alive, and she needed forgiveness.
I don’t know how it happened. Her memory of the original Dodd must have been strong. But just for a moment, the zombie Pfc. Dodd reached up and stroked Arlene’s cheek! No zombie would have done that, I reckoned. A moment later he died. Again.
I turned away, leading the rest of the crew deeper into the building. Behind me, the crying lasted another couple of minutes, then it stopped as if cut off like a faucet. Arlene the lover was finally buried; Lance Corporal Sanders returned to the group and announced, “We’ll find the Door behind the rear right piston. Careful not to get crushed.”
It was Arlene who found the Door, but Slink Slunk was more excited than the rest of us, for she recognized what it was. “Is bridge!” she cried, capering and gibbering, swinging her hands so violently that she tore a hole in one of the building walls. “Is bridge—connects other place!”
“The other place?” I asked.
Arlene sounded strangely detached, a stranger inhabiting the body of my buddy. “She’s right, Fly, it is a bridge connecting us to main operating system of the Disrespect.”
“How do you know that?”
Arlene smiled apologetically and shrugged. Her eyes were red from . . . from something she must have got in them. “ ’Cause I remember it. Of course.”
I approached. The Door looked like a bank vault, solid steel with a combination lock in the very center. The lock comprised eleven wheels, each lettered from A to Z with a space tag between last and first. The mechanics were obvious: line up the wheels so they spelled out the password and turn the huge handle to open the Door. The only fly in the ointment was guessing the right sequence of letters.
So what’s the big deal? I wondered. There can’t be more than about 150 million billion combinations! “Well,” I said, sighing. “I guess we’d better get busy. What should we try first?” I looked around, but nobody spoke. “Wait, I have something. Let’s try this one.”
Smiling, I set the wheels to spell P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D-Space-Space-Space-Space. I turned the handle.
The Door clicked and opened.
I stood in the Doorway, staring like a total doofus. If there’d been a snake, it would have bit me; if there’d been a bear, it would have hugged me to death. A password spelled PASSWORD? That was the stupidest damned password I ever saw! When I was in the Applied Crypto Advanced Training Facility in Monterey, that was the standard joke among the students: the idiot who was so stupid that his password literally was that very word! But I had never believed until that moment that anyone could really be so—so braindead.
Evidently, it never even occurred to the Newbies that anyone would ever find one of their back Doors. I smiled. Every time I ran into these Resuscitators, they reminded me more and more of a bunch of college boys.
That made it easier. I could whup college boys.
We leveled weapons and slunk through the Door, Slink at my back while I took point, Arlene taking rear, everyone else in between: our standard formation. The Door led to a long corridor—I mean, a long corridor! Six klicks at least and arrow-straight the whole way.
At the end was another Door, just like the first, except this one had no combination lock. I opened the Door abruptly, prepared for the worst.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Staring at me was a seven-foot-tall, pearly black shell covered with millions upon millions of squirming vibrating cilia. It sat utterly still except for the cilia—a rounded blob without eyes, ears, or any other sensory organs.
We had found the answer, if only we knew what question to ask.
23
“A bug . . . a bug? A huge freaking bug, that’s what we’re fighting?” Arlene was unhappy; I could tell. She stomped around the tiny cell, looking at the bug from all angles. It pretty much looked the same from every direction.
“I don’t think it’s an insect,” I rumbled.
“It’s a bug! Who cares what kind?”
“Corporal, remember where we are.” I spoke sharply, and she hauled up, shutting her mouth. “What did we just pass through? What was that Doorway you remembered, A.S.?”
“I don’t know, Sarge. A back Door.”
“Come on, what were you thinking? What kind of back Door?”
“Um, something like what they used on us to suck our souls out. That probe that got up inside my nose and into my brain; that was kind of a back Door, like.”
I thought for a long moment, closing my eyes to visualize the system. “Arlene . . . you saying that all this time, the last three levels, you’ve been thinking of that soul-sucking probe as the back Door we were looking for?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Well, I think that’s exactly what we found.”
Her eyes went as wide as dinner plates. “The probe itself?”
“Why not?” I pointed back at the six-kilometer-long corridor we had just spent the last hour traversing. “Isn’t that the tube, the one that sticks through your sinuses into your brain? It looks like it. Why can’t it be?”
She turned back to the bug. Behind me, Slink Slunk, her intended Chomp, and the rest of the crew waited impatiently, not understanding all the talk. “Let’ssss kill bug!” Slink suggested, licking her lips.
“Not just yet, soldier,” I ordered.
“Fly, if that tube connects the system to a soul, then what the hell is this bug anyway?”
I turned up my hands. “How the hell should I know? It’s a soul, right?”
“One of the Res-men? Do they have the probe hooked up to one of them?”
“Well, there’s no one else on the ship, so that’s probably a pretty good guess, A.S.”
She rolled her eyes at my sarcasm. “But why doesn’t it look like a person then? I mean, you look like you to me, and I presume I look like me to you—why does this guy look like a huge bug with squirmy tentacles?”
The answer popped simultaneously into both our minds, and we spoke in unison: “Because . . . it’s a Newbie soul!”
“Jinx,” Arlene added. “You can’t talk until someone says your name, Fly.”
I circled the bug, still trying to wrap my brain around the concept that I was looking at the soul of a Resuscitator. It didn’t look like a Newbie—but it wasn’t a Newbie, it was the soul. . . . Who knew what their souls looked like? They were sure as hell different from ours. That was the whole guiding principle behind every freaking invasion and study done on Earth in the last several hundred thousand years—by the Klave, by the Freds, and now by the Resuscitators! Maybe our souls looked just as weird and disgusting to them as theirs did to us. Maybe they were filled with as much violence and anger against us as I was against all the other races in the galaxy, even the Klave.
Of course, the difference was that we were just defending ourselves. They were the aggressors. They had dragged us into their ridiculous war between different schools of literary criticism, not the other way around! We didn’t invade or attack the Fred homeworld, not intentionally. We didn’t infest the Newbie minds. We didn’t even set up observational posts and spy on the Klave!
It was these bastards, they were behind it all—all of them, all the so-called bio-freaking-logical races of
the galaxy, who didn’t even consider us living beings because we had different souls than they. “Fine!” I declared, aloud. “So if you can steal our souls, you bastards, then you shouldn’t object if I do this.”
I slung my rifle behind my back, stepped forward, and without even a thought for poison or acid, I wrapped both arms around the damned bug and hoisted it off the floor. Despite its huge size, the damned thing didn’t weigh much more than twenty or thirty pounds.
“Fly!” Arlene screamed, evidently thinking about what I had just ignored. But nothing happened to me. I didn’t start feeling sleepy or sick or anything, and nothing stung me. The cilia squirmed frantically; I think the thing realized something bad was happening. But it had no way to stop me—the Newbies had long since evolved beyond the “need” for things like arms and legs.
“Fly, put that down!”
“No way, A.S. We’re taking a prisoner of war back with us.”
“Back where?” She hovered around me like a mother hen, clucking and poking at the thing with her lever-action.
“You got somewhere else in mind? Back into the simulation, of course. This is a dead-end back door you found. . . . This is as far as it goes, into the head of a Res-man.”
Suddenly, the room shook violently. Outside the door, the corridor detached and started pulling away. “Arlene, jump!” I shouted. It wasn’t altruism on my part to get her to go first—she was in my way! Arlene didn’t waste time asking who, what, where, like a civilian would; she was a Marine, and Marines act first and ask stupid questions afterward.
She dove through the door, and I piled through right on top of her. Behind us, the little room—the brain of a Res-man?—pulled away, vanishing into the distance. Outside our door was only emptiness now, a void of nonexistence that turned my stomach when I looked at it—so I didn’t look at it.
“They must’ve figured out we’d gotten up the probe,” Arlene said, “and they yanked it out. But we’re so speeded up, compared to them, that they couldn’t yank it out fast enough.”
“Well, before they think of ripping out the other end,” I suggested, “let’s get the hell back to Dodge City.”
The Newbie soul was like a giant sponge. I discovered I could wad it up into a more manageable ball and tuck it under my arm. We ran the entire six kilometers back to the Deimos lab. The monster apostles never seemed to get tired, and Arlene and I were in Marine-shape. Still, it took us twenty minutes to hoof it back.
Why didn’t the Resuscitators destroy the machine? I guess they couldn’t believe we had done what we did, or else they were afraid of destroying the soul of their own guy. What was it that the late, lamented Sears and Roebuck said? Something about the greatest crime in all the galaxy being the deliberate destruction of a living soul, a crime so horrific for them to contemplate that there wasn’t even a word for it! Even in a pure hive culture—an interesting bit of intel, potentially useful in a war. Too bad the creatures that made the observation were no longer among the living.
We burst through the Door back into the room with all the pumping pistons in the corners. A new pumpkin had decided to invade the place and set up shop. . . . While Slink Slunk and the boys fought with it and shouted a conversation, trying to convert the thing—they told it about the great martyr Olestradamus—Arlene and I laid the soul of the Newbie on the floor. A lightning ball brushed just over my head, sizzling the ends of my hair and making all my muscles jerk.
The Newbie soul expanded from its wadded-up shape. Now it looked totally different, short and fat, and the cilia were absorbing into a fabriclike coating covering the damned thing’s hide. I stared at what used to be a bug. “What the hell? Arlene, is this what it looks like in the simulation?”
She shook her head. “No, that’s not it—look, Fly, it’s changing again!” She was right. The Newbie soul split into two main globules connected by about a million strands of—flesh, connective tissue?—like pulling apart two lumps of slimy prechewed bubble gum. It changed color from black to dark purple.
Then it changed again: the connections widened, flattened, and now they were spatula-shaped. The globules spread out, growing tendrils that circled around until they connected with each other, forming a circle around the flat spatula core. The color changed from static to prismatic, flickering through every color of the spectrum from dark red to nearly white violet, parts of it transparent—maybe too high or low a frequency for us to even see.
“My God, Fly,” Arlene said. “It’s evolving! It’s evolving into something new every second.”
A wild shot from our own spineys whizzed between Arlene and me. We dove back, then continued imagineering. “I remember that, A.S. I remember how fast the Newbies evolved . . . remember?”
“Huh? Yeah, it’s evolving right in front of us! What are you saying?”
“Remember what the one we had as a prisoner from Fredworld said? They evolve faster and faster, speeding up with no upper bound to the curve? Remember?”
Arlene stared at me—a true college kid! Then she finally got it. “Yeah . . . yeah, I do remember that! And they’re evolving farther and farther away from being a threat to us, remember?”
“Arlene, all this time they’ve been evolving farther away from even being physical beings. Look, see how fast it’s changing now?”
I wasn’t joking. The Newbie was flickering through its different forms so quickly now that it was impossible to fully grasp what one version was before it was subsumed into another. I had a glimpse of crablike claws, a million mouths opening and closing in unison, a spray of spoors! I leapt back, terrified in spite of my training—I’d never been trained to deal with something like this!
But I knew what we had to do, the direction we had to push it. Here, in the Newbies’ own simulation, everything moved a thousand times faster than on the outside . . . including the Newbie evolution.
Arlene moved close and put her arms around me. “I’m remembering real hard now, Fly. They’re evolving away from physicality, just like you said. . . . They’re evolving away from even caring about this universe. Evolving toward the, ah, the mind of Brahma, simultaneous connection with the entire universe, all the other dimensions above ours.”
“Uh . . . yeah, I’m remembering all that, too.” I thought I pretty much grasped what she was saying—enough to get a really, really good mental image anyway.
We stood and remembered. The Newbie—definitely no longer a Resuscitator—contracted to a pinprick, then without warning, it exploded in a burst of white light and soundless energy. The light flooded through us, illuminating us from the inside out. But it continued to expand, not pausing even a nanosecond at me or Arlene or Slink Slunk or the other apostles or the monsters or anyone else in the world—in the simulation.
The Newbie was gone. Arlene didn’t let go. “See?” she said. “I always said there was some use to science fiction.”
I didn’t say a word. I was just damned glad she hadn’t attributed her brilliant idea, the one that saved all humanity, to a college philosophy course—that, I would have had a very hard time living down!
I looked back at our crew and saw that the fight had ended. The pumpkin was sitting on the ground, receiving instruction from Chomp, the most articulate of the imps, on the new quest: hunting down the False-One Freds and butchering them.
Arlene still didn’t let go of me. “Fly,” she said, “do you think it just went off into the universe all by itself? Or did . . . ?”
“Did it take its buddies with it? I don’t know, A.S. Maybe we’ll never know. Arlene, I—I don’t think we can ever leave this simulation.”
She raised her orange eyebrows, swishing her tongue from one cheek to the other. “I guess you’re right. Our empty bodies are back behind on that planet. If the Newbies are gone, I doubt the former Res-men know how to pull us out of here and stick us back into our bodies anyway.”
“But something occurs to me. There’s no reason this simulation should end unless they turn off the power. If they d
o that—”
“Then we’re dead, and we won’t even know it. But if the Res-men keep it on, Fly . . .” She scowled at me. “You saying we can live here, in this simulation?”
I cleared my throat. “I don’t see as we have much choice, Arlene. You got an appointment somewhere else, soldier?” I softened the tone. “Look, it’s not so bad. We’re getting pretty good at remembering things the way they ought to be, rather than the way they happened to happen the first time. It’s like casting magical spells. We don’t have to remember a horrible world where monsters are trying to kill us every second!”
I pointed at the pumpkin, bouncing slowly into the air and settling back down again, listening to Chomp and Slink take turns proselytizing. (They held each other’s hand . . . how touching.) “We can remember a world where the damned monsters just go away to live in monasteries. We can remember how we returned to Earth, but we can remember how we stopped the entire invasion this time, turned them back without the millions of dead civilians.”
Arlene looked up at me, blinking a tear out of her eye. Must have been a dust mote; Marines don’t cry. “Do you think I can ever forget Albert’s death?”
“Arlene, given enough time and energy, maybe some of that hypnosis . . . I’ll bet anybody can forget anything.” I detached her arms and sat down, suddenly so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. “At least, we’ll go to our graves trying to forget. He’s in here somewhere, Arlene. . . . The whole place was constructed from our memories—so he’s here! It’s just a matter of finding him.”
Arlene sat down next to me, expressionless. Her voice sounded as dead tired as mine. “We stopped the Newbies, Fly. We saved Earth . . . again. That ought to count for something, right?”
“Counts for a lot, A.S.”
“So if your Somebody is up there . . . maybe He’ll let us find Albert?”
I lay back, feeling consciousness ebb, sleep overwhelming me. I think I answered her, but maybe I only dreamed it. The best Somebody for us to rely on, Arlene, is the somebody inside . . . not the one upstairs.
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