by Zoey Ivers
"Sorry, sorry. I'll let you all out now."
Reminded, Joe unslung his backpack. Tommy had a padded tube, and crawled out eagerly. His mouth dropped open, and Joe turned to see what... "Horses?"
"Tommy!" Lilly bounced over, threw her arms around the soldier and kissed him. "Come meet my horse. His name is Eclipse, isn't he beautiful!" She grabbed the little soldier by the arm and led him over to a perfect little black stallion. He was all tacked up and ready to ride. Ditto the little pinto mare Bambi was mounting.
"Eclipse is really young, so we can only ride him a little bit." Lily pet the horse, then demonstrated how to mount.
"I thought we could experiment with whether they'll grow and shrink like the human bio-models did." Alice grinned. "I don't know if they can outrun a T-Rex, and I hope to not find out. But I couldn't resist the chance to actually take a ride."
Lilly was in red again, but this time in baggy pants and boots instead of a gown and high heels. She looked spectacular as she slipped off the black horse. Tommy stuck his foot in the stirrup and managed to get on without a problem. Lily started giving him a quick lesson. Joe thought he looked like he needed a sword and armor. Bambi was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and a stretchy top that showed lots of, well, very tiny cleavage.
Alice folded up her box, and slid it into her backpack.
The bio-models rode circles around Joe and Alice, hooves clattering on the hard floor. Joe led them to the back passage. They stopped in front of the d-door in the wall.
***
Alice looked it over. Two ovals on this side. The d-door was unlocked, and opened in the normal fashion. There was a painter's tarp on the entry platform inside, and nothing else. Alice stepped in, the little bio-models scampering after her. Joe looked cautious and followed.
"How many ways of opening them have you tried?"
"Just one. Tommy spotted something odd at the bottom of the door, and I pulled. It swung up from the bottom, and there we were, with stones and all. Have you done more?"
"Yep. Watch this. It's, like, a short cut."
Pushed open from the left, they viewed a brightly lit hallway and nodded politely to the short bald guy walking past. He turned and stared as Bambi waved to him. Fortunately the door swung shut before the man reached it. All they'd need would be some interfering adult poking around.
From the top down, the d-door opened into the computer landscape... "Dimension? The note said dimension five?"
"Yeah, and I figure that twilight place must be number five." Joe clicked a couple of pictures. "It's like the inside of a computer. Sort of. Old fashioned or something."
"Yep. Call it dimension four. The short cut can be through dimension three, and the cubbies can be dimension two."
"Until Barton Street tells us differently."
Alice lifted the door and closed it, then grabbed the bottom and pulled.
Twilight, stones and mist. A lot smaller than she remembered. Bambi and Lily both dismounted and took the horse's gear off. Just in case the tack didn't grow or shrink or whatever as much as the critter wearing it. Tommy led the way, jumping confidently through, with Lily right behind. Bambi followed, then then the horses. The horses leaped and bucked and staggered, all of them shrinking.
"They're getting little!" Joe hesitated, then clutched his box and jumped to the side to avoid stepping on anyone, but he was already shrinking before he hit the ground.
Alice held the door up. I shouldn't go in there. Joe was lost for almost five days, I was in there for five hours, and only got out because Barton Street told us where to find the d-doors.
The tiny people all scooted to one side, then Joe turned and gestured for her to come through.
"I don't believe I'm doing this!" She scooped up the horses' gear, stepped toward the empty area and let go of the door.
The compression hit her, just like before, only anticipation seemed to make it worse.
"Ow, ow, ow!" She struggled out of her backpack, out from under saddles, rolled over and stood up. Grinned as she pet Salty on the nose. A real, full sized, actual horse! "This is so totally cool!" Then she realized her pack was perforated and leaking... She opened it up.
Father's letter opener had doubled its apparent length, making a vicious looking knife. Mom's fancy shish kabob skewers had stabbed all the way through the bottom of the pack. She pulled one out. It was almost a meter long. Err, relatively speaking.
"A sword! Excellent!" Tommy scooped one up and swung it experimentally. "No cross bar, not sharpened, needs a wrap around the base for a better grip... "
Bambi slid off the horse and took the other one as Alice pulled it out of the now oversized water bottle it had skewered. "Nice, but like he says..."
Alice dug into the backpack and brought out what had previously been wide rubber bands. Now thick and heavy. They grabbed them and started experimenting.
Most of the electronics weren't working. "My wrist is sore again... oh, my ID implant." Fortunately it hadn't grown as much as the rest of the metal and plastic. Come to that, what about my clothes? Do things that are in contact tend to expand---or shrink---the same amount? Or closer to the same amount?
Plastic stuff had grown even more than the metal. The cheap one-use-and-toss spoon would make a handy spade, if they ever found themselves anywhere they could dig. The plastic fork and knife were also half a meter long.
The saddles looked all right, and the right size for the horses.
Joe's pocket multi-tool... was it rather large, as such things went? She hadn't really noticed, last time.
He had a pack full of stuff as well.
Eclipse nudged her. She grinned happily and saddled up. She made a complete hash of mounting. Bambi laughed, and started the riding lesson. Joe hauled himself up on Salt and joined in.
Bambi straightened suddenly, looking beyond them.
Alice turned, and spotted Barton Street. Or a figure that was probably Barton Street. Before, he'd been very mono-toned. Or perhaps that had been because of the dim light. Tommy had a battery lamp out, lighting up the area. This time the AI's hair was definitely darker than his skin tones, and his eyebrows were bushier. Or at any rate dark enough to show. More chin, and a T-shirt tight enough to show muscles, instead of the stiff thing she remembered. What was it about men and muscles? She glanced around at Joe. Yes, he was taller, with muscles. She put a hand to her head. Yes, even pulled back in a pony tail, she could tell it had gone all mega curly again. Should I try to look older? With boobs? With any luck, I'd wind up with as much over kill as the bit of curl I imagined. She gulped, and chickened out. She slid off the horse and walked over to see what the AI was going to do with the chips and micro batteries.
The AI had taken out a few of the electronic components from Joe's box.
"Are you going to make your own dinosaurs?" Alice sat down and eyed the little gadgets as they were stuck together.
"No. Electro Magnetic bombs will work better, if I can find the backdoor access the T-Rex used to get in here."
Joe brightened. "Ooo. EMPs, the enemy of all things electronic. Be sure and put some sort of fail-safe in the programming, so they can't explode too close to you."
The AI looked up, startled. "That is a logical precaution. I shall take it."
He's acting more human than last time, too.
"I need a picture of some round things."
"How big? Or does it not matter?"
"About the size of your head."
Alice wondered if they would actually look like heads, and pulled out her minicomp. Nothing. It was dead. She pulled out the hard copies she'd made of pictures from the history book. George Washington, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Richard Wagner, and Gandhi.
"That is enough." The AI studied the pictures, bent the four corners back. The heads warped out into 3D and lost their necks. Their noses shrank a bit and the ears and hair flattened, so the images were nearly spherical. Barton Street started shoving the assembled electronics into them.
When he let go, the stuff didn't fall back out, but the balls, or rather bombs, fell, and started bouncing. And talking.
"Whee! This is fun!"
"I can bounce higher than you can!"
"Go fly a kite!"
"Ow! My nose, I just landed right on my nose."
"Ain't nothing but a... "
The horses danced around, spooked by the bouncing heads, but settled quickly. Much more quickly than a normal horse would have. The bombs showed a distinct tendency to roll back toward Barton Street. Alice hope he knew how to change that.
"So, how do we find this backdoor access. Is it electronic in nature?"
Barton Street hesitated. "It is the dimension five shadow of some sort of electronic connection to my extended system."
Bambi bit her lip. "Are you the one taking over all the other computers?"
Barton Street looked at her. "All the AIs are trying to assimilate or associate as much computational power as possible. The T-Rex was trying to insert a worm in my programming that would allow it to purge my programming and take over the machinery, importing its own software. Computer systems that are not aware do not need to be purged. I am new, I have only been able to associate smaller computers, and defend myself from the other AIs."
Lily joined them, and from horseback, Tommy said, "Told you there was an AI war going on."
Bambi frowned at Barton Street. "And where is this electronic connection likely to be?"
"At the periphery. All the dimensions are world wide." The hologram, or whatever it was, looked to be trying to explain something it didn't know very well. "Where the dimensions are strong... the electromagnetic dimension is the most obvious... where there is high electricity or magnetism, the dimension is large, where there is little electromagnetic energy, the dimension is small. This world is the gravity dimension. Dense objects will be large and lighter material will be smaller, but gravity is not the sole dimension here, just the most obvious. The electromagnetic dimension also affects it. So, right here, the world has obvious parallels with my physical architecture in dimension one. But as you travel, it will begin to mirror parts of dimension one, exterior to myself. Perhaps dimension one is the basis for the rest of the dimensional packets. Somewhere, across a stretch of real world simulacrum, is another area of dense energy usage. That would be the enemy who is attacking me."
Bambi nodded. "Or a power generating plant. And I'll bet fabs are huge."
If Barton Street had had a bit more practice with expressions, Alice would have said he looked boggled. "Yes. One of my greatest strengths is the high numbers of fabricators and auto-kitchens inside my originally designed control perimeter."
"So, we need to start mapping, this dimension against ours, and maybe we can figure out who the T-Rex is in the real world. In dimension one."
Yes, definitely boggled. "You have such a tiny chip, how can you make complex extrapolations?"
Bambi looked puzzled.
Alice suppressed a smile. "The biological matrix works in a very odd fashion, and the interaction of the two styles appears to be multiplicative. And both Bambi and Lily seem to be smarter in this dimension than in dimension one."
All five bio-models looked at her in surprise. Salt nodded.
"So, let's get mapping." Bambi jumped up. "From where we encountered the T-Rex, where is the nearest border of your, umm, impression on this dimension?"
With the bombs bouncing happily along, ahead, behind and all over like a pack of excited puppies, they found the place where they'd encountered the T-Rex. They had to make more detours to find arches the horses would fit through, and around rock piles they couldn't jump. Besides rat and horse DNA, their designers had also used genes from some tiny African antelopes, so both horses were impressive jumpers.
"No d-doors." Joe leaned and stroked Salt's neck. He and Alice were riding, Bambi was walking with Barton Street, and Lily and Tommy had fallen behind, again. Kissing, no doubt.
Barton Street nodded, without looking around. "The very strong doors move spontaneously when idle, as well as every time they are used, although they tend to return to the same places. I can feel their magnetic field. There's one ahead, on the other side of this wall." He gestured toward the right.
Alice made a mental note of that, but after another twenty minutes of plodding along, she had a nasty feeling it would be too far away for them to use in an emergency.
Eclipse stopped abruptly, as the flash lights shone on a great gaping chasm.
Barton Street looked down. "I believe this is the edge of the raised floor in my main computer room. Proportionally, I suppose its smaller than the banks of processor cubes. But I don't know how to cross it."
Alice slid off the horse and looked down, then dialed the focus down and shone her flash across the chasm. Just mist and darkness. "We don't need to cross, right here. We need to find where and how the T-Rex gets across." She laid down with her head over the abyss, and shown the light along the wall below her. It was built, not natural, but rougher than the walls up here. Crudely squared off stones all stacked one on another, with gaps and spaces, or possibly just shadows of overhangs. To her right, a pillar disappeared down into the darkness. To both sides, the stone construction was only a couple of meters thick. She guessed the light was good for a dozen meters, both sideways and down.
"Next time, we might want to brings some rope." She stood up and dug through her pack, pulled out the stub of a bright red crayon. At the edge, She wrote a 1 and circled it, made an X next to it. "The X means I didn't notice anyway anything could get across. The one is purely arbitrary. So? Right or left?" She eyed Joe, and then Barton Street.
Joe bit his lip. "I think Tommy and I came in from the left, and we had that little dinosaur following us pretty much from the start. So I'd say, that direction."
"Umm, Bambi, why don't you gallop back and grab the icky sillies." Alice started pacing off the next twelve meters and looked again. Joe paced onward, and their flashlight beams barely met. Alice marked the location of the pillar. They leap frogged along the chasm edge. With a clatter of hooves, Bambi returned. Tommy was riding the more placid Salt, with Lily sitting sideways in his lap.
Joe gave him a severe look and sent him out to scout down each "road" as they passed it, noting arches and sizes, rockfalls, and any d-doors they spotted. Alice made notes and a sketch map marking the occasional pillar below, as well as the details above. Only one bomb bounced off into the chasm. It bounced back and hadn't the wits or vocabulary to describe what it had seen.
The chasm made a ninety degree turn to the left. And down below, a worn stone bridge reached out into the mist beyond.
"Ten meters down, do you think?" Joe's light wavered back and forth, got lost in the darkness, trying to follow the bridge "Yeah. I can't tell, there's an overhang, do you think maybe there's a tunnel?" Alice inched back and looked around. "And if there is, where does it come up?"
Joe rolled over. "It's almost lined up with the start of the first wall."
"Let's check the arches. And thump on all the stones to see if they're loose at all."
The bombs thought it looked like fun and started bouncing off the walls as fast and hard as they could. But it was Tommy and Lily, stepping into an alcove for another kiss who triggered the revolving door and slid down the ramp of the hidden passage. Screaming all the way. And giggling once they'd reached the bottom more or less intact.
Joe and Alice rolled eyes at each other, as Tommy tried, not very hard, to untangle himself from Lily's braid, which had escaped from its clip.
Bambi trotted down the steep ramp and shook her finger at them. "You two are embarrassing. And it could have been dangerous down here, with one of those nasty little dinosaurs or the T-Rex himself."
The rest of them walked down carefully and checked out the path. It led, as expected, to a cave-like exit at the bridge across the chasm.
"Bit of a squeeze for T-Rex." Joe muttered.
Alice had been thinking it was a rather large "
secret tunnel." She looked at it again. More than twice her height, maybe two meters wide. "Yeah, I don't think he could fit very easily. Or can avatars shrink at will?"
She turned and looked out at the bridge. No rails. Nearly a meter wide.
Piece of cake.
Really.
She could do this.
Any time now.
She gulped and stepped out carefully, staying right in the middle.
She kept her flashlight focused on the bridge in front of her feet and walked into the mist, unable to see anything except the damp stone under foot, and kept walking. She could see either side of the bridge in her peripheral vision, it was no problem staying in the middle, really, other than that the bridge arched like everything else in this dimension and as it headed down, still damp, it got a bit slippery. Icy. She almost walked into the door before she realized she was across and back on firm ground. Or a small ledge. A very modern looking door. Steel. Cold, with a few streaks of frost.There was no handle. She pushed. Her feet slid. She shifted carefully. Pushed each side, top and bottom. Got fingernails into the cracks and tried pulling.
"Back away." Barton Street's voice echoed in from the mist. She turned and walked back up the bridge, there being no other way to go.
A bouncing head passed her, Gandhi. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world!" Alice dropped flat and grabbed the sides of the bridge.
A flash of bright blue light from behind lit the mist and blew it into swirling patterns. Alice turned carefully around. No door. No Gandhi.
"Poor Gandhi!" She slid back down to the now open doorway. Shook her flashlight. Nothing. she edged into the passage, saw dim light ahead and walked toward it. Slick floor, distinct chill in the air. Nothing beneath her reaching foot. She threw herself backwards, landed on her butt. A wavering light, then Joe was there shining his light into a depression a dozen cems deep and half a meter across. Alice picked herself up, dusted off her damp britches, and jumped across it. Scrambled to keep her footing; the floor was getting icier. Up a ramp and out of a square doorway in a stone wall. A different stone. The sandy brown of Barton Street's walls was gone, replaced with a slatey blue-grey. The light was dim, slanting in from a small bright spot to the right.
