The Forever Gate Ultimate Edition

by Isaac Hooke

  She could sense the remnants of vitra use floating in the air. The individual they tracked had expended much of his charge, maybe all of it, when the four guards attempted to detain him.

  Two streets led from the square. She glanced at the seven gols who accompanied her and Tanner. They were armored in gray plate, the sword-and-shield symbols stamped into their breasts proclaiming their guardsman professions. Though they looked human, in actuality they were randomly spawned AIs—artificial intelligences.

  "You three, take the north street," Ari told the guards. "And you three, the east."

  "Yes, Nine." The guards obeyed, splitting up to follow their assigned routes. Only one of the gols remained behind with Ari and Tanner.

  "He won't have gone far," Tanner said. In the real world of the Outside, Tanner was half a head taller than Ari, but on the Inside he was the same height. He sported a goatee matched to a flourishing mustache that day, and wore a skin-tight blue outfit that accentuated the muscles of his chest, arms and legs. The cuffs and collar seemed to meld into his flesh, almost as if the fabric were a tattoo. The look was completed by black boots, a metallic utility belt, and a silver cape. Embossed into the chest area of the tight fabric were the digits 1010—binary for the number "ten."

  Ari's outfit was nearly an exact duplicate, excepting her belt and cape, which were golden, and the digits on her chest, which read 1001, or "nine." She also carried a small satchel over one shoulder.

  Since the two of them were connected to the Inside via an access port, not a pod, the system treated them as gols. If either one died on the Inside, they would die in the real world.

  "He's still here," Ari said. "Hiding somewhere. He has to be."

  She kept the sword extended in one hand as she swept her gaze from building to building. The blade left a subtle trail of flames as it moved. On the steel was etched a fire-spitting raven, its wings streaming cinders.

  Though it was midday in the city of Severest, the square was somewhat dark thanks to the overcast sky and its black clouds that threatened a storm. She hoped to find the target before the sky opened up. Rain only made the lightning worse.

  Ari strode past the ruins of a fountain. A gaping hole had been blasted into the rim, allowing the water to spill forth. She remembered a time, less than a year ago, when that water would have been frozen, the land gripped in the permanent vise of winter. They had made much progress since then. Roughly half the cities of the Inside were completely free of the software-enforced ice age. The other half were thawing out. It wasn't a utopia yet but it was getting there.

  Ordinarily she allowed the gol guards to hunt down and collar youths whose powers had newly awakened, but this particular individual had eluded capture for months. Ari admired his ingenuity and wanted him on her team. She planned to bitch him herself and bring him under the tutelage of the Users, a group of uncollared individuals on the Inside. That, or she would send him to the real world of the Outside to join the equivalent group, known as the Children. Together, both groups formed the Council, which she led. If the renegade had no interest in joining her, then the bronze bitch she placed around his neck would neuter his powers and spare the Inside from his menace anyway.

  She moved between the different stone buildings that enclosed the square, pausing beside the wooden doors to look for signs of forced entry.

  She sensed a sudden surge of vitra from the second floor of one of the houses across the street, and spun, reaching for the spark inside the blade. Just in time she fanned that spark into a conflagration; she used all of her focus to turn the weapon into a lightning rod so that the steel absorbed the deadly electricity aimed at her.

  The attack subsided and Ari lowered the sword, whose metal glowed a molten red.

  "Go!" Ari shouted, running toward the building where the attack had arisen.

  Tanner and the gol guard followed close behind.

  "He's definitely expended his charge by now," Tanner said. "He's ours."

  Ari hurled her body against the wooden door at the base of the building and the hinges yielded. The first floor held a glasswork shop of some kind. Heat emanated from a kiln in a side room. Intricate glassware lined the shelves near the front of the shop.

  The cowering owner pointed a shaking hand upstairs.

  Ari took the steps two at a time and reached the hallway on the second floor. Two doorways lined the right side of the hall, while one door opened on the left.

  The gol guard and Tanner came up behind her. She made her way slowly toward the first doorway. She paused at the opening, pressing herself against the wall. She nodded at Tanner, who proceeded to dash inside the room, going high. She followed, going low, her extended sword ready to lash out with flame.

  A compact bed rested near the wall, beneath the closed window. A tiny chest and a writing desk completed the furnishings. Tanner searched under the bed. Nothing. There was no other place for anyone to hide in there.

  They cleared the second room in the same manner.

  As Ari emerged to join the gol in the hallway, a fork of lightning erupted from the third room.

  She rolled to the floor. The powerful forks ripped the gol apart above her.

  She unleashed flames from the sword toward the door. The lightning barrage ended and she scrambled to her feet.

  Tanner was already at the door.

  "Surrender and we will spare your life!" Tanner shouted from his position beside the entrance.

  In answer a bolt of lightning ripped from the doorway; the deadly tines scarred the wall across the way and left behind blackened and splintered wood.

  Ari joined him. "He has to have rings. There's no way he could still have any charge after all of that."

  "Unless he's an aberration," Tanner said.

  "I somehow doubt it," Ari told him.

  "Well, either way, I don't think we'll be collaring this one," Tanner said.

  "No," Ari agreed. "Ready?"

  "Ready." Tanner crouched.

  She sought the spark of vitra inside the blade and amplified it. The weapon glowed molten red and smoke poured from the metal. She directed the sword past the door, keeping her body shielded behind the frame, and unleashed a veritable wall of flame.

  Tanner followed the fire inside. She heard an eruption as he launched his own stream of flame.

  She joined him in time to see a charred body fall to the floor beside a burning bed.

  "Got him," Tanner said.

  Ari approached. "It's too bad it had to end this way. He would have been a good addition to the Users."

  She sensed motion behind the burning bed. "There are two of them!" She darted toward the fiery mattress.

  A figure emerged from hiding and raced toward the door. A young woman.

  "Catch her!" Ari said.

  Tanner managed to wrap his arms around the woman and he pinned her limbs to her torso. He lifted her and she struggled in his grasp, her legs squirming in the empty air.

  Ari approached but the woman nearly kicked her.

  "Hold her to the floor!" Ari said.

  Tanner dumped the woman rather hard to the floor and mounted her. Ari retrieved the bronze bitch from the satchel she had brought and clasped it around the neck of the young woman.

  "It's done," Ari said.

  The woman still struggled.

  "Calm down," Ari told her. "It's okay. It's over. We're going to let you go."

  The young woman stopped squirming after a few moments.

  Tanner released her.

  She reached up and hesitantly touched the collar at her neck.

  "What was your relation to the deceased?" Ari asked the young woman.

  The girl glanced at the burned corpse of her companion.

  "He was... he was." She seemed about to burst into tears.

  The woman abruptly scrambled to her feet.

  Tanner made to grab her but Ari extended a halting hand.

  The woman promptly fled.

  "Let her go," Ari told Tanner. "There'
s no harm she can cause anyone, not anymore."

  Ari approached the charred body and knelt. "See? Rings." She lifted the clawed remnants of the youth's hand.

  "Someone was helping him," Tanner said.

  "It would appear so." She removed the four silver rings one by one from the fingers and deposited them in her satchel.

  "There are only two places he could have gotten those from," Tanner said.

  Ari nodded. "Let's go have a chat with our charred friend here in the real world."

  "Assuming he survives his rebirth. For all we know, he could be an old man in the Outside."

  Ari pursed her lips. "It's possible. But I have a feeling this one has lived only two or three lives on the Inside."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "He avoided the gols for months. It takes an active mind, full of ingenuity and the cleverness of youth, to outwit AIs like that."

  "But we already agreed that someone was helping him," Tanner said.

  "Good point." Ari stood. "I guess we'll find out his real age soon enough."

  Tanner regarded the corpse uncertainly. "You know, sometimes I wonder at what we've become."

  "What do you mean?"

  He smiled fleetingly. "I once believed we would have a world uncollared. A world where every man could freely use the spark inside him without aging, and without punishment for doing so."

  "We all wanted that," Ari said. And it was true. After the war they had conducted trials in certain small, isolated cities, uncollaring all the residents. Chaos reigned for the first few weeks until a pecking order emerged: those strongest in vitra assumed control of the community and ruled by fear. When one of the communities began plotting to attack another city via portal hop, the Council ruled the trials a failure and voted to shut down the experimental communes and maintain the ban on vitra throughout the Inside. The Council allowed only a small subset of people to remain uncollared: the members of the Users, their partners on the Inside.

  "Let's get back," Ari said.

  Gemma raced down the street, scarcely seeing where she was going through all the tears, and the storm: the clouds had opened up, dousing the streets in rain. Terror and hatred alternately racked her body in waves.

  When she finally realized the gols weren't pursuing, she paused in a shadowy alleyway, gasping for breath. Lightning flashed in the skies, and she jumped.

  Lightning. She would never know it again.

  She wrapped her fingers around the bronze bitch at her throat and pulled with all her might. The cold metal felt far too tight, almost as if it were choking her. She reached for vitra, the freedom maker, the essence of life. She could almost touch it but not quite: it teased her, lying just beyond her grasp, near and yet so very far.

  They've taken even that from me. The one comfort I had left.

  She released the collar and fell to her knees in anguish. She covered her face in her hands. The rain suited her mood entirely.

  She had told her brother to give her some of the rings, but he had refused, wanting to protect her. And now he was dead.

  She thought of the two evil gols with the strange digits on their chests who had murdered him.

  Lightning flashed again.

  She swore in that moment to track down those two gols at all costs.

  And kill them.

  2

  Ari opened her eyes in the world of the Outside. She lay on a mat, tethered to a terminal by a cord that ran from her belly like an umbilical. She lifted her torso, wrapped her hands around the clamp at her belly button and rotated the metal cylinder, disconnecting herself from the umbilical. She knew that organic wires threaded the surface of her intestinal tract to her spinal cord, where they met with more embedded devices and cords. The machines that operated the ship had implanted these bodily intrusions inside her during the fetal stage, and the wires had grown with her body. She didn't exactly know how the technology worked, but that wasn't important. All that mattered was that when she jacked in, she joined the simulated dream experienced by the other tens of thousands of crew members.

  Tanner arose from a mat nearby and similarly disconnected.

  To her left, the desolate, icy surface of Ganymede resided beyond the broad window beside her. The banded clouds of Jupiter took up much of the sky. Stars dotted the remaining darkness.

  To her right, the main area of the compartment known as the Control Room was crowded with small desks covered in dials, buttons, blinking lights, and touchscreen displays. Five watches of the so-called Children alternated shifts in the Control Room so that it was manned every hour of the day. She remembered a time when they all wore white robes on duty. These days everyone dressed in service utilities, a more formal attire that better suited their station. She had ordered the change when they had discovered the 3D printers.

  Half of the Children were tethered to their terminals, lying unconscious on mats on the floor, entirely immersed on the Inside. In addition to programming, testing and maintaining the environment, they acted as Keepers, people the Inside citizens could go to for help in times of need or trouble.

  The other half sat in the chairs and physically manned the different terminals. Most of the awake operators used augmented reality glasses, or aReals, to access the various systems. Those glasses overlaid computer graphics with one's existing vision, "augmenting" the reality one saw. A similar user interface was available when connecting through the umbilicals, though the aReals were preferred because they allowed for untethered access—having a clamp pulling at your insides could become uncomfortable after more than a few hours, especially if you sat in a chair. The touchscreen displays on the terminals offered a backup user interface.

  The operators were called Children because when her father Hoodwink originally recruited them, he had concentrated on the youngest members of the crew, choosing them for their ability to learn quickly and their better chances of surviving the awakening process. Though these days the operators were comprised of individuals of all ages, the name had stuck. Since these men and women were part of the Council that determined the overall welfare of all the people aboard, both Inside and Outside, Ari had selected them based on their maturity as much as their technical proficiency. Some of the eight-year-olds present had the minds of sixty-year-olds, while some of the sixty-year-olds had the minds of twenty-year-olds.

  Why?

  Time passed differently in the two worlds. Forty-eight hours on the Outside was roughly equivalent to three weeks on the Inside. Because of this, bodies aged and died in the simulated world far faster than the host's actual body, therefore the main AI that ran the system routinely rebooted people's consciousnesses. When someone died on the Inside of "natural causes" on a date predetermined by the computer system, their memories and personalities were reset and they were assigned to new parents on the Inside.

  Because of a glitch in the system, violent, unexpected deaths caused one to wake up from that reality, and when that happened a person retained the knowledge and memories of only the latest life lived. That was why the mind didn't match the body's age. If the awakened person survived but remained within their pod, they would be wiped and returned to the Inside. If they managed to pierce the pod that contained them, previously they would have been sent to the meat grinders for protein reclamation, given the damage to the ship's nutrient production systems. But after Hoodwink had destroyed the attacking ship in orbit and Ari assumed command, she had made the food system repairs the first priority. Cannibalism was utterly repulsive to her, even if the dreamers had no idea where their food had come from. The repair drones had been able to restore most of the food system, so that humans who died or awoke prematurely were spared from being processed into nutrients for the rest of the dreaming crew.

  Those who escaped their pods and did not qualify for membership with the Children helped out in other ways: some became engineers, others doctors and growers. Most of them were constantly learning, via the archives. The goal was eventually to help the machines as th
ey went about their daily tasks, or even supplant some of them.

  Ari went to one of the operators and rested a hand on his shoulder. "Stanson, I want you to track down the pod containing that teen."

  The androgynous-looking youth nodded, waggling the locks of his pageboy-style hair. "We detected a wake-up on deck twelve. He forced his way out of the pod almost immediately." Despite his feminine features, his voice was the deepest of anyone present.

  "I'm not surprised," Ari said.

  "I already sent a retrieval crew," Stanson continued. "If he lives, he should be here in a few minutes."

  "Good," Ari said. With the alien computer virus out of the system, the machines no longer swept the corridors clear of humans. The retrieval crew would have a safe passage.

  Ari joined Tanner at the window. He was staring at the starboard wing of the ship, which was partially visible from their current position. Most of said wing was buried underneath the icy surface of the moon. The impact had apparently not been very gentle.

  "Do you ever think we'll leave this place?" Tanner asked her.

  "I don't know," Ari said. That was a lie, of course. They were never leaving this place. The only other person who knew was the chief engineer, who she had sworn to secrecy. Certainly, the robots were doing a fine job of repairing the ship, both internal and external, but according to the engineer, the main reactor core had been ejected before impact. A reactor wasn't something the robots could simply reconstruct—the fuel source alone was impossible to replicate. Without the main reactor, the ship didn't have the energy necessary to ignite the propellant that would have allowed them to leave orbit. The secondary reactor provided only just enough power for the internal operations. The solar panels installed on the dorsal portion of the hull helped. Even so, when the plutonium in the secondary reactor ran out after fifty years, the crew would perish. Yes, better that no one knew.

  "I suppose there's nothing left for us on Earth, anyway," Tanner said. "This is our home, now. I guess I'm going to finally have to come to terms with that."