That was Palimpsest: a sinkhole through the reality stack; a tiny god in a room made of doors. That was the thing he had inadvertently built. And because he had built it, Palimpsest wanted to protect him—just as it had striven to protect the one person he cared about. It was determined to keep them both safe, and it had all of creation to play in.
Not this time, though. This time he had a destination in mind. Faizan had thought of it in the moment the shot had impacted, thought of nothing else, and he was thinking of it now, unheeding of the pain, of the dying. He was holding a memory, knowing it was more than a memory . . . knowing it was an entire reality. And at the same time he was shouting, in his mind, where he had to believe that Palimpsest could hear. Because it wouldn’t let him die. Because even now it would be in the process of copying everything that made him him, ready to replicate his consciousness into yet another reality. Because—before it could do that—there would be an instant, a fraction of a millisecond, where all of him was contained within it.
Take me back. Leave her here. You have to trust me. I know you’re trying to save me. I know you’re trying to save yourself. But if it’s possible, if there’s any way, then I need you to do this.
I made you. You have to trust me.
A pause. It felt like a held breath. Palimpsest had no need to hesitate, for its processes were as close to instantaneous as anything could be. Perhaps it was only showing him the mercy of consideration: a softening of the blow. How could Faizan not doubt himself? It was the spider at the centre of the universe-web and he, its creator, was merely a man.
Then time and space began to fold, or else unfold, shrink or expand, like origami worked by a million competing hands: backwards and forwards, in and out, and every way the same, everything a point and every point a centre. Faizan was falling, sideways, upwards, and then in no direction at all, for he understood by then that the sensation was only his mind fighting to make sense of dimensions it could not possibly comprehend.
Better, surely, to surrender, to relinquish himself to the flow—even if the flow felt as if it would twist him every way at once and spit him out in pieces. And sure enough, it was easier if he didn’t resist; so much so that for a moment it seemed he was on the verge of some great understanding. If only his body would stop trying to cling to antique notions of three-dimensional space, then perhaps his mind might see the multiverse for what it was—see the way his creation saw.
But the moment was slipping. The sensations he experienced were changing, the possibility he’d felt himself so close to was tumbling away. Space flexed back into something like its recognisable shape; time ceased its frantic hurtling, shrank to the mundane linearity of moment upon moment.
Faizan opened his eyes.
No. Not Faizan.
His name was Dran Florrian, and he’d come home.
He’d have been lying if he’d said the view was worth the effort. For the storage bay was much as he’d left it, and seemed more drearily pragmatical than ever for all the other versions of this space he’d witnessed, which still flickered on the edges of memory.
He was on his back, staring up towards the girder-ribbed ceiling. Was he injured? Florrian tried to recover what had happened in those last moments, before Palimpsest had cast his consciousness hurtling through the multiverse. He’d tried to shoot Dorric. He’d missed. Florrian had hit Palimpsest instead. The shot had carried on, and . . .
Karen. He’d shot Karen.
The memory was like a blow, a blow that brought with it other memories not quite his own. Florrian knew what it was like to be shot. He could feel the wound he’d suffered, only moments ago and never: could remember suffering a similar injury, in this body and this reality. He knew what Karen must have endured.
But Palimpsest had saved her, as it had saved him. It had spirited them away before death could claim them, merged what made them unique with other versions of themselves. It had sheltered them, protected them, made sure they weren’t seperated—like a child unwilling to see its parents part.
That seemed an absurd motive to ascribe to a machine. So maybe Palimpsest had simply calculated unimaginable odds and concluded that their best chance of survival—and therefore, its own—lay in their staying together. If so, it had been both right and wrong, for hadn’t those other realities proven every bit as hostile? Then again, Florrian was here and Karen was alive, or at least a version of her was. It was too early to condone or condemn Palimpsest for what it had done. He still had a chance to set this right, or to fail utterly. Because if he couldn’t beat Dorric, then no version of him, no version of Karen, would be safe ever.
So what now? Florrian was in the storage bay. He was lying on his back. He wasn’t tied up, for who would bother to restrain a corpse? Yet there was no wound in his chest, either. Only as Florrian raised his head to look down the length of his own body did he understand why: he wore not the one-piece coverall he’d dressed in that morning, but a long loose jacket and trousers of darkest grey, and the hand that he held up for his own inspection was not untanned pink but earthy brown. He wasn’t wounded because this wasn’t him.
His mind, but a new body: a body patched from another him in another reality. Palimpsest had brought him back here just as he’d asked, and done so in the only way it could. It would take some getting used to—if Florrian lived that long.
Then a panicked thought struck him. What about the neural implant? His remote interface with Palimpsest was the sole reason he’d sought out this reality. Yet even as he thought of it, he felt a whispering response to his probing. Not as he remembered it, though, like a note out of pitch: the implant belonged to this body, drawn presumably from a technologically analogous reality. With concentration, however, he found that he could access it; whether because it was genuinely similar or because this body had also brought memories with it, he chose not to wonder.
Florrian probed with the new mental implant, testing its limits. Would his connection still be blocked? Yes, it was like drumming against a wall, a wall in his own mind. He knew his first priority then. He tilted his head, hoping against hope that neither Dorric nor his engineer were looking his way. They weren’t: the engineer remained hunched over Palimpsest’s control panel, while Dorric was farther away, leaned against a cargo pod, his body language speaking clearly of impatience.
Dorric was out of reach, but the engineer wasn’t. That suited Florrian’s needs. He probed for the dull bone-ache in his arm that represented the weapon embedded there—and felt nothing. This body had never been modified, never been remade for the purpose of violence; of course it hadn’t, for if it had been, then Palimpsest could never have patched it through.
Then again, there was a contradiction there that Florrian had never quite been able to resolve. For with sufficient ingenuity, anything could be repurposed for violence—even a body.
Florrian rolled to his front, pushed onto hands and knees and then to his feet, the motion clean and gymnastic. His old muscles had been in good shape, but these were better. Before he was even fully standing, Florrian was moving, and the engineer was turning at the scuff of soles on metal. His mouth had formed a perfect O of surprise—as befitted the sight of a dead man, his skin colour inexplicably changed, barrelling towards him.
When Florrian’s fist met his chin there was almost no resistance. It was like the man wanted to fall. They went over together, Florrian struggling to find purchase against the limp form collapsing under him. The engineer was out cold, his jaw fractured or broken—and neural interfaces didn’t react well to extremes of pain, let alone unconsciousness.
Florrian flinched at the crunch of the engineer’s body beneath his knee and rolled over, trying to regain his feet. Ahead, Dorric was turning. Under other circumstances, the almost cartoonish astonishment on his face would have been gratifying. But he had a weapon in his right hand, a disk of glass and metal such as his thugs had used. It wouldn’t take Dorric long to recover and use it, and there was no cover, nothing nearby—nothing
except Palimpsest, and Florrian would sooner gamble his own life than risk it suffering more damage. He staggered on, and stopped.
“Your skin?” Dorric asked, with all the wide-eyed puzzlement of a small child.
It must be shocking, Florrian realised, to see him like this: the same but different. Perhaps it was surprising that he wasn’t more shocked himself. It suddenly seemed funny, a minor victory, and rather than answer Dorric, he smiled instead, a smile that felt cruel and feline on his lips.
Dorric’s response was a small but visible shudder. “You were . . .” he said, and left the sentence hanging, as though it were both too obvious and too absurd to finish.
“I was,” Florrian agreed. Until Palimpsest brought me back. And only then did he remember the neural link. He tested it once more and this time, sure enough, felt the familiar sensations: a moment’s buzz like a pressure headache, the tingle of connection. Then an interface panel was glowing beneath the splayed fingers of his outstretched hand; not the one he was used to, but close enough that Florrian knew he could make it work.
“You were dead,” Dorric finished finally. “And you should have stayed that way.” His voice was calm again. Any uncertainty was gone; the unwavering confidence that only the truly psychotic could hope to possess had taken its place.
There’d be no playing mind games with this man. If coming back from the dead in a new body wasn’t enough to shake his grotesque self-assurance, then nothing Florrian could do or say would.
That left only Palimpsest. But the tactile interface was too slow, too clumsy. Florrian probed again. He didn’t even know what he was hoping for, except that after everything he’d experienced, everything he now knew it was capable of, the thought of typing commands into Palimpsest in any fashion seemed ridiculous and archaic.
Sure enough, there was a response. Not something he could quantify, because he’d never experienced its like before, but a sense of . . . presence. It was like stepping into a blacked-out room and knowing without question that someone else was there, just waiting.
Dorric raised his hand, so that the flattened palm with its gently glowing device pointed directly at Florrian. “I might have been using Karen,” he said, “but I still had a certain . . . regard for her. Truly intelligent women are such a rare find. It’s a shame you shot her open with that ridiculous little spy toy of yours. I’ll tell you, Florrian, she’d have died a slow, excruciating death if I hadn’t had the decency to finish her off.”
Florrian forced himself to ignore the words. He couldn’t think about Karen suffering, not now. I know you’re there, he thought. I need you. I need . . .
What? Not a weapon. Palimpsest would never allow that. Nothing actively harmful.
“I don’t expect I’ll be as generous with you,” Dorric said.
Just as water sloshed from nowhere, a wave without a sea, flooding over him from head to toe.
Florrian flung himself towards the nearest cover, the slap of brine against metal in his ears. Though he’d seen it, though he’d willed it with every fibre of his existence, he couldn’t quite believe what he’d seen: he hadn’t expected it to work, and yet it had. Water, summoned from the ether—emulated from another reality. A gift from the genie he’d unbottled.
He made it to the shelter of a luggage rack, just in time for Dorric’s first shot to gouge a chunk from it. Singed scraps of fabric exploded before Florrian’s eyes; blackened tufts flopped through the air like dandelion seeds. The rack was no cover at all, not much better than a pile of shrapnel just waiting to hurtle through his body. But at least he was out of sight—and at least, now, he had a means to fight back.
Or did he? No weapons. Nothing harmful. Florrian could sense the truth of the fact even as he thought it—as though, thanks to the neural implant, he was now within the penumbra of Palimpsest’s burgeoning consciousness. Was it still bound by the morality he had programmed into it, or had it found its own? Either way, he couldn’t keep fighting Dorric with water.
No second shot had come. Dorric would want to get up close; was surely endeavouring to do precisely that right now. He would already have worked out how a wave had materialised from thin air, perhaps had already theorised just how Florrian had risen from the dead. Having at least some idea of what he was dealing with, he would try for the element of surprise, acting quickly enough that Florrian could pluck no phantasmagoria from thin air.
Which meant that whatever Florrian was going to do, he would have to do it now. He took and held a breath, forced calm upon himself. What would Palimpsest allow? Not a weapon. An obstruction then? Florrian reached for what he needed, picturing it as clearly as he could manage with adrenalin still making his pulse dance. And this time it was even easier—as though Palimpsest was an eager child wanting to impress.
He saw, where a moment ago nothing had been, bundles of wire hemorrhage into existence. The wire was thorny with metal needles and strung between great, weatherworn concrete crosses, Xs at the end of some indecipherable signature. It had drawn a diagonal line across the middle of the cargo bay, in the direction from which Dorric would be approaching. The only routes open to him now lay to either side, and one of those would take him halfway around the room.
Florrian broke cover. He made four paces before the soft crump of another shot turned a circle of wall ahead to glowing yellow, which faded instantly through deepening reds to charred black. He ducked low and ran on, confident the next shot would sear through his back at every moment until the one when he skidded behind another rack of luggage.
This time he didn’t wait but pushed off again, hurling himself through space, gritting his teeth against the exertion of muscles not quite familiar. When Florrian glanced right, thinking to see Dorric beyond the barrier of wire or the brilliance of another shot carving the air, he discovered that he was looking instead at Palimpsest, planted in the centre of the bay like a monolith abandoned by some antediluvian culture. He had always found it strange, grotesque, unfamiliar, even as his hands were constructing it. Now he read those same traits differently. Not strange, but otherworldly; not grotesque, but primal. Had Florrian really created Palimpsest? Or had he only discovered it? Had it wanted to be created—perhaps called out from some impossible other dimension, demanding to be made and made and made again?
Florrian ducked behind a pile of perfectly stacked crates, each branded with lines of neatly printed scrawl. Foolish questions. He had invented Palimpsest; designed it to be a tool. Now all that mattered was how he made use of it.
Only, it really wasn’t so simple. A tool didn’t second-guess you. A tool didn’t refuse to be used. For he’d considered summoning a wrench or hammer, some innocuous object that could nevertheless be repurposed as a weapon—and even as he’d thought it, Florrian had felt the resistance. Palimpsest had read his intention, rejected it. A wrench or hammer could easily be turned into a weapon, but he sensed that nothing he did would bend Palimpsest the same way.
Dorric’s voice made him start. “You can’t hurt me,” he said with certainty.
The words were coming from towards the entrance, but Florrian couldn’t pinpoint where; that frustrated him almost as much as the fact that Dorric had read his thoughts so easily.
“I’ve learned enough about your machine to know that. All you can do is irritate me. And you can’t get out without coming past me. So why don’t we talk?”
All true enough, except that it was hard to believe Dorric had the slightest desire for conversation. But it was a fact that the only thing Florrian had achieved so far, with the godlike power he wielded, was to make a pest of himself. Childish pranks weren’t going to save his life, not forever. And escape wasn’t an option, now less than ever, as every minute made it more apparent to both of them what horrors Palimpsest might accomplish in the wrong hands.
No, Florrian needed to think bigger; outside the confines of this box he’d made for himself. No weapons. No weapons. But . . .
Then it came. And, oh, now he was thinking big�
�but perhaps too big, for he thought that his mind might burst with the idea; that his skull would split like a walnut shell. Was it even possible? Yet he knew it was.
Palimpsest . . . you know what I’m thinking.
Sure enough, that other consciousness was waiting for his; impatiently, Florrian thought, as though here was a question it had been anticipating.
You can do it, can’t you?
It could, he knew. Yet even as he probed, as the idea became whole, he understood just what he was asking. It was dangerous, deadly dangerous, this playing in realities as though they were one great sandpit instead of entire, distinct creations never meant to touch. Florrian understood what Palimpsest had risked by bringing him back here, in such brazen defiance of cause and effect, of life and death. It was meddling with an order that had begun with the first glimmer of the Big Bang, would hold until all there was had returned to nothing.
But . . . it was possible. He knew it was possible. And if it was possible he had to try.
Do it, Florrian thought. I take the responsibility. It’s my call to make.
Hesitation. An unresponsiveness that felt to him like doubt.
You know we have to try.
And somehow that was enough—for he was certain, a moment later, that his reality had changed. He was growing familiar with the process now, attuning some unprecedented new sense or receiving at secondhand a fraction of Palimpsest’s unimaginable sensory input. Something had changed, though what he couldn’t say. Had it worked? He tried to phrase it as a question, but no response came from Palimpsest, and perhaps Florrian hadn’t expected one.
It would have to wait. He’d know soon enough, if he could only stay alive. An added motivation then.
How much time had passed? He’d been so deep in communion with Palimpsest; for all Florrian knew Dorric could be almost upon him by now. It was hugely difficult to use Palimpsest like this, relying on a precision of thought nigh impossible to maintain under stress. Then again, what choice did he have? Florrian forced his eyes shut, though his instincts screamed against it. He needed time, needed to stay hidden. He needed to even the odds, at least a little.
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