Into the Looking Glass votsb-1

by John Ringo

  “Sensory deprivation,” Weaver thought. Okay, what happened? He remembered stepping back to the gate. And a flash, he thought. “Am I alive?”

  Well, sure, otherwise who is asking the question.

  “What am I?” he asked. Where am I? could wait. Get down to base principles. “I am a thinking being.” Good, so he at least existed in some form. But sensory deprivation was tricky. The brain anticipated continuous feedback, little signals sent down the nerves and received back like a computer network that is constantly sending out packets. If it didn’t get feedback it sent out more and more packets until it overloaded. Which was why sensory deprivation was such a great tool for torture.

  “On the other hand, that assumes I have a brain,” he thought. And nerves.

  “This really sucks,” he thought, bitterly. So, what had happened? He and Miller had shot the cone thing as they were retreating out the gate. Something had happened after that. There had been quite a few attack units in the gate room, like they were staging for another assault. So the cone thing was probably supposed to follow up the assault. Maybe some sort of weapon. A nuke? Possibly. So had they predetonated it? If so, as close as it was to the gate, the wormhole, it could have destabilized it. If so, what did that mean to him? Maybe he was dead and this was the afterlife. If so, where were the angels? Then he thought about a few of his life experiences and considered the alternatives. Okay, where were the demons with pitchforks?

  “Neither a particle nor a wave,” he thought. Caught in Schrödinger’s box. I’m a cat that might be alive and might be dead. Now if I just had some equivalent of opposable thumbs, or, by preference, a crowbar. “Excuse me? Would you let me out of here?”

  He suddenly found himself in a car, going down a winding mountain road. There was a huge semitrailer in his rearview, riding right on his tail. He instinctively knew that if he slowed down the semi was going to run him right over and he really would cease to exist. But he couldn’t go too fast because around every turn there were low-slung police cars with beady-eyed officers clutching radar guns. If he went too fast the police would catch him and then he would cease to exist as well. He didn’t know how he knew that but it was an absolute certainty as strong as the fact that he had to breathe.

  He looked down at his speedometer and slowed down, slightly, but nearly ran off the road, actually bouncing off a guard rail and barely regaining control of the car. He got back on the road but by that time he had lost track of how fast he was going and tried to look at the speedometer again. It was impossible; he couldn’t know how fast he was going and where he was at the same time.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered, careening around the twisty road, trying to watch the road and instruments at the same time and failing miserably at both. “I’m an electron.”

  The crazy road race continued for some time, sometimes uphill and then, crazily, he would find himself going downhill without having reached a crest, the semi always on his tail, crashing into him any time he slowed down too much. When they were going uphill it would fall behind a little bit but it would come barrel-assing up behind him on the downhills. And always there were the police.

  He got to a trance-state where he had a vague notion of where he was in the road and also how fast he was going. Not a perfect control of either, but a good approximation. He was all over the road though. And then, suddenly, the road ended in a guard rail right around a steep corner. He slammed on the brakes but the semi hit him from behind and he found himself flying through open space. Then the car, nose down, hit a wall on the far side and exploded.

  He came to, lying on the ground at the bottom of the mountain, pieces of the car all around him. He could barely see them, out of the corner of one eye. He tried to move his head but it was immobile, his vision skewed up and to the left. He rolled his eyes and saw his torso, only slightly bleeding, lying on the ground next to him with a leg on top of it. Then the leg jerked into motion and slid over to the shoulder socket and attached.

  “That’s not right,” Bill muttered, wondering how he could speak without lungs to provide the air.

  There was more thumping and bumping around him and then he could turn his head. He got to his feet, clumsily, leaning slightly to one side, and looked down.

  He had one leg and one arm attached as “legs.” He had a leg as his right arm and his left arm was attached, backwards, on his right. One buttock was just below him on his chest and he noticed that it wasn’t his chest but his back; his head was on backwards. And there was something tickling his hand.

  He pulled the hand around, holding it upwards behind his back where he could see it. What was tickling his hand was Tuffy.

  “You’re real,” he said. He noticed then that there still was no sensation. He hadn’t felt the turns on the road or land under his feet. He could see, but there was no sound of wind, no smell, no feel. Except for the tickling sensation from Tuffy’s fur.

  “What is reality?” The words formed in his head. They weren’t even words, just the knowledge that such words had formed.

  “I’m a physicist, not a philosopher,” Bill replied. “You’re real.”

  “At your level, what is the difference?” The words were like lead weights in his mind.

  “We’re better at sums,” Bill said. “And you’re real.”

  “I thought that physicists hated it when people said ‘sums’?” the creature replied, honestly sounding puzzled.

  “I’m supposed to have legs where legs go and arms where arms go and you’re arguing semantics?”

  “Nonetheless, when all was uncertain you clutched for the certainty of philosophy,” the creature said.

  “Descartes was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time,” Bill replied. “I didn’t read about him in a philosophy course, I read about him in a tensoral calculus course. His ‘I think because I am’ thing was just blind panic.”

  “Yet you continue to use your mind, to apply logic, even when your butt is sticking out of your chest. Many would have gone insane.”

  “I made my SAN check,” Bill answered. “I was an electron, all that ‘I can’t know my velocity and location at the same time’ bullshit in the car. Now I’m a busted-up electron that has been badly reassembled. I suppose it’s a metaphor for something. I’m still trying to figure out the cops. They looked just like Virginia State Patrol, except that Virginia State Patrol doesn’t usually have fangs that are dripping venom and yellow eyes.”

  “Who do you think keeps an eye on the particles in your universe to ensure they don’t exceed the speed of light? And who destroys them when they do?”

  “Cops with yellow eyes and fangs?” Bill said. “Makes as much sense as anything Einstein ever said.” Bill thought about something else and found himself laughing out loud. “And blue lights!”

  He found himself back in the car, in the race down the hill. Tuffy was hanging from the rearview like a brown, fuzzy dice, swinging back and forth, attached by a silver thread that looked infinitely thin.

  “Uncertainty principle,” Bill muttered. “I got it the first time.” His body was whole again, two hands on the wheel, bitterly trying to stay on the black stuff.

  “All of reality is based upon uncertainty,” Tuffy said. “Certainty is impossible.”

  Bill was certain that the police would kill him if he sped up. So he sped up. Before long he had a chain of police cars following him, blue lights flashing. One pulled along side of him. He looked over and the cop reminded him of a Virginia State Patrol officer that had pulled him over on I-81 the one time he had been stupid enough to drive to Washington instead of fly. Same fat face, same expression of casual disinterest in his existence. The dripping fangs and yellow eyes like a snake’s were at variance, though. So was the cop’s action which was to ram into the side of the car, Bill suddenly realized it was a Pinto, and shove it off the road into space. He’d somehow expected a ticket and a lecture on safe driving on twisty roads.

  The cop car followed and the whole line behind it
came along, the line of cars flying off into the canyon and impacting on the wall on the far side.

  Bill woke up back on the ground. This time both his arms were in the place his legs should be, his torso had been switched for his abdomen and his head was on sideways. Tuffy was perched on his butt, which was about where his shoulder should be. That was when Bill realized he had his head up his…

  “You’re real,” Bill said. “I don’t know about any of the rest of this Heisenberg stuff and I refuse to believe that I’m an electron, especially one with free will. But you’re real. And I think you’re trying to tell me something. Couldn’t you just send an e-mail?”

  “Yes, Bill, I’m real,” Tuffy replied. “I’m the realest thing you’ll ever meet. Realer than a mountain falling on your head. Realer than a planet, realer than stars. More real, by far, than death. I’m as real as it gets.”

  “This isn’t real, I know that,” Bill replied. “I can’t be talking without lungs.”

  “Who says that you’re talking?” Tuffy noted.

  That was when Bill realized that he couldn’t actually hear himself talk.

  “So what is reality?” Bill asked. “Really.”

  “Do you want to see?” Tuffy asked.

  “I’ve always wanted to see,” the physicist admitted. “Since the first time I asked myself that question.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t a philosopher,” Tuffy said, dryly.

  “Well, you were right, at this level the only difference is that we’re better at sums.”

  “Okay, I’ll show you reality.”

  Bill suddenly found himself squeezed in on every side. There were Tuffys all around him, pressing him in, making it hard to breathe. They were on his back, in his hair, pressing against his mouth.

  “SAN check time,” he said, noticing that he did not, in fact, have to breathe and that he hadn’t actually spoken. Just that certainty that he had.

  “You’re doing well,” Tuffy said. It was all of them and one of them at the same time. “This is the ultimate reality.”

  “What? Fuzzy stuffed animals?” He noticed that while there was a moment of panic it was actually quite comfortable. He also noticed that what he was standing on was Tuffys; they were squirming under his feet.

  “Your scientists describe universes as soap bubbles,” Tuffy replied.

  “For the masses, yeah,” Bill said. “I can do the sums, though.”

  “Equations, Bill.”

  “Not if you’re a high-tech redneck,” Bill replied. “Then it’s sums.”

  “As you will. But what they do not ask is: in what medium do the soap bubbles float?”

  “Well, they do,” Bill pointed out. “But it’s like asking what’s the whichness of where or what is East of the Sun and West of the Moon.”

  “This is the reality beyond the universes, the whichness of where.”

  “Plush children’s toys?” Bill asked. He’d had a girlfriend once who had collected Beanie Babies obsessively. It pained him that she might have had a better handle on reality than he did.

  “Sometimes, bubbles are created within the bubbles,” Tuffy replied. “When they reach the wall of the outer bubble, if there is a bubble on the other side of the wall, they open a hole between the bubbles. Just for a brief moment, or eternity in another way of speaking. This form that you see is obviously not our real form. We are what is outside the soap bubbles. The child was carried through in the instant of the bubble being formed, caught in the interstices between the walls, where we live. She, in a way, made this form, a form that she could understand and love. So, to you humans, yes, reality is plush children’s toys.”

  “And now I’m caught in it, too,” Bill said. “That thing exploded and shoved me into the interstice, right?”

  “That is as close to the reality as you’re going to get, yes,” Tuffy answered.

  “How do I get back?” Bill asked. “Click my heels together and say: ‘There’s no place like home’?”

  “This is the reality that is everywhere and nowhere. You’ve always been home.”

  There was a brief moment of disorientation and Bill was lying on his back. He was in the Wyvern. The cameras were all inoperative but he could see through a small armored plate in the chest. There was blue sky above him with high cirronimbus clouds drifting across it. All of the electronics on the Wyvern were out but he could still move his arms and legs, and fingers seemed to be where fingers were supposed to be and toes were down where toes were supposed to go.

  He got the arms of the Wyvern moving and rolled himself over on his belly, then levered himself onto his side.

  He was at the edge of a town. The walls of the strip-mall in view were pockmarked with bullet holes and one end had burned. He could see buildings in the distance that were somewhat higher. The place had a familiar feel and after a moment he figured out why.

  “Staunton,” he muttered. “Why the hell did I have to end up in Staunton?”

  * * *

  Major Thomas “Bomber” Slade was the S-3 (Operations) officer of the 229th Combat Engineering Battalion (Light, Sappers Lead), based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The short, stocky, erect officer had arrived three hours before with the main body of the engineering battalion that was tasked with designing and beginning construction upon interlocking defenses to attempt to stem further Titcher incursions through the Staunton wormhole. He was currently observing the wormhole from the front glacis of an M-88 engineering vehicle, that being the only place in relatively short range that wasn’t radioactive as hell.

  Major Slade was an “active reserve” officer. That is, he no longer held a regular Army commission, despite being a product of the United States Military Academy (West Point, NY). He had resigned his regular commission as a captain to embark on a career as a civilian civil engineer. He had his bachelors in civil engineering from West Point and had attained a masters from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York while in the United States Army. After serving with the Army in several positions, notably as a company commander of the 82nd Airborne Division’s light engineering company, he felt that he had limited chance of eventual advancement to high rank in the regular Army. This was as a result of the incident that had given him the moniker “Bomber” Slade.

  As a young lieutenant he had been tasked with clearing a live fire range of unexploded ammunition. His platoon had spent two weeks carefully policing the combined arms’ range for unexploded ordnance ranging from small mortar “sabot” rounds, which were about as dangerous as firecrackers, up to five-hundred-pound bombs. They would comb one-hundred-meter by one-hundred-meter segments and put white flags on any ordnance that was detected. Then, when the area was fully surveyed, they would carefully lay small charges of Composition Four on any of the unexploded ordnance, “daisy-chain” the explosives together for simultaneous detonation and then, having removed to a distance considered safe, detonate the charges thereby blowing up the dangerous munitions that had been lying around.

  They had done this for two weeks and at approximately three p.m. on a Friday the range had been declared, by Lieutenant Slade, clear.

  Unfortunately, Lieutenant Slade was a meticulous officer and he had ensured that only sufficient C-4 had been used on each munition to ensure its destruction. Furthermore there had not been as many exploded munitions as were anticipated. Therefore, there was a large quantity of C-4 left over, approximately thirteen hundred pounds. Once drawn from the ordnance corps, munitions are extremely hard to return, even if it is, as most of this was, in unopened ammunition boxes. It entails vast amounts of paperwork and annoyingly intense questions from various ordnance officers and NCOs who are, understandably, unhappy to have “irregular” munitions in their storage bunkers.

  Therefore it was Lieutenant Slade’s decision to detonate the C-4 on site.

  The careful and cautious manner to do so was to detonate the C-4 in small lots, carefully moved from the site of the central group of material. But it was late on Friday, the platoon
had been out on the fricking range for two weeks and everyone was ready to head back to quarters, grab a shower and then hit the bars on Bragg Boulevard. Including Lieutenant Slade. It was, therefore, his decision to detonate the pile of explosives as one lot, a sort of going away present for the exhaustive work of clearing the range.

  Being a combined arms’ range there were more than sufficient bunkers and trenches at a reasonable distance to ensure the safety of the working detail and the C-4 was placed well away from anything that might suffer undue harm, such as a passing tank. Therefore after rigging the pile to blow, the platoon retreated to the bunkers and Lieutenant Slade clacked the claymore firing device that was connected to the blasting cap by a very long wire.

  The explosion was more than thrilling. Everyone had inserted earplugs but several of the platoon complained of ringing in their ears and Private Burrell developed a small nosebleed. Despite that fact the platoon, speaking loudly as was necessary because everyone was at that point a bit hard of hearing, packed up and headed back to barracks feeling that they completed a job well done.

  What Lieutenant Slade and his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant who would later leave the U.S. Army at about the same time as Captain Slade, failed to consider was the method in which wave fronts from explosions propagate. They are, essentially, sound waves. Secondary effects can be mitigated, therefore, by the presence of obstacles, such as the pine trees that just about cover the ranges of Fort Bragg. However, if there is no intervening obstacle they are mitigated only by distance. And it had been a very loud explosion.

  The 82nd Airborne Division’s quarters are laid out between Ardennes St. and Gruber Road. On the far side of Gruber Road are the motorpools of the division and on the far side of the motorpools are training areas detailed to the various battalions. They begin the vast stretches of training areas that make up the bulk of the Fort Bragg reservation. There are very few buildings other than motorpools on the far side of Gruber. The exception is the division headquarters, which is placed on the top of a hill just about centered on the division. The front of the headquarters, which faces the division, is given over to reception and security areas as well as offices of the lowly in the headquarters. The back of the headquarters is reserved for higher ranking officers. And right at the rear of the headquarters is the office of the commanding general. Behind his desk is a large plate-glass window so that by no more than turning his chair around the general can look out over the vast stretches of land where his troops are busily training.