The fear that kindled when I’d glanced beyond the starting grid’s borders threatened to make my heart burst. So I clamped down on it. Running in circles wouldn’t solve a software malfunction, or whatever this was. Only logic could fence out panic. Aloud I said, “How about you, Mel? Can you take off your goggles, or your gloves?”
Mel’s eyes were big as she shook her head. Sanders didn’t respond at all, but at least he’d stopped twitching. Of course, he wasn’t really hurt, because we were just in a simulation…
Alice was already at the terminal, hands flickering over one of the keyboards. She glanced up and ordered, “Take a look at this.”
“Bradley!” I shouted at the empty air. “End the simulation. Emergency! Damn it, I mean it, this isn’t funny. We’re having real issues in here!”
Bradley had apparently stepped out of the lab, leaving us strapped into our VR rigs, untended. That was fucking irresponsible of him.
When I joined Alice at the console, only gibberish danced across the screens. I keyed for a status update. Reams of data rolled past. I let it auto-scroll, hoping I’d see something, anything, to anchor me. Just more gibberish. Except…
Except it wasn’t. My gift for pattern recognition engaged. Pressing a key, I slowed the data dump to manual scrolling. I saw the hint of an underlying order. I typed more commands to the system. My queries brought up new rafts of data. It all pointed at something that was, simply put, unbelievable.
“Are you seeing this?” I said to Alice.
“Yeah. Some kind of hardware crash. I can’t seem to stop it cycling. None of this makes any sense.”
“It does if you, um… shift your paradigm. See, right here? The superposition of our qbit processing chip became entangled with an entirely new regime.” I spoke calmly instead of shouting. Or screeching. A detached part of me was proud of my self-control.
“That’s what it’s supposed to do,” she said uncertainly.
“Not to this degree. We’ve been squeezing a lot of extra cycles out of your hardware, sure, but this is beyond anything we could’ve ever imagined. It’s like we’ve tapped into a preexisting network, one that seems… limitless. I don’t think our starting grid is being hosted on our lab server anymore. We’re someplace else.”
“That’s impossible,” Alice said. “Stop being a jerk.”
“Look,” I said, and typed a new command, my hands shaking. “We still have a link to the original server, but it’s outside this environment. The starting grid was downloaded from there. And…”
“And what?”
A splinter of an idea pulled me from my daze. I said, “We can use this console to arbitrarily change the rules inside this virtual reality environment.”
“Well, sure. We can spawn more trees, torches, or crawlers to our heart’s content. We can change the color of the sky. That’s how we programmed the terminal. But what good does that do us when we can’t get our goggles off?”
“It means we’re not trapped here,” I said.
“Huh?” she said. Then, “Oh, because you’re saying we’d be trapped in the simulation otherwise. Shut up. I don’t think you’re funny.”
“I’m not trying to be.”
Alice hunched her shoulders and scowled at me.
“Unless you’re having better luck getting out of your rig–”
“You’re wrong. There’s no way we can be trapped in a VR. It makes no goddamned sense.”
“OK.” She wasn’t wrong, it didn’t make any goddamned sense. That didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the simulation.”
“But you are right about one thing,” Alice muttered, transfixing me with a glare as if this was all my fault.
“Which is?”
“We need to fix this.”
I nodded. Alice and I bent to the console.
Elite athletes talk about being “in the zone,” that magical place where mind and body work in perfect synch and movements seem to flow without conscious effort. Coders experience the same thing, when time becomes meaningless as fingers deliberately strike the keys, problems slowly resolve, and solutions eventually emerge. I fell into that flow as I delved into the strange substrate beyond the starting grid. My fingers hit the keys with more authority, harder and sharper.
“Carter, you were right about something else,” said Alice at one point. “The system hosting this simulation is impossibly large.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. We were looking at the same data. Words failed. Nothing was big enough to contain the network. Nothing, unless it lay in the quantum foam that lapped past the edges of the universe itself. Maybe the dark energy that underpinned reality was the shadow cast by this network, or maybe dark energy was the network, living in the wavelets of virtual particles and curled magnetic fields. Compared to the wind-tossed white-caps of our visible universe, dark energy constituted the unending depths beneath, vast and alien.
And we’d plunged in like fools. What if the quantum states of our minds had transferred, interpolated by a system whose resources dwarfed galaxies? It was sort of like being trapped in our own avatars.
Something caught my attention. Among all the other wonders hinted at, the data streaming from the console suggested that if we requested it, the dark energy network would print a version of us at some arbitrarily defined location. Print, as in recreate a full, three-dimensional version of a living person, without the need for a physical printer to do so other than the network itself.
“What do you make of this?” I asked Alice.
“What?”
Not wanting to prejudice her, I just pointed out the relevant sections.
She squinted, scratched her head, and frowned. It was amazing, the fidelity of the experience. This didn’t seem like VR; it seemed real. A simulation so true to life that it might as well have been reality–
“This code seems to suggest the network is designed for travelers,” Alice said, interrupting my thoughts. “Travelers who upload scans, then print out new instances of themselves elsewhere… in the universe?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“But everything’s scrambled. Like there was some sort of major crash, and the system only came back part of the way.”
Shivers of awe ran down my spine. This was cosmic. This dark energy network we’d stumbled into – was it designed to create doorways, by printing travelers at the destination they desired in the world or normal matter? If so, by whom? Where had they gone, and what’d happened to create such chaos in the system? Maybe the answers to those questions were linked.
Someone – Jason, I realized – grabbed my shoulders and spun me away from the console.
“Hey!” I said. “I was right in the middle of…”
A storm had rolled in while Alice and I had been lost in the data. Clouds piled higher than worlds threatened to tumble across the borders of the starting grid. Green lightning danced in their depths. Pretty. Eerie, too, but…
I bent back to the console. Data scrolling on a side screen revealed new, ancillary code, something that we hadn’t written and something that hadn’t been present before now. It was so complex that I couldn’t begin to scroll through it all. And it was active. New threads lit up the screen by the hundreds. Something was actively trying to crash the program describing our virtual space and overwrite it with billions more lines. When I tried to analyze it, all I got was noise. Encrypted, of course. Unlike our starting grid.
“Alice, do you see this?” I pointed at the screen.
She glanced over, and frowned. “What the–?”
“It’s the storm,” I said. I glanced up again at the boiling clouds. “It’s trying to force its way into the starting grid.”
“Like it’s alive,” she said.
“Oh, fuck.” The grid hadn’t been built with security in mind.
Great green spheres tumbled within the gathering cloud, jerking and whirling as if caught in the frenetic grip of madmen on speed. Some of the spheres spl
intered, revealing blobs of quivering yellow black sludge, like melted wax, or another part of my mind screamed, like putrefying flesh. The sludge ran together and massed towards the starting grid, as if attempting to form some hideous monstrosity, probing at the edges of our sanctuary. Before each new terrible form could congeal, it fell back before beginning anew to grow into something even more appalling, like sentient waves of chaos lapping at the foundations of reality…
Emerald lightning stabbed from the nearest thunderhead, leaping across the threshold, breaking my fascination with the green globes and what they disgorged. The bolt transfixed Sanders, straight through his forehead. Like a fishing line of laser light, the tendril pulled the man upright. Sanders’ eyes and mouth snapped open. His irises flamed the same green as the lightning falling all around us.
“Motherfucker!” I shouted.
Sanders convulsed, bent over, and heaved. Nothing came up. He wiped his mouth, then looked up at all of us. His eyes were still green. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but all that came out was strange noises, like he’d forgotten how to talk, or even use his tongue.
When he staggered and almost fell, Mel grabbed him. “Peter! What happened? Are you all right?” I wanted to tell Mel to get away from him, because he was obviously not all right. But I couldn’t make my mouth form the words.
Sanders began to shake like a leaf in Mel’s grip, then just as suddenly stopped. His emerald eyes fastened on to her, and he tried to speak again. His voice was the sound of fabric tearing. He said, “Let. Us. In.”
“What?” Mel said.
“Maybe don’t touch him,” Jason said, his voice tight. I nodded agreement.
Mel released Sanders. The man swayed like a marine plant, but didn’t go over. In a strangely boneless gesture, he pointed up at the clouds. Behind them, the hint of vast creatures swam. My eyes threatened to cross, because what they saw were things like starfish crossed with industrial equipment, if starfish were the size of entire city neighborhoods.
“Holy shit!” I yelled. That clinched it. Those cloud things were after us. They were actively trying to enter the starting grid. And–
“Carter,” said Alice, her voice oddly composed, given that Sanders seemed to be possessed, and creatures straight out of Lovecraft swelled in ever greater density at the edge of our Earth-like domain. Her firmness helped me control my rising panic. I glanced at the screen she indicated. More data splayed, hinting at new secrets of existence… but I was too rattled to make any sense of it.
“What am I looking at?”
“This represents our connection back to the lab,” she explained. “However we got injected into this network, a connection remains. We could use it to get back, if we had time to decode what’s going on. But, look!” Her finger jabbed. “Our connections are compromised! They’re corrupted. Whatever those things out there are, they’ve already tapped into us. Sanders is worst, but we’re all affected. I think they’re going to use us – our bodies back in the lab – to route traffic back to our origin. Out of this network and back to Earth.”
Sanders groaned again, blinked, and repeated himself, maybe in warning, “Let. Us. In.”
Insanity. It was unbelievable. All of it was like a bad dream that I desperately wanted to wake up from and laugh about.
And yet, there we were. You need to get your shit together, Carter. You need a plan. The analytical part of my brain clamped down on the panic, the part that wanted me to look stare out at the cloud-swaddled green spheres and completely lose my shit.
Alice’s explanation got me part of the way to understanding. But an intuition whose source I’m still not certain about got me the rest of the way there. I somehow knew Alice was right. It was obvious. Sanders, Mel, Alice, Jason, and I would serve as a physical point of connection out of the dark energy network into the world of normal matter. We’d be a beachhead for vast creatures that’d had been swimming in this dark energy network for who knows how many millions or billions of years.
“They’ve done this before,” Sanders muttered, sounding more like himself, thank God. “They’ve done it millions of times. Billions. They never stop. They reach out forever, consuming…”
“Done what?” yelled Jason, his voice a strangled entreaty. I’ve never seen him more scared.
Sanders coughed, staggered, blinked some more. Finally he managed to speak, “Eaten any world that connected to their network. They’re like… carnivores that eat planets.”
The term came to me. “They’re planetovores,” I named them. Then I caught Sanders’ horrific implication. “This is why we’ve found no evidence for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. They were all eaten when they discovered this fucking network.”
Sanders nodded, green liquid dribbling from the corner of his mouth. He said, “I can feel them in my mind. They’re excited. Hungry. Unstoppable.”
And here we were, responsible for opening the door to Earth for them. It was the end of the fucking world, and we were to blame.
Unless I did something unthinkable.
Jason jostled me as he made room for himself at the console. His wild eyes scanned the screens. He said, “Carter, get us out of here. If you can’t, we’re all going to end up like Sanders!”
“I’m trying,” I panted, pointing at the data. “But it’s not that simple. See? Earth and this new network are connected; they weren’t before. We’re the link. Us. If we don’t sever the connection…”
Jason’s hands went to the controls. He started typing, and I saw immediately what he was doing. He’d always been a quick study. He was going to pull all of us straight back out of the system, despite the corruption.
“Jason, stop!” I grabbed his shoulder. “We’re compromised! All of us, not just Sanders.”
“See?” I yelled, gesturing to include everyone. “We can’t just disengage. We have to–”
Jason shrugged out of my grasp, muttering, “That’s not going to happen to me.”
“It has already!”
He ignored me. Of course he did. I knew what he was like. He wasn’t going to listen. And if Jason finished his desperate attempt to jack all of us out, the planetovores would come along, using the “printing” technology to manifest themselves in reality. They’d overwrite their new environment. To them, regular matter, including our minds and bodies, were probably just another operating system to be cracked and exploited.
Stopping that from happening was the only thing that mattered.
I put my hand on Jason’s sternum, then shoved him away from the console as hard as I could. Unprepared, he fell and rolled, yelling “What the hell?”
“It’s got to be me,” I said as I called up new menus on the console.
“Saving yourself, is that it? You selfish prick, Carter!” Jason went for me again, but Alice and Mel got in the way, even though they weren’t quite sure what I was doing. Sanders did, but he was too far gone. But maybe I could save him, Earth, and all of us from a similar fate. Or, at least save Earth…
The next moments were vague. Maybe the same corruption that was in Sanders whispered knowledge into my mind, or maybe I’m just that good. Either way, I was able to commandeer the virtual particle printing array inherent in the network; its raison d’être. If we recalled our conciousnesses, as Jason had just tried, we’d cement the creatures’ connection to Earth. They might even be already back there, using our bodies for themselves, like demons possess people in religious stories. So I had to get out a different way. By using the printing function embedded in the dark energy network to print a new instance of myself without using the compromised link to my old body. In effect, there’d be two of me at once.
There wasn’t time to get everything exactly right. Clothing, for instance, wasn’t going to make the trip back. So I queued up the commands to print myself as close as I could to where my original body was strapped into a VR rig dreaming, but somewhere I could appear without drawing undue attention.
The command executed, and I was
funneled up the link, out of the network, and back onto the university campus, a freshly printed dark energy traveler.
Leaving everyone else behind.
2: Disconnection
Carter Morrison
Falling in the men’s shower knocked the wind out of me. Of course, five seconds ago my lungs hadn’t existed, at least not here. When I printed back onto the university campus, I’d somehow managed to appear two feet higher than the floor, then fallen straight down on my back. Idiot!
My chest heaved and my heart thundered. Sucking molasses through a straw would’ve been easier. The floor was cold and gritty on my skin. My fingers curled spasmodically. Ineffectually. Is this what panic felt like?
A scrap of breath hissed between my teeth. Then another. Finally the fist in my chest unclenched, and I gulped in lungful after lungful of air. I was going to live a while longer. A chance to get older, but probably not any wiser.
“You all right?”
I realized I was laying naked on floor of the showers in the university athletic center. The guy inquiring about my health was two stalls down, his hands poised in mid-shampoo.
Trying to speak, I coughed instead. I settled for nodding.
“You sure?” he said. “Looked like you were having some kind of fit.”
“Slipped and fell,” I finally forced out. “Knocked the wind out of me, is all.” I patted my chest.
“OK, good,” he said, obviously relieved he wouldn’t have to administer CPR to a nude stranger.
Staggering out of the showers, I snagged a towel from a stack near the door and dried off. Which gave me a chance to look around for something to wear. I’d never stolen clothing before, but as I’d hoped, a locker room was a great place for that kind of petty larceny. No one noticed as I pilfered an unattended locker, so I avoided difficult questions.
The Myth of the Maker Page 2
