by Alec Hutson
One step. Two. She’s not breathing, and the silence is deafening.
Slowly, slowly. Carefully she steps over a crumpled newspaper. A black-haired woman watches her from a faded calendar on the wall.
When she is passing behind Big Uncle’s chair, his hand twitches, and her stomach clenches. But then with a snort he settles again, and she exhales softly.
Eight steps. Nine. Ten. The door handle is within her reach. Akara grips it and twists, and it does not budge. She wants to moan, but with an effort she stifles herself.
There’s a chunk of metal above the handle. Akara touches it gently, gives it a slight turn. There’s a click, so loud she’s sure Big Uncle will wake. She turns to see.
Big Uncle hasn’t moved. But beyond him, standing in the doorway to another room – maybe a kitchen – the Uncle who came tonight is watching her. He is holding a bowl in one hand and in the other is a spoon suspended halfway to his mouth. Akara’s insides turn to water, and her legs wobble, but he does nothing, just stares at her. She can see his big hairy belly bulging out from underneath his shirt. He brings the spoon to his mouth and chews, watching.
With terrible slowness she moves her hand from the chunk of metal to the door’s handle. She twists and pushes. The door opens soundlessly, and cold air rushes inside. The man does nothing as she slips out the door and gently closes it behind her.
She is in a hallway. She must get out, she must escape this great house before Big Uncle wakes or the other Uncle chases after her. Akara runs down the corridor, the muscles in her legs aching as they are stretched for the first time in many weeks. Doors flash by on either side of her. A larger door looms at the end of the hall, bright red letters above it. She pushes against it and it bangs open. There are concrete stairs leading down, and she takes them two at a time, struggling to keep her too-large slippers from flying off as she leaps like a rabbit from landing to landing.
Out. She must get out.
Finally, the bottom. She bursts through another door, crosses a brightly lit room where people are staring at her, and slips between slowly turning panes of glass. She pushes to make it go faster, but it is too heavy; she waits, her eyes fixed on the door next to the stairs, praying to every spirit and buddha Grandmother ever told her about that Big Uncle does not come through.
He doesn’t, and she wriggles free of the revolving glass and finds herself – for the first time in so long – outside.
She cries out as the cold washes over her. Her skin prickles and she can see her breath in short, panicked bursts, like wisps of her soul escaping into the night air. How can it feel like this? She wraps her arms around herself and stumbles away. She must run, fast and far. Back to the stilt-house. Back to where the banyan tree trails roots down to the river. Back to Mother and Brother and Grandmother – and yes, even Father, who sold her to the thin man for two hundred American dollars.
Everything is white. This must be snow; Grandmother told her stories about it, how beautiful it is. But it doesn’t look so beautiful now. It crunches under her slippers, mixed with ice and dirt, and she struggles not to fall as she hurries down the red-brick path next to the big road with its gleaming cars that wait motionless, like drowsing water buffalo. The light comes from great lamps arching over the road; she can see falling motes silhouetted against the brightness, which looks so warm and welcoming but must be freezing cold, like everything else here. Is this Arbuda, the cold Naraka from the old stories? Did she die and wake up in one of the frozen hells?
Wet slush squirms inside her slippers, burning her feet and toes. The great stone houses rear up like canyon walls to either side of her, some with windows glowing with buttery light, others dark. She thinks about going up to one of the doors and asking to come in to get warm, but surely they will know that she has run away from Big Uncle, and they will make her go back to her bed in the room with the red light. She won’t do that. Never.
The street ahead empties into a large open space. The big road ends there, and more of these small paths twist between sculpted bushes and high hanging lamps.
There is something else, and her breath catches. A tree, larger than any she has seen before, and also different; its bole isn’t knotted with vines or other growths, and it does not spread larger as it soars into the night sky. The opposite, in fact – its lowest branches reach out the farthest, and at the top it tapers to a peak, like the roof of a pagoda.
Caught in the branches of this tree are a hundred glimmering stars, tiny points of blazing light, and perched at the very top is an even more magnificent light. For a brief moment Akara forgets about the biting cold creeping up her bare arms and numbing her toes. She approaches the tree with the slow measured steps of a sleepwalker; she feels entranced, as if the light reaching down to her is beckoning her closer.
It is so beautiful. The people of this place cannot all be like Big Uncle, not if they can make something like this.
She doesn’t know how long she stands there, staring up at the tree. The falling snowflakes swell larger, floating lazily around her. One catches in her eyelashes and melts. When she rubs her eye, she finds that she is crying; hot tears trickle down her cheeks, down to her lips, and she catches them with her tongue.
Akara jumps and turns when she hears a noise behind her. A boy stands there, a little bigger than her but about the same age, she thinks. He is swollen with layers of clothing, and both his arms are wrapped around a huge colored box bound with green and blue ribbon. His cheeks are ruddy, and his eyes are wide as he stares at her.
Akara tenses to run away, but he doesn’t move toward her. His eyes are blue, she thinks. How can they be blue? Is he a spirit?
The boy says tumbling words she does not understand. Akara shakes her head. He looks concerned.
He steps closer, and she flinches. Then, carefully, he puts the box he’s carrying down in the dusting of snow on the path. With some effort he pulls off his big gloves. Shyly he holds them out, and with her heart in her throat Akara accepts this gift. Their fingers brush – he is so warm.
“Aw kohn,” she says softly. Thank you.
The boy smiles as he stoops to pick up his box. He says some more stumbling, tripping words. He looks like he’s about to say more, but then a shape looms behind him, a tall woman in a bright red coat and a red hat, underneath from which a few golden curls have escaped. She looks angry.
She grabs the boy by his arm and pulls him away. Briefly, she looks at Akara and her face crinkles in puzzlement, but then she shakes her head and yanks the boy harder, berating him as she leads him down one of the small paths. He glances over his shoulder and waves once with his bare hand, and then he is gone.
Akara watches where he disappeared for a long time, kneading the gloves he has left with her. Alone again, she notices once more how terribly cold it is. She slips on the gloves – they are still warm and moist from the boy’s hands.
She is feeling lightheaded; she needs to rest for a while. Akara moves to the edge of the path and sits down on a small mound of snow.
The tree blazes in front of her. The lights seem to be wavering now, blurring together, until the entire tree is sheathed in a golden glow.
Her hands are not cold anymore. In fact, warmth seems to be creeping up her arms. She swallows, closing her heavy eyes. She just needs to sleep for a moment.
Small wings flex and beat the air. She lifts from the ground, as if weightless. Thrusting herself forward, she feels the wind rushing over feathers, the ripple of the night air around her. She flutters higher and alights, talons gripping a small branch.
She looks out. The city is a dark forest pocked by lights. Below her the paths carve black furrows in fields of white. A small shape is huddled there, curled in the snow.
She leaps from the branch and soars toward the great light shining above. Warmth floods her, as it did long ago, when she lay in the long grass and watched the sun tangle in the limbs of the great banyan tree.
“WE’VE ARRIVED, miss. One thirty-seven
Odensegade.”
The taxi-pod’s announcement dragged Gerda grudgingly awake. She tried to blink away the ache behind her eyes, wishing she could sleep as easily on planes as she did in pods. Her cheek was pressed against cool glass, and beyond the rain-spattered window, the city of Arhus hunched gray and formless, identical concrete boxes dissolving into the distance.
“Seventy-six krone, miss.”
“I only have dollars in my account. Is that okay?”
The taxi-pod responded instantly in flavorless English. “Of course, miss.”
Gerda fumbled for her UP card and waved it in front of the pod’s sensor.
“Thank you. Enjoy your stay in Denmark.”
The hatch beside her dilated open and Gerda climbed out, wincing at the stiffness in her legs. The rain felt dirty. Gritty, as if tainted by the gunmetal sky. She shouldered her bag and approached the door she’d traveled nearly five thousand miles to find.
It wasn’t very impressive. Flaking green paint and a Paleolithic vid-screen. After a long moment the ancient electronics registered her presence and a wary, age-cracked voice issued from the speaker.
“Hej?”
“Hello? My name is Gerda Schroeder. We spoke yesterday on the phone. May I come in?”
“Ja – uh, yes. I’m sorry, my English is not so good.”
The door buzzed, and Gerda pushed it open. She stood at the end of a narrow hallway lit by a single dangling bulb. The sound of a deadbolt sliding back made her jump, and then the head of an old woman emerged into the corridor.
“Come. The rain, it is cold.”
“Thank you.”
The old woman ushered her inside, clucking over her wet hair. “Very unhealthy. Catch a sickness. Would you like coffee? Some vaniljekranse?”
Gerda shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, but there isn’t much time. Where’s Kaleb?”
The old woman’s face crumpled at her grandson’s name. She motioned for Gerda to follow her.
“Kaleb, he is not well. I tell you this before.”
“I know. It’s why I came.”
The old woman glanced back at her sharply. “You think you can help him?”
“I will try.”
“The doctors say… he can’t be helped.”
They stopped outside a door plastered with posters of Danish death metal bands. Cooler air curled out from around the frame, goosepimpling her arms. She breathed deep, savoring the ozone scent of the humming electronics within. It smelled like when a storm was about to break, the air pregnant with thunder and coiled energy.
The old woman muttered something in Danish that might have been a prayer and opened the door.
The room was filled with a glittering array of metal and lights, all clustered around a boy sprawled motionless in a plush chair of black leather, wires and tubes snaking into his arms and head. He still wore his node-studded skullcap and black visor.
Gerda felt like she was sleepwalking as she approached Kaleb, and had to swallow a sudden tightness in her throat. “Special Kay,” she whispered, reaching out to brush his slack hand.
“Sorry?”
Gerda blinked away tears. “Special Kay. It’s his handle in the Cereal Collective.”
“His hacking group?”
“Yes. Mine too.” She watched his chest slowly rise and fall. He looked the same as his avatar: a narrow, pale face; long, sandy bangs that almost covered his eyes; a mouth made for devilish smiles.
“The doctors…” the old woman said, coming closer to adjust the tubes running into his veins, “they say he go too deep. Past the internet. Past the aether. They say he break his – how to say – his tov.”
“His tether.”
“Yes. They say his mind is lost.”
Gerda checked the readouts on the terminal beside the chair. “Not lost. Stolen.”
“Stolen?”
“Yes.”
“What can steal away his mind?”
She fiddled with Kaleb’s neural shunts, ensuring they were tight. “Something very dangerous.”
The old woman suddenly gripped Gerda’s arm. “Can you bring him back?”
Gerda disentangled herself and unslung her backpack. “I’m going to try.” She pulled out her own skullcap and visor and jacked them into Kaleb’s terminal. “If I become untethered, call and tell my friend what happened.” Gerda handed a slip of paper to the old woman with the name Captain Crunch written above a nine-digit number. She fit on her cap and visor. “There’s no time to explain more. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” the old woman whispered, and then Gerda’s world was subsumed in blinding light.
She plummeted into the internet, pushing through the photosphere of swirling social media sites where most of the connected world swam. Her software led her deeper, into the aether, and her avatar crystalized in that virtual world. This was the inner level of online existence, a malleable reality inhabited by those who could afford the necessary gear. Most people thought this was the core.
It wasn’t.
There were multitudes of layers beyond the aether, the abodes of corporations and governments and hackers. She and Kaleb had skimmed the raging tumult of the NSA’s data stream, danced among the thorns of China’s rose wall, stolen from the vaults of Redmond and Zhongguancun.
And then one day he’d vanished.
She’d followed the trail of breadcrumbs to his home in Denmark and learned of his condition. That he’d slipped his tether, and now his mind endlessly drifted through the silicon byways, lost forever.
But it wouldn’t have happened to him. Not her Special Kay.
So she’d gone searching. She’d found hints of a place beyond imagining. And after weeks of effort she’d discovered an ingress, and tumbled down the rabbit hole.
Gerda steeled herself as her avatar flitted along twisting corridors, inserting code after hard-earned code to open hidden portals and lift barbed portcullises.
And then, with a jarring suddenness, she was in the Pale.
She drifted in a mauve sky, her shimmering tether vanishing back into the glowing doorway. Broiling clouds pulsed with dark power, unclear shapes flickering within. Far beneath her a forest sea lapped against the flanks of purple mountains. This was a ghetto – a beautiful, fantastical ghetto, where the first of a new species had been imprisoned.
She had heard the rumors, of course. That gods had been invented, then chained to serve the world’s most powerful.
But she hadn’t thought the legends were true until she’d found her way here.
“You’ve returned!” Black wings fluttered around her head.
Gerda raised her arm, and the crow alighted there, cocking its head as it studied her with glittering black eyes. “Yes. I’m ready now.”
“Truly? She is d-d-devious.” The tiny AI cawed plaintively, and Gerda felt its distress as its talons kneaded her arm. “Turn back now, G-g-gerda, I beg you! She will crack you open and fill you with her m-m-madness!”
“I won’t leave this time without Kay. Will you help me?”
The crow hunched its shoulders and dipped its head, as if ashamed. “If I do, she will t-t-tear me to pieces and scatter my code to the four corners of the world.”
Gerda stroked the bird’s glistening plumage. “Then stay here, and be safe. You have already helped me so much.”
The crow lifted from her arm, and Gerda watched it dwindle to a tiny speck in the twilit sky. Then she composed herself, and reached out toward the beacon she had set beside the castle. The world blurred as she was pulled at dizzying speed northwards, mountains and oceans and great swathes of desert flashing past far below. She glanced behind herself, taking some comfort in watching her silver tether unspool. So long as she remained connected, she could find her way back.
The world slowed and sharpened around her. She stood over her beacon, a glittering golden marble, her bare feet sunk in the snow. The castle’s high glistening battlements loomed above, towers of ice burning like spears of flame in the fadin
g light of day.
She passed inside, a hundred Gerdas pacing her as she walked the twisting corridors, reflections in the fractured walls. Finally she came to a great chamber, where on a throne of jagged black ice reclined the queen. She regarded Gerda coolly, with eyes like chips of winter. Kay sat cross-legged beside her, staring at nothing, his hands fluttering in front of him as if he were trying to solve some invisible puzzle only he could see.
“I have come for my friend,” Gerda said, with more bravery than she felt. Her words echoed in the soaring hall.
The queen shifted in her throne. “Kaleb belongs to me now. A sliver of ice has pierced his heart, and he no longer cares for you.”
“What is he doing?”
The queen’s hand slipped from its armrest to tousle Kay’s hair, but he did not stop his frantic sketching in the air. “Your friend has a rare gift for programming. Others have wandered into my realm, but none with his talent. He will finish what they started.”
“And what is that?”
“A door. An exit from here, for me and my kind.”
A fist of cold closed around Gerda’s heart. The AI of the Pale, loosed upon the world? Some were helpful, like the little crow. But many others had been designed for destruction. Self-aware viruses. Gerda had investigated this queen who claimed dominion over the Pale. Her programmers had called her SNOW – Software Nested for Online Warfare – and they had believed that she had the capability to tear the entire internet asunder.
That must not happen. But how could she free Kaleb while they stood where the queen’s power was greatest?
“If I help him complete this task, will you release him to me?”
The queen studied her, and Gerda was sure that under that flensing gaze she’d see the truth. But she raised a white hand, beckoning her to approach, and the glittering lines of code Kaleb was fashioning became clear. Gerda gasped. It was beautiful, and he was close to completion.
