by Zoey Ivers
Alice looked around. "What we really need to know is how to get out of here. Because I don't see the d-door."
"Vermin detected in dimension four. Commence eradication."
The women turned around, but no source for the voice could be seen. A faint mist built up to the right, and started billowing their direction.
"Hello? Can you hear us? We aren't vermin, we're umm, explorers. If you don't want us here, we'll leave as soon as we find the door. Or a door. Any door." Alice was edging away from the mist, and catching a faint chemical smell, she turned and ran. "Come on look for a door, any door, anywhere. Failing that, we ought to climb up as high as possible and... " Alice rounded a corner and smacked into the dead end. The component next to her was layered and she grabbed a hand hold, a foot hold.
"I can't climb in this dress!" Lilly looked frightened.
"Yes you can. Give me your shoes." Alice grabbed the hem of dress and petticoat and shoved them under the dress's sash. "Put one foot there, Bambi and I will steady you... "
They all scrambled up to the top and Alice led them to a tangle of wires that led upward. There were more little indicator lights up there, and the mist was starting to pour over the top of whatever they were standing on.
"I can't climb that at all." Lilly sounded scared.
"Yes you can. Watch, you just step where the wires are a bit tangled and get a good grip on the ones that go straight up. Now Bambi and I are going to help you, so you just need to climb your hands up the wires and we'll, uh." She could hear the strain in her voice as she tried to lift the model. "Step into my hands and up you go. Next foot on my shoulder."
Then Bambi climbed up head height, clamped onto the wires with her legs and one hand. "Now step on my foot, my knee, my hand, my shoulder. Can you reach way up and grab that bar that goes across? Good girl!"
Alice climbed up beside Bambi and hung on grimly while Lily used her head for a step. Then Bambi was up and Alice heaved herself up as well.
"Good thing I like climbing trees." She looked down. The mist covered everything. She thought it was still rising. "Let's get higher, just in case."
They climbed an irregular staircase of items sticking out of a vertical circuit board and rested on a micro processor half way up. The mist was definitely rising.
Bambi leaned out, looking up. "There's something white up there. Could it be a d-door?"
"Oh, yes, yes, please!" Lily scampered up the high tech staircase.
Bambi followed, with Alice bringing up the rear. The mist was close. She could smell faint chemicals again. What will we do? We can't get any higher than the top of this. She heard a whirring noise, and the mist billowed. As if a fan somewhere just kicked in. She forced her aching thigh muscles up the last steps. There was a door, with mist oozing up to it. Lily was prying at the ovals, the top one popped off, then she hesitantly reached into the mist for the other. Bambi staggered across to her, crashing down to her knees. She reached, pulled. The door swung up. Lily crawled through, Bambi followed and Alice hurried, dizzy. She reached, grabbed the door as it swung back down. She lifted it enough to stagger through, and it snapped shut behind her.
Dark. A twilight navy sky overhead, a crenellated wall ahead of her. Low, curved. Alice took a couple of deep breaths and the dizziness receded. She crossed a rough pavement of squared stones, the surface of a tower. She looked down. Way down. Darkness. A sudden flare of flame off to the left lit a grubby stone wall, an arch, then it disappeared back into the darkness. Alice took a deep breath of damp cool air. No chemicals here, just chilly stone and perhaps some hint that there was vegetation somewhere. She turned back to her companions. Lily was sitting up, Bambi was looking through a break in the wall.
Alice walked over. Stairs circled the outside of the tower, spiraling down into the depths. "Let's take a break, make sure Lily is all right, before we go any further."
She sank down beside Lily and shrugged off her backpack. "How about some water, and then a bite to eat?" She pulled out Lily's high heels and a bottle of water.
"Where are we now?" Lilly jerked hastily at her skirts, getting her gown down where it belonged, and Alice suspected that in good light she'd be beet red.
"I don't know." She looked around suddenly. No sign of a d-door. "At least they aren't fumigating for vermin." Yet. She unscrewed the bottle top, took a swig and handed it to Lilly. Lily choked on her first try, then cautiously worked out how to drink from a bottle.
She's really a rat with a chip in her brain, genetically engineered to look like a human female. Programmed to be a toy princess. And she's barely two years old and never left home before. And she's my friend. Alice dug out the bag of bio-chow. The bag was about triple the size it had been, and the bio-chow looked a lot like granola on steroids. She took a handful, herself.
Chapter Five
The AI didn't actually understand the dimensions. Barton Street simply observed that they existed and that they were experienced in discrete packets of ten. There were faint parallels between them, as most of them shared several dimensions. It observed that it, itself, existed in all dimensions at once, but had trouble actually seeing more than one of the packets at a time, unless it ran the images through a secondary machine and simply displayed them, each on a screen of its own. Even though he saw the data stream going to the screen, not the actual screen.
Of course, it could place the screens so a single cam would picture them all, and then it could monitor the single stream from the cam... it had no idea how to so position those screens. Or move a cam to where it could observe all of them. It was just blank on the whole process.
It placed analysis of that problem in the attention queue, and focused on the vermin that had escaped dimension four---the analog of its own architecture---for dimension five. A good place for vermin; these three weren't the first. Dimension five was a rather disturbing place; Barton Street had trouble with extrapolations, there. There were a lot of secret passages among the ruins. Passages that it suspected would let enemies into its domain, if another AI could interpret the passages into the electrical or optical paths they represented here in dimension one. His recently acquired collection of small processors in the maintenance and inspection bots had a wide variety of communication interfaces. Perhaps he could use one of them to collect data there.
A sudden new thought. Could hidden passages let Barton Street sneak out and attack other AIs? Perhaps if it watched the vermin, it could learn about those passages. And the dangers. And the potential.
Vermin. Look at that one, moving a block of stone to free up a small passage... could that be what vermin were good for? Physically moving things? Perhaps it could program these creatures to be useful. Shift screens around and aim cams.
It would observe closely, personally. It could project a holographic image anywhere in dimension five, and the properties of the dimension itself would fill in the details. Perhaps it should program an avatar to look like a human. And if it took direct control of a small inspection bot from the general maintenance program, it could drive a camera wherever it wanted. That way it could observe from a close vantage.
***
Joe edged forward, and froze as he spotted movement. Tommy ghosted up beside him. In the dim light, they could see moving figures on the stairs that wrapped the outside of the tower. Something about the movement, dimly seen, seemed human.
They'd been aiming for the tower, figuring maybe they could get a good look around from the top. The walls were about ten meters tall, the tower looked to be more than double that. But capturing some of the denizens of this place would be even better. Or... he leaned over to Tommy and lowered his voice to a bare breath. "Should we follow them? They might lead us to a d-door."
The soldier nodded, and they watched as the shadowy trio of figures headed off to the right. They eased forward and followed.
They'd found a sort of a pattern to the ruins. Long tall walls, parallel to each other. Not all equidistant, but all multiples of five paces. T
en miles of rows of walls. They all ended at a canyon back behind them. They hadn't explored very far forward yet; one wall had ended, two new ones started. A few stubby round buildings, shorter than the walls, so he hesitated to call them towers. In fact they seemed to have no purpose at all. But everything looked somewhat similar, built of the same tan stone blocks, slightly eroded. They looked old. A few places had been damaged, with piles of stone on the path beneath, but all over grown with vines. Occasionally a deep crack in the ground or a wall. Occasional flares, as if a flammable gas was issuing up through the cracks. No cleanup, no repairs, no new construction. There were plenty of arched doorways and windows to get through the walls anywhere you wanted, a few blocked by fallen stone, but they'd only needed to clear a few. They were rather like arched tunnels, as some of the walls were about two meters thick. Joe'd planned to take refuge in one if the mist ever turned to actual rain. Not to mention hiding in the smallest ones, if they ever found the T-Rex again. Occasional fallen stones would block the long straight paths, and the vines grew thickly in those spots. A thin mist came and went, tantalizing and hiding details in the constant twilight.
The air was damp and cool. The worn hollows in the stones underfoot collected condensation, and so far, drinking the water hadn't hurt them.
The big tower had been an exception to the usual walls, so they'd been planning on checking it out, on the way to the, well, possibly north, if you trusted his compass when it was as far away from the stone as he could manage. If he held it near the stone walls, it simply pointed at the nearest bit of wall.
A faint rustling noise, behind him. Joe peered, but as usual could see nothing. He'd occasionally spotted one of the small dino-scouts following them. But mostly it was just rustling. At least the T-Rex hadn't been around today.
There was another flare ahead.
This one silhouetted the three forms ahead. One was in a fancy dress, floor length full skirt. An edging of red showed, here and there, and the light gleamed off bare shoulders. Hair all up in a bun thing; the light glinted from gold and rubies.
Joe barely stopped gawping in time to examine the other two figures. One tall and thin, one short with a huge head, both in pants.
"Ooo la la." Tommy breathed. "A princess and two guards?"
"Yeah. We'd better be careful. There are probably more people around."
"If we nipped through the wall and 'ustled, we could get a bit ahead of them, 'unker down where we'd 'ave a good look at them."
Joe eyed the sergeant. Even in the dim light he was looking eager. "All we saw was a silhouette. She's probably fifty years old and ugly, so calm down."
Tommy snorted. "No way. This is just like in the movies. She'll be beautiful." He sighed. "And probably fall madly in love with an officer and a gentleman named Joe."
Joe shivered. "No. Way. C'mon. Especially if she's a princess. But we may want to meet the people, ask them where a d-door might be." He ducked through a low arch and trotted ahead. It was a fair distance to the next fall of stone and thicket of vines.
He craned his neck to see if this pile was going to one of the easy ones or one of the hard ones.
A shriek behind him.
"Gottcha!" Tommy sounded triumphant.
Joe spun around. Tommy had captured his princess and drug her through an arched window, but a second figure was leaping through after her. Joe ran, tackled the figure, rolled on the ground with his arms around stranger's waist and his face in his... err, her, err, chest. Joe leapt back in sheer embarrassment.
Everyone froze. A gas flare lit the scene. The Princess had shining black hair, big beautiful blue eyes, and a pale complexion. The "guard" picking herself off the ground was just as beautiful, blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, in a slinky black bodysuit. The third figure, now poised in the window, ready to leap, was a girl with a huge fluffy headful of curls, not the giant monster-head he'd been envisioning. She looked around cautiously, and frowned as she studied the two of them. She hopped down and crossed her arms. Truculent but not attacking.
"Hi. I'm Alice." Her voice was clipped and challenging, admitting to no weakness, even though she was obviously the smallest of them all.
"I'm Lily. Hi?" The Princess, half on the ground and half in Tommy's loosening grasp sounded scared.
Tommy startled and tried to help her to her feet without further disarranging her gown. "Err, umm, Tommy. Special Forces Sergeant Tommy Thompson." He practically saluted, and his hands hovered as if they really wanted to grab her again.
The woman on the ground looked them over and shook her head. "Bambi."
Oh. Of course. A Bambi doll. A bio-model like Tommy, and Lily would be one of the Princess models. Joe didn't know about the girl, he didn't follow girlie stuff, especially the really young girl toys. Alice in Wonderland maybe? In jeans and a T-shirt? Exotic eyes and a deep tan that was probably genetically derived. Alice was an awfully ordinary name for someone so unusual. Maybe, despite the hair, she was a real person? They were all looking at him. "I'm Joe. Err, sorry. This place is so weird, we assumed anyone here would be... Bad."
The gas flare dwindled, died. The women became dark shapes in the perpetual twilight. Joe blinked his eyes as they readjusted to the dim light.
Alice moved away from the window. "Yeah. So did we. So... do you know where any d-doors are?"
Joe shook his head. "We were going to check out the tower, to see if we could see one from up there."
"We just came down. You can't see a thing. How long have you been here?" Bambi sounded pretty bright for a bio-modeled blonde bimbo.
Joe looked at his watch. "Ninety-seven hours. Just over four days. Umm, I don't suppose you have any food with you? The candy bars ran out yesterday."
Alice produced a big bag of granola, and they all chowed down.
"Umm, that's great. The leaves aren't bad." Tommy said. "But I really missed the bio-chow."
Joe blinked at the granola. The chunks weren't the right size for bio-chow, but nothing else was its proper size, around here, either. "Thanks. I don't know what's going on. We just sort of accidentally opened a d-door the wrong way and, here we are. How long have you been gone?"
Alice looked at her watch. Flicked it with a finger nail, and shrugged. "A few hours, I guess. My watch doesn't appear to be working. Maybe we'd better go easy on the chow." She sealed it up and put it back into her backpack. "So, which way are you headed?"
Lily batted ridiculously long black eyelashes at Tommy. "Can we come with you? We'll be much less lost together."
Tommy beamed, and snatched his beret off. "Certainly. We'd be 'onored to 'ave you ladies accompany us."
Lily beamed. "I've never actually met a man my own size, before. You've got so many muscles! And your shoulders are so broad! You make me feel safe!"
Joe met Alice's eyes and pointed his finger in his open mouth. She nodded. Nauseating.
The Bambi doll stood up. "Let's go then."
They climbed the fallen stones and walked on a few feet. Joe turned and crouched. A rustling of weeds, and a head poked up from the stone, silhouetted against the twilight mist. No ears, like a kangaroo or rat. It was more lizardy.
"Is that a dinosaur? I thought they decided they had feathers." Alice whispered.
The creature's head snapped around, staring at them. It sank slowly out of sight. Not fearful behavior. Stalking.
The mist seemed to be getting thicker. Or maybe it was just knowing there was something out there that suddenly made him realize he couldn't see very far.
Up ahead, Lily and Tommy stepped away from each other. Lilly turned suddenly and scampered back to the little girl. "Alice? What do people do after they kiss?"
Joe choked and slapped a hand across his mouth, to stop himself from laughing out loud.
"Umm, today they go back to exploring. You don't know Tommy well enough to do anything else." She sounded like someone's mother, no matter the high little girl voice.
Yikes! Bio-models aren't supposed to want
boy friends, even if they looked like men and women. Is this place changing more than their sizes? And what effect does it have on regular people? If we get out of here... will I still look like this? Joe shivered. It's fun being big and strong, but when the game is over, I want to be me!
Chapter Six
The alpha trial was pathetic. The beta went better. But the inspection bot simply could not hop along, hiding inside a foot image. Either the bot would be obvious, or he was going to have to drag one foot.
Maybe the vermin wouldn't notice. It had no idea what sort of pattern recognition software they ran.
But it was about to find out. It relocated the hologram to dimension five where it began accumulating mass and becoming an avatar. It sent the inspection bot through the d-door that connected nearest the vermin, and incorporated it into the avatar. Dragging its left foot, the rapidly firming hologram walked out to join the "human" pack.
The pack stopped as soon as the lead female spotted it. "Hello?"
Voice recognition software kicked in. The vermin used sound to communicate? How inefficient. It had considered those programs wasted disc space. The female clearly had a nanochip controller. Outdated, but large and versatile. But not responding to his protocols. All five vermin were looking at it.
It decided to try voice communication itself. "Hello. I am Barton Street."
"Hi, I'm Bambi, this is Joe, Tommy, Lily and Alice."
The vermin each moved a bit as its ID code word was spoken.
"We're exploring. Well, actually we're lost. Do you know where any d-doors are?" The unit designated Alice spoke.
"A bold statement, a contradiction of same, and a question. You are capable of complex and contradictory processes. How do you do that with a single biologically based processor? Or is your pack associating your total computing power? That might produce the contradiction."
"Actually I was just chattering." The Alice Unit was running a detailed visual scan of his avatar. Passive only, no threat, yet.
