The Myth of the Maker

by Bruce R Cordell

  “Now what?” said Navar, coming up behind.

  “Now,” Elandine said, “we chart a path through the zone, steering clear of anything dangerous.”

  “Then let’s avoid the place entirely. Everything down there is dangerous.”

  Elandine laughed. Now that she was here and no one could deny her, her humor had returned. “Fair point, Protector. But that’s our path. If we don’t reach the center of the zone by noon, we’ll miss our chance for another month. I don’t mean to make Flora wander the Night Vault for even another day.”

  Navar’s ears nervously flicked, but she made no response.

  They descended on a path steeper and more tortuous than the one they’d ascended, leading their horses instead of riding. Brandalun hadn’t described that aspect of the trip. When they reached the valley floor, morning was well along and Elandine was anxious, as well as soaking with sweat. “We’ve taken too long,” she groused.

  Pale and tortured trees clogged the valley, twisted by a lifetime growing under fluctuating Rules. They were also tall and strewn with creepers and hanging vines, which meant the central plateau she’d spied from higher up wasn’t visible while they were beneath the canopy.

  Ignoring the protests of Navar and her new captain, Elandine took the lead. She plunged into the undergrowth, swinging her sword Rendswandir to help cut a path. Over the sounds of her exertion, the humid air vibrated with the peculiar calls, some high and lilting, others deep and rumbling. Beasts of the termination zone jungle, she supposed, who would hopefully keep their distance.

  Though she allowed herself to be spelled by others in her detail when she grew tired, it seemed to Elandine that their pace was no better than a wandering child’s. When they finally broke into the clearing around the plateau, it was with only an hour to spare before totality. Carved stairs and gaping windows wound up the plateau.

  The interior was supposedly a wrath haunt. When the spirit of a dead creature fails to find its way to the Night Vault, its fate is to become a bodiless being of rage and loss: a spirit of wrath. A wrath’s touch rotted flesh and drained life.

  Ribs, femurs, even a few skulls lay about the base of the plateau. Probably the remains of wrath victims who hadn’t known to stay away, or who’d been lured by stories of treasure to be found in the Night Vault.

  According to Brandalun, the stairs were at least as dangerous a route to the top as the tunnels and galleries that mazed the plateau’s interior, because sometimes demons from the deepest places walked them. Meeting a demon on the stair was worse than meeting a wrath in the dark, Elandine’s mother liked to say.

  Navar pointed to the granite doors half-way around the circumference of the plateau, leading into the interior. The First Protector knew Brandalun’s stories as well as the queen.

  Elandine shook her head. “No. We don’t have time to creep through the unmapped interior. That could take days. If I’m going to make it to the Moon Door on top of the plateau before noon, we have to try the stairs.”

  A babble of concern drowned out whatever objection lay on the First Protector’s lips.

  Several soldiers from her detail pointed into the sky. Glancing up, the queen saw a billowing gray cloud blowing in the wind.

  Elandine asked Navar “What is it?”

  “Bad weather? Unless…”

  “Unless it’s a breach!” finished Elandine. In places where the Seven Rules were weak, kray sometimes blew into Ardeyn, dispersed by the wind, using long strands of webbing like kites to carry them far inward from the Borderlands, or from a leaking termination zone.

  “But there’re so many! Hundreds!” barked Navar. “It can’t be kray!”

  In the queen’s experience, no more than half a dozen kray had ever made it into Ardeyn at a time, and the destruction of even so few was an arduous task. On the other hand, she’d never traveled so far into a termination zone before, either.

  “It’s kray,” Elandine said, knowing it with dry-mouthed certainty. She grabbed the hilt of Rendswandir and squeezed the unyielding leather-wrapped metal. What was falling from the sky was nothing less than a catastrophe. Somewhere, a gaping hole had been torn in the protection granted by the Seven Rules.

  12: Confrontation

  Katherine Manners

  “Well, that’s insane,” Kate told Carter.

  She’d finished calibrating the fake security card halfway through Carter’s account, right around when the story veered into Lunatic-ville.

  Carter shrugged. “I know. If you want off the bus, give me the USB stick. And hand over the card spoofer, too. Please? I’ll take it from here. You can wash your hands of the whole thing.”

  She considered his offer. No one would fault her for leaving, not even herself. Finding Jason had been weird, but Carter’s explanation was all kinds of fucked up.

  But she said, “What happened next, after you, uh, printed back?”

  Carter stuck his hands in his pockets. “I dropped the codebase of my defunct video game down the entangled link, into the primordial network.”

  Kate shook her head. He’d mentioned the game before, but she still wasn’t clear on its significance. “Why the hell do that?”

  “The starting grid code wasn’t encrypted. It was like a big welcome sign pointing at Earth: ‘Planetovores Welcome! All You Can Eat!’ I hoped the finished code and its rules would fence out anything not part of the encoded setting. Ardeyn, Land of the Curse.”

  “Did it? Work, I mean?”

  He nodded slowly. “The next thing I remember is waking up in a self-storage unit three years later wondering about my kidneys. Earth’s still here, so it must have.”

  Her finding a melting man in a server room was almost pedestrian compared with the enormity of Carter’s story. Kate’s brain staggered and skipped, trying to grasp it. “So, someone built that crazy network? Where these planetovores roam?”

  He shrugged. “I’m making lots of assumptions, but yeah, based on what I saw looking at the raw code in the starting grid. But a long time ago. My guess is that the network was created as a transport system.”

  Kate tried to imagine a transport system built of dark energy, but failed. She wanted to ask something more incisive. But all she could come up with was, “Really?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve been thinking about it, and if it was a transport system, it explains the printing protocols already in place between the real world and the network layer. I didn’t just whip that code up out of the whole cloth.”

  She nodded as if he’d made sense.

  Carter pulled his hands from his pockets, mimed grabbing something with two hands, and breaking it in half. “My best guess is that this wonderful, amazing, alien transit system broke. Lots of travelers were stuck inside. Over aeons, terrible things evolved from what was trapped in the network. Desperate to escape, they eventually figured out a way to get out. A terrible way, which is why I came across planetovores. Or maybe planetovores went wrong in the first place.” He shrugged. “Either way, based on what I glimpsed in the code, it looks like those things eat civilizations in the real universe of normal matter, every time they find one.”

  “Why? Why do these things want to eat worlds?” Kate flashed back to reading Jonah and the whale as a ten year-old. In her mind’s eye, the whale, already old and bloated, grew with the ages. Over deep time, grew large enough to swallow the entire Earth. She shuddered.

  “I don’t know,” said Carter. “Maybe they’re just bad-ass aliens who survived being pulled into the network by earlier waves of planetovores. They could be emergent intelligences of the network itself, or something I can’t even imagine. Probably all those things, and more. The dark energy network is immense.”

  Talking to Carter wasn’t solving anything, nor were his answers proving to be easy to hear. In fact, the more she heard, the less reassured she felt. So she slapped the flash drive ring from Jason into the hand of the man with the mad story. Then she swiped the spoofed card through the read
er. When the security door clicked, she pushed it open and asked Carter, “You coming? I haven’t got all day.”

  Carter nodded, obviously surprised “Thank you.” He made as if to go first, then motioned her ahead instead. A good sign, Kate thought – he’d remembered which one of them was trained at breaking and entering.

  Ten minutes of sneaking saw them outside the door of a corner office. The frosted glass bore the title: Liza Banks, CEO. A yellow-orange glow filtered through the glass, as well as the sounds of more than one voice.

  They put their ears to the door.

  After a few moments, Carter whispered, “Can you make anything out?”

  She shook her head. A lot of mumbling was audible as of at least two people talking, but nothing sensible. A male voice seemed excited, and another actually did seem a little bit familiar…

  The door was yanked open.

  “Don’t move!” someone yelled. Kate squinted against the unexpected light. The voice belonged to a man with greasy hair holding a gun on her. Fuck. She raised her hands.

  The CEO’s office was richly appointed. A gargantuan flat screen monitor dominated one wood-paneled wall, displaying gray-white curls of static. An equally gargantuan desk crouched beneath the flat screen on carpet that probably cost more than Kate’s annual income. Someone was tied into the desk chair with a bag over his or her head, so Kate couldn’t see who it was. That wasn’t too creepy.

  In addition to the gunman and the captive, the office also contained a pudgy man with a neck beard. Finally, an impeccably put-together woman with horn-rimmed glasses stood near the gunman.

  The woman gave a fake, perfunctory smile. She said, “Hello. Took you long enough to get from the garage to my office. Well, come in, but slowly. Don’t try anything stupid. Fred has a twitchy trigger finger.”

  “You knew we were coming?” Carter said. Kate gave him a sidelong glance. Duh.

  Fred the gunman gestured with the snub nose of his pistol, and backed away far enough to give her and Carter room to enter. She complied, her mind very much on her own concealed weapon as she shuffled forward. But it wasn’t the time for sudden movements.

  Carter followed her. They stopped where Fred indicated, along the office’s back wall. Kate said in a tight voice, “Liza Banks?”

  “The one and only,” the woman said. “And you must be the precious detective. And there’s the fellow we heard over the garage intercom spinning tall tales. Carter, is it?”

  “You heard me?” said Carter. “I didn’t see a mic. Maybe that makes things easier.”

  Liza shrugged, “We were wary already, on account of the other visitor who arrived before you. BDR is a popular destination today. If I’d known, I’d have put out appetizers.”

  As she spoke, Liza walked over to the captive sitting at the desk beneath the flat screen TV. She pulled off the captive’s mask–

  “Raul!” Kate yelled.

  Raul’s sheepish expression was hampered by a few fresh contusions. He said, “Hello, mi chula. Who’s your new friend?” His eyes flicked to Carter.

  As she’d feared, Raul hadn’t bought her dog-walking excuse. She cursed herself. She should’ve said nothing. It would’ve been less suspicious. But she hadn’t expected that Raul’d make a beeline for BDR while she dallied listening to Carter’s story.

  Liza said, “You know him? Makes sense. Though your coordination is terrible. We caught him trying to jimmy the doors to the executive lobby. We were just getting down to brass tacks, as Fred says, when we heard you on the intercom.”

  Carter said, “Then you know the danger the dark energy network represents! If you don’t–”

  Liza raised her hands, saying, “Woah, cowboy, slow down. I heard enough to concern me about your mental health, yes. And that you have something that belongs to me. Hand it over.”

  Neck Beard looked at Liza. He said, “Hold on. What if there’s actually some kind of danger? My last set of tests returned results I frankly can’t explain.” He gestured to the static on the flat screen, as if that was some kind of proof, and continued, “Whoever this Jason is, he isn’t providing us with the full story.”

  “That’s why he sent the flash drive,” said Liza with exaggerated exasperation. “He said that’ll contain all we need to make the qbit chip and quantum computing a reality.”

  “You can’t trust Jason,” Carter intruded.

  Fred raised the gun. “You. Shut up.”

  Carter glared, but shut up.

  Kate finally got over the shock of seeing Raul. She said, “What’s your interest in quantum computing? Are you trying to corner the market on VR, like Carter was?” The gunman didn’t tell her to shut up, maybe because he didn’t feel as threatened by a woman. A mistake a lot of men made.

  Liza said, “Virtual Reality? Please. Dr Paldridge here,” she gestured to Neck Beard, “promised me that his quantum computer would have an absurd amount of processing power, applicable to a wide range of schemes. But only if someone could iron out the difficulties. Someone like himself, with Jason’s help. That kind of power could blow through any encryption in seconds.”

  Kate blinked. A pure money grab, then. She wondered if the woman had ever thought her scheme would come down to hiring gunmen and putting sacks over people’s heads. To Kate, Liza Banks seemed nervous beneath her boasting exterior. Probably best not to test her though. Besides, she’d just remembered a story that’d been at the top of the security forums for weeks.

  Kate shifted her attention to Neck Beard and said, “Mr Paldridge, is it?”

  Neck Beard said “Dr Paldridge, but yes.”

  She continued, “Don’t we already have quantum computers?”

  Carter shot Kate a surprised look. She ignored him.

  Paldridge bit his lip and said, “No.”

  “Some Canadian company has been selling quantum processors for a while now,” Kate said. “I’m sure I just read about it online. D-Wave–”

  Liza snorted.

  Paldridge gave emphatic shake of his head and said, “Those D-Wave machines are quantum annealers, not quantum computers. They’re not even comparable to ENIAC. They can only solve a small subset of problems, not generalized quantum algorithms. I aim to bridge that gap.”

  All right then, the man seemed to know what he was talking about. Let’s see–

  “Enough chit chat,” Liza said. “Hand over the device. Get it from them, Fred.”

  Fred advanced, pressing the gun to Carter’s side. Kate instantly understood how Fred had sacrificed the distance advantage a firearm provided. On the other hand, Carter was obviously cowed by the brazen threat.

  Carter said. “It’s in my coat. That’s what I’m reaching for. Is that all right?”

  Fred nodded.

  Carter’s hand inched into the pocket of his pea coat, then emerged just as slowly with something balled in his fist. Kate considered going for her own gun while everyone’s eyes were on Carter.

  But Carter beat her to the stupid. He twisted suddenly, knocking Fred’s gun hand with his elbow, trying to grab Fred’s arm.

  A gunshot tore through the office, louder than a car crash. Carter gasped, collapsing. The ring dropped from his hand and bounced across the floor.

  “You shot him!” Kate yelled. Her ears were ringing, and her own words came out muted.

  Liza’s mouth hung open a moment in similar shock. She whispered, “Oh. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “What’d you expect?” Fred said. “He had it coming.”

  Liza swallowed. In a tight voice, she said, “Paldridge, bring me that.” She pointed to the ring Carter had dropped. “Fred, see to the man you just shot. If he croaks, I’m shooting you next. Damn it.”

  Kate said again, louder, “You fucking shot him!”

  Fred growled at Kate, “Try anything, bitch, and I’ll shoot him again.” Then he bent to the fallen Carter.

  “Let me help,” Kate begged. “I promise, I won’t cross you.” I won’t cross you yet, she silen
tly added. “I just want to make sure my friend doesn’t bleed out.”

  Fred looked at the bleeding man, and seemed suddenly out of his depth. A second later, he motioned her over. She crouched next to the stretched-out Carter. A red stain was blooming on his upper chest beneath his shirt. Kate hoped it was “upper” enough that the bullet missed anything too vital…

  Paldridge had gone pale and shaky, but he retrieved the ring as Liza requested and examined it in his cupped palm. The big costume jewel caught the light. He pulled the removable section from the ring and said, “What an odd flash drive.”

  Kate didn’t have time to explain the extraordinary circumstances by which she’d come by the ring. She was too busy applying pressure to a bullet wound. She yelled at Fred, “Get a first aid-kit!”

  Fred gave her a disinterested stare, but eventually said, “There’s one in that closet.” He pointed. “Get it yourself.”

  As Kate tried to explain how that’d require her to let up pressure on the wound, an electronic squeal howled from the wall-mounted display.

  Another whine like tires spinning on asphalt followed it. The static cleared – not quite completely – revealing a man. He wore some kind of bulky black suit. Was it iron armor? Interference made everything jaggy. When the man spoke, his voice sounded as if it echoed up from a well. Kate couldn’t understand him.

  Banks went to the desk and fiddled with the keyboard of her computer. She said to the image, “Jason, you’re breaking up. Please repeat.”

  Jason? Kate studied the monitor. The interference made it hard to tell, but the man did have brown eyes. But she’d seen him melt!

  The figure said, “You’ve created the bridge. Congratulations. But it’s a shaky connection, and I need you to finish the process I outlined to you. Why haven’t you done it already?”

  The CEO walked into view of the blinking camera over the monitor. She said, “Someone stole the flash drive. This woman,” she pointed to Kate, “and her friend. But we’ve got it back. Dr Paldridge is going over it now.”