by Ian Whates
It was like walking through some surreal woodland - the club-goers their fellow explorers, sharing the discovery of this sacred realm. The further they went from the dance floor the more subdued the music, the accumulated mass of the veils acting as a baffle, muffling the sound.
"I don't get it," Tanya said as they continued. "Shouldn't we have hit the wall by now?"
"Definitely," Philip replied. Yet the forest of veils stretched on into the distance.
"This doesn't make sense," Malcolm murmured. "I looked at the coding myself before we set out, just moments ago, and there was nothing like this."
The music had faded to mere background, the number of people around them growing fewer and fewer.
"What does it mean?" Tanya asked, her voice as subdued as Malcolm's. Philip could understand why; somehow it felt wrong to speak loudly here, in what had developed into a tranquil, almost mystic place.
"It means that wherever we now are doesn't exist in Home's Virtuality, that somehow we've gone somewhere else," he said.
"Bollocks," she exclaimed, evidently unimpressed by any sense of mysticism. "Things around you two just keep getting weirder by the minute."
"You could always go back," Philip offered, not sure whether he wanted her to or not.
"Thanks, but no thanks. I've got my reputation to think of."
"Of course you have. Wouldn't want to put a blemish on your CV now, would we?"
"Cut it out, you two," Malcolm interrupted. "Save the bickering for later."
He had a point; it wasn't as if there was any shortage of things to claim their attention. The veils were changing, slowly and subtly; a gradual shift from what they had been to something less substantial. The sense of being in a vast forest was more pronounced than ever, but the solid trunks of the 'trees' were becoming ethereal phantoms, as if the three of them had somehow stepped across into the realm of faeries.
Philip was absorbed by the changing veils, watching them intently to try and see the actual shift of form, but it was too subtle. The effect was undeniable, however. "They're becoming pure energy," he murmured.
Curtains of light now stretched around them, where previously delicate cloth had hung. Pillars of coruscating energy had replaced the tumbles of vibrant cloth they'd been walking between mere moments before. Nor was that the only change.
"Listen," Malcolm said. "Can you hear that?"
The music was now barely audible, but a new sound had begun to supplant it. Indistinct, yet somehow comforting, a distant murmuring, as if they were approaching a large gathering, an auditorium in which a vast crowd had gathered, conversation bubbling throughout as they settled in anticipation of a performance. The sound was too indistinct, too quiet, almost buried beneath the lingering music from the club, yet it was enough to have Philip straining to hear, striving to sieve meaning from the garble.
"Where the hell are we?"
It was a while since they'd seen anyone else. Tanya's question was little more than a whisper.
"I think," Philip began, "that this is a link..."
"A bridge," Malcolm interjected.
"...between our Virtuality on Home..."
"...and the Byrzaens," Malcolm finished for him.
"You're kidding me," Tanya said. Then, when neither laughed, "You're not, are you?"
"Wish I was."
"But how is that possible?"
"Absolutely no idea," Philip conceded.
Without any discernable leap, just incremental drift, they found themselves somewhere that was undeniably alien. They were now tiptoeing through a landscape dominated by curtains of light that rippled and ran and receded and darted. Bright colours ran through the translucent veils like veins, pulsing, thickening and dwindling. As with the veil he'd held earlier, Philip couldn't shake the feeling that these shifting films of energy were organic in some way, that they might almost be alive, but he couldn't have offered any explanation for that impression.
The music had disappeared completely, only the faint hum as of distant conversation remained, though it had grown no clearer and it remained impossible to discern anything as intelligible as words.
"Noise..." Malcolm said.
Philip nodded.
"What about the noise?" Tanya wanted to know.
"The Byrzaens believe that the sounds of intelligence - communication and other sundry asides - enhance the brain's ability to think," Philip explained. "It seems to be one of their fundamental tenets."
"Great, so you two geniuses ought to be on top form right about now then."
Nothing in Philip's experience, not even his brief visit to the Byrzaen spaceship at New Paris, had prepared him for this environment of energy, which seemed unharnessed and yet, at the same time, restricted to the forms of the veils. It was a strange dichotomy that somehow felt right, part of the intended order. He couldn't help but question the earlier assessment that they were within some sort of link between human territory and Byrzaen. What if this wasn't a bridge at all, what if they'd already crossed into Byrzaen space? Could this landscape of shifting veils be as familiar to a Byrzaen as forests of bark-crusted trunks and leafy canopies were to rural living humans? But how could that be? How could life in their galaxy have evolved to be so dramatically different when nothing similar had been encountered in human space? The questions multiplied without any prospect of imminent answers.
A figure walked across their path, some distance ahead. At first Philip paid little attention, lost in his own convoluted thoughts and assuming this to be some reveller from the club out exploring, but almost immediately he realised how mistaken that assessment was. Hunched shoulders and long, gangly legs that gave the figure an almost heron-like gait...
"A Byrzaen!" Tanya exclaimed.
"Evidently." There was always the possibility that this was a human club-goer who had chosen to mimic a Byrzaen for his avatar, but, given the context, Philip wouldn't have bet on it. The figure had disappeared from sight, masked by intervening screens of energy. It gave no indication of having seen them.
All three of them quickened pace, hurrying forward to the point where they'd seen the Byrzaen, but it had vanished from sight.
Without any warning, Philip fancied he could hear words emerging from the background noise, so faint that he couldn't be entirely certain, but a voice seemed to say, "We mean you no harm." The words sent a chill coursing through him.
"Can you hear anything in the static?" he asked, as casually as he could manage.
"No," Malcolm replied. "Damned annoying, isn't it? I keep trying, but nothing."
We mean you no harm.
"Well, do we follow after the bird-man?" Tanya asked, sounding none too keen.
"I don't know about you," Malcolm said, "but I think I've seen enough."
"More than," Philip agreed.
"If that means we're heading back, you've got my vote," Tanya chipped in.
We mean you no harm.
They retraced their steps, a walk that seemed to take far less time than the outward trip. For the most part they did so in silence, though Malcolm said at one point, "Still don't understand why none of this shows up in the coding. It has to, somewhere."
We mean you no harm.
The message stayed with Philip, constantly repeated, never clear enough to convince him that he wasn't simply projecting a pattern into the chaos.
The music gradually swelled as they walked, swallowing the constant background babble and its insistent message, if such it were, which neither rose nor fell in volume but simply disappeared beneath the club's pulsing rhythms, while the veils around them slid craftily from energy to tenuous substance to material. Before Philip realised, they were back in the club itself. The atmosphere, which had struck him as tranquil and relaxing when they first entered, now took on a more sinister edge, as if the tranquillity was intended to disarm and seduce, to lure the unwary into a false sense of security. None of their party seemed inclined to linger. They made their way across the floor and were soon exitin
g Veils into the bland simplicity of the street beyond.
It felt to Philip as if they had narrowly escaped the jaws of a cunningly concealed trap. Before he could comment to that effect, something flashed towards them. Philip only caught a glimpse in the corner of his eye and, but for Tanya, wouldn't have registered the presence of the flash at all before it killed him. Her hand shot out, interposing itself between Philip and whatever he it was. Later, Philip would recall what Catherine had said about Tanya's avatar being 'packed with countermeasures.' Presumably this was one of them. Certainly he'd never noticed her clutching a translucent disc before, which was what she seemed to have in her hand now; a shield of some sort, which he only really saw as the flash struck and the disc was limned in pulses of silver fire. The fire died, its energies spent.
Tanya's hand was blackened as she lowered it, charred, with wisps of smoke rising from fingertips and palm, but she didn't seem to notice. She was already in motion, sprinting in the direction the flash had come from, towards a figure that appeared to have been cast from polished chrome or perhaps silver, light glinting from its skin and blank, featureless face. The assassin - for that was all Philip could think this must be - crouched in preparation. For a bizarre moment its silver hide reflected the onrushing Tanya, making it seem that she was charging towards an imminent collision with a warped version of herself.
As she ran, she swept out a hand and flung what appeared to be a fistful of glowing embers at the mirrored assassin, except that the embers raced ahead of her and zeroed in on their target. Philip thought he caught a glimpse of tiny winged figures within these fiery motes, but couldn't have sworn to the fact. The motes converged on the faceless figure, which began to pulse with light, before flaring in a manner that reminded Philip of the flash Tanya had intercepted. The dazzling nimbus formed a bubble upon which the embers dashed themselves, to flare briefly and magnificently as they died.
Tanya was almost upon the assassin, who sprang away at the last minute, as if afraid to grapple with her. Clearly deciding discretion to be the better part of valour, the silver figure turned and threw himself at the building behind, scurrying up its wall like a monkey up a tree. Tanya skidded to a halt and produced a gun with her left hand, raising it and firing even as she slowed. Visible energy leapt from the muzzle in a continuous stream, bridging the gap between the weapon and the fleeing figure. Despite the very real threat and the rush of fear, Philip couldn't help but wonder why he could see the beam. Surely there was no need for lethal energies to cross into the visible spectrum; in fact, it seemed inefficient to even think of designing a weapon that way. It reminded him of something from a game - souped up and vivid, perhaps, but even so... he recalled Catherine referring to Tanya as an experienced gamer and wondered if this was a result of that - Tanya's visualisation in some way finding form in Virtuality.
The assassin had frozen, and now began to lose definition, flickering in and out of existence, until it winked out entirely. Still Tanya kept firing, as if to make certain the silver figure wouldn't return.
Evidently satisfied, she holstered the gun and strode back to where Philip and Malcolm waited. "Damn! So much for hoping that this assignment would be a free ride."
"Why did you charge him?" Philip wondered. "I mean, if you had a gun, why not just shoot him and be done with it?"
"To put myself between you and the assassin, obviously," she replied with a toss of her blonde hair.
Obviously.
"The time it would have taken me to draw a gun and take aim is time he could have used to take another shot at you. This way, I kept him occupied and didn't give him clear sight of his target."
"Thanks," Philip said, lamely.
"Ah, glad I'm here now, are you?"
One thing Philip couldn't help but notice was how hot she looked right then, but, judging by her tone, he guessed sex was still off the agenda for the immediate future.
"If he was an avatar, why did he run? Why did saving himself matter so much?"
"He wasn't running," Tanya said. "He went up the building to remove me from the equation and get a better angle for a shot. That's why I had to take him out before he reached the top or before he could even stop partway up and turn."
"Oh." That possibility had never occurred to him.
"What happens now?" Malcolm wanted to know. "Won't he just come back for another try?"
Tanya shook her head. "I've set hounds to burn up his back trail and hopefully trace the avatar to its source, though I wouldn't count on the last bit. Doubtless they will try again, but not right now, not by simply rebooting that avatar, at any rate." She frowned. "The corp behind the avatar will know some of my counters next time, though, so I'll have to install a few upgrades. Expensive stuff." She flashed them a grin. "Just glad it won't be me that's footing the bill."
"Have you done this sort of thing before?" Philip asked, curious about how readily Tanya seemed to be taking events in her stride and wanting to gain some context.
"No," she replied. "Not really; not in Virtuality at any rate." She lifted her hand, the one that had been charred in the initial attack; not that you would have known it now. The hand was unblemished. "Same principles apply though, in here or out there. Show an enemy your moves and then let him walk away and you'd better learn some new moves fast."
Philip pondered her words, the nonchalant implication that she was some sort of hot-shot bodyguard in the corporeal world, and wondered whether that were true or a touch of bravado for his benefit. You never could tell in Virtuality.
Tanya flexed her fingers, balled her fist and smiled at Philip, evidently satisfied. "Now, unless you two boys want to hang around for anything else, shall we get out of here?"
"Good idea."
She sashayed past them, took a few steps and then paused to turn and blow Philip a kiss. "See you later." With that, she disappeared, stepping out of Virtuality. Philip looked at his father, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Where in the universe had Catherine found this woman? Not on Kaufman Industry's payroll, surely?
Leyton lay there in the dark, listening to the breathing beside him. He could tell she was no more asleep than he was and wondered if he should say something.
She beat him to it. "Can't you sleep either?"
"Not at the moment." He raised his voice a fraction. "Lights, minimum illumination."
A soft glow suffused the room and he looked at her, still questioning the wisdom of letting this happen, of wanting it to happen. Was he really over Mya, finally, after all these years? She'd only left the ship a matter of days ago, and here he was in bed with someone else.
"Is it Mya?" Kethi asked.
"No," he lied. "It's nothing. I've just grown used to sleeping alone. It's a little strange having someone beside me."
"I could go back to my own quarters."
"No," he said quickly.
She smiled, and then rested her head against his chest.
A corner of his mind doubted though, was afraid that this was still all about Mya. He really didn't want it to be a rebound thing. Kethi deserved better than that.
"It's not because of what happened on Arcadia, because you now know what I am?"
"No," he said again, and at least knew that to be wholly true. He gently lifted her head to gaze into her eyes. He'd never seen such vulnerability in her before, would never have dreamed it existed. "Of course not." He leant forward and kissed her - a chaste pressing of lips to lips. Hers were soft, warm, and dry.
"Good. I'm different, I know. I can do extraordinary things, but then, so can you. Doesn't mean you're not human."
"I know."
"What I do..." She drew a deep breath. "I can raise and lower my metabolism at will, crank up the whole pace my body functions if I need to - muscles, nerves, thoughts, the whole caboodle." She obviously wanted to talk, and he was happy to let her. "So that to me it seems as if I'm moving normally while the whole world around me slows to a crawl. It seems to everyone else I'm moving impossibly fast. I
don't do it very often because..."
You don't like to be reminded of how different you are, he filled in the unspoken words. "How does your body cope with the speed, though, with the extra strain that has to come with it?"
"It's designed to, it grew to.. The AI part of my brain has been shaping my body's development since birth, sculpting my physiology so that I can handle the extremes required."
He didn't react, didn't draw back, because the prospect didn't bother him, but the fact remained that, despite her protestations, Kethi was a lot less human than she seemed - a lot less like other humans at any rate; not less in the sense of inferior, just different, as she said. In fact, superior in many ways, perhaps even a new evolutionary step. A different form of transhuman from the Kaufmans senior and junior, but a step forward none the less, so he continued to hold her, and said, in part to lighten the mood a little, "It is a neat trick, though, the speeding up; must make you a demon on the z-ball court."
"I don't use it, wouldn't use it when I'm playing. What would be the point?"
"Well, I suppose the point would be that you'd win."
"Exactly. Every time, without anyone else ever getting a look in. Sort of takes the fun out of things for all involved, don't you think? Besides, how many people do you imagine would want to play me a second time?"
"Ah, so that's the real reason."
"No, it isn't!" she flared, pulling away. Then, seeing his grin and presumably realising that he was winding her up, she added quietly, "Bastard," and mock-hit him on the chest before snuggling up to him again.
"One thing, though," he said. "Surely when you do win, fair and square though it might be, folk on the losing team must sometimes wonder."
"Maybe, sometimes, but I hope most of them know me well enough to realise I wouldn't cheat like that."
Leyton wasn't so sure. He'd watched Kethi play z-ball and had seen for himself how good she was. He could well imagine that in the heat of the moment someone on the losing team with a strong competitive streak might wonder whether she'd used her abilities, just a little bit. Still, if any such resentment did linger, he'd never noted it in the crew's reaction to her.
